Sanitation Isn't Everyone’s Business. Or Is it??

 The article below 1st appeared in the Zambia Daily Mail Newspaper of 26th November 2022.

“Sanitation is everyone’s business.”

Those were the words of Vice President W.K. Mutale Nalumango as she officially opened the Second Sanitation Summit held in Lusaka on 18^th and 19^th November 2022 under the theme The Sanitation Economy: Making the Invisible Visible.

Organized by the Ministry of Water Development and Sanitation and its partners in the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector, the purpose of the summit was to stimulate political and technocratic will on existing commitments made during the First National Sanitation Summit in November 2018 and to accelerate action aimed at improving sanitation and hygiene services for all and ending open defecation by 2030.

Participants were drawn from the Government, Traditional Leadership, the United Nations, Cooperating Partners, Non-Governmental Organizations, academia, private sector, and the media.

The event was deliberately timed to coincide with commemoration of World Toilet Day on 19^th November, a day that reminds us of urgent need to tackle the sanitation crisis. Resolutions from the summit will be codified into a Statement of Action that will help Government and other stakeholders implement the various commitments to improve sanitation in the country. 

Like other UN members, Zambia has signed up to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), all of which have to be attained by 2030. SDG 6 enjoins member countries to ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.

Zambia is behind on this goal of ensuring safe toilets for all by 2030. That is why it is important for all stakeholders in the WASH sector, with strong Government leadership, to implement the various commitments and national strategies to improve the state of sanitation in the country.

Although the United Nations officially recognised access to sanitation as a human right 12 years ago through Resolution 15/9, many people still lack access to safely managed sanitation. Many do not even have a decent toilet of their own. 

Safely managed sanitation is the bedrock to protecting groundwater and positively contributes to good health outcomes. The failure by one household to construct a proper septic tank or pit latrine frustrates not only current aspirations but also the future ability to access clean and safe groundwater.

To achieve progress, all stakeholders should understand their obligations and responsibilities to reach everyone with sanitation services, hence the clarion call by the Vice President that “sanitation is everyone’s business.”

Sanitation is  not just about a clean environment.  The Sanitation Economy has the potential of monetising toilet provision, products and services to provide benefits across businesses and society. This can be done in many ways such as converting faeces to fertilizer and biogas and supporting the entire sanitation value chain.

There are several windows of opportunity for the sanitation subsector.

For instance, taking advantage of the increase in Constituency Development Fund (CDF), local authorities could scale up sanitation efforts and partner with private sector to achieve sustainable service delivery. The increase in CDF thus presents unlimited opportunities for the private sector and local authorities to tackle some of the sanitation challenges communities face.

Most, if not all, of the mushrooming informal settlements in Zambia are not connected to either water or sewerage systems, leaving that to individuals as they construct their houses.

In addition, most families still rely on privately-owned boreholes and shallow wells which – if not properly managed – are often contaminated with raw sewage.

Commercial utility companies have the mandate to inspect and ensure property developers comply with prescribed guidelines in the construction of water and sanitation facilities. However, enforcement remains inadequate and in some cases absent.

Non-traditional markets such as rural areas have for a long time been considered unattractive to private sector due to their perceived lack of profitability. But with appropriate risk management tools, market assessments and linkages, private sector should be encouraged to enter rural markets and provide sanitation services. 

Promoting the sanitation economy is not a zero-sum game but a win–win situation, protecting groundwater against faecal contamination whilst making a livelihood out of it.

Investing in sanitation has positive economic returns like creating jobs and contributing to energizing the economy. Failure to invest in sanitation has a huge negative impact on a nation’s economy through mortality and morbidity arising from diarrheal diseases caused by contaminated groundwater.

THE NAME OF THE GAME: CORRUPTION

Almost a week to the first ever World Cup in the Middle East, taking place in the natural gas reserves and oil reserves rich country of Qatar, American streaming giant Netflix released FIFA Uncovered, a four-part documentary highlighting the global scale of the corruption that was happening at Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the world football governing body. HOW CONVENIENT? 

Throughout the documentary – and of course from the discourse that emerged after the awarding of Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup – one country comes out as ‘The One’ which should have been given the hosting. I will leave this to you to find out on your own. However, here is what I have leant from this documentary:

Blatter was never loved by his people in Europe

?

In 2002 FIFA presidential election, UEFA supported Issa Hayatou's – the then Cameroonian football executive and president of the Confederation of African Football - FIFA presidency ambitions because they were just looking for someone they could control after failing to control Blatter. Isn’t this hypocrisy

Was FIFA corrupt?

Certainly. As late the Lucky Dube concisely had put it in his song titled Freedom, too much power in one man’s hands is dangerous. You can have such a huge organization that is only accountable to itself with carte blanche to make decision. As a result, corruption was institutionalized in the organization.

Prior to the 2002 FIFA election, Emmanuel Maradas - who was Blatter's advisor Africa and behind African Soccer Magazine - claimed that Sepp gave him money which he distributed to all Council of Southern Africa Football Associations (COSAFA) members to help them build Football Association (FA) Headquarters to the tune of $400,000 each. But from the documentary, this money was never audited nor were the FAs requested to report back. How much did our own Football House cost to build?

Did Blatter sell the World Cup to Qatar?

According to this documentary, Blatter was also against giving the World Cup to Qatar because inter alia, Qatar’s lacked the football culture and enough infrastructure to hold a world cup as all the stadiums and hotels had to be built from nothing. He was also betrayed like everyone else that feels betrayed. The real villains are Jack Warner (CACACAF), Issa Hayatou (CAF), Michel Platini (UEFA) and Nicolas Leoz (CONMEBOL) who used their influence to tip the scale towards Qatar. Muhammad Bin Hammam (AFC), on the other hand, was just being patriotic. He was the son of the soil.

When some country lost the 2022 World Cup hosting rights, they went flat to bring FIFA down. Would we have known about FIFA's corruption if they had won? I leave you to answer this. Corruption is a consumer satisfied crime. When both sides are happy, everything's cool. We mask corruption with nice names when we are involved: gifts, blessings, answered prayers, deserving and all sorts.

Causes of corruption

There are many causes of corruption but in this documentary, they are twofold: the greedy and insatiable appetite of those in privileged position. And poverty.

I want to talk about the latter since the former is well known with several examples from people hoarding money in their homes and fields to people acquiring property within a short period without a clear financial trail.

Poverty is rarely seen as an enabler of corruption. While poverty in the north is caused by greed, corruption in the south is mainly caused by poverty. One thing that is also clear from this documentary is that to fight corruption, you have to fight poverty first. The documentary offers reasons as to why vote buying may have influenced in Qatar hosting this world cup:

• Qatar sponsored the CAF conference that was held in Luanda, Angola.
• Qatar paid $1,500,000 to Cameroon, Nigeria and Côte d'Ivoire FAs presidents for ‘their countries’ football development.’
• Qatar gave cheap oil deals to a number of countries.
• Qatar Airways started flying to new destinations where they didn’t initially go before their world cup campaign was launched.
• Politicians at the highest level of governments and politics would see this as an opportunity to push for their ambitions. Leaders like Nicolas Sarkozy and Lula da Silva got involved to broker vote buying.

To be clear, I’m not trying to be a corruption apologist. Far from it. I believe that corruption is a crime against humanity and should be treated as such. But what I’m trying to dispel is the perception that the South is more corrupt than the North. And yet it’s the banks in the North that advices how to avoid tax and hugely benefits from corrupt transaction from the South.

Is the anger towards Qatar justifiable?

Not at all. Like South Africa which ended up paying $10,000,000 in the name of Diaspora Funds (whatever that meant) to Jack Warner in exchange for votes to host the 2010 World Cup, Qatar was also taken advantage of by these players of the game. Qatar may have parted away with so much looking at how many people and governments they had to engage to win the 2022 World Cup hosting rights.

Why are people angry at Qatar then? Because of how political this World Cup has been, its difficulty to really ascertain the validity of the human rights abuse claims. We should never have allowed politics to infiltrate football, we have created a monster that will be impossible to slay. In this case, anger stems more from those that feel entitled to have hosted this World Cup. It is called transferred aggression or misdirected aggression. This happens when a person feels threatened or upset by an outside stimulus but is unable to focus their animosity on the stimulus. Whoever is weakest and closest to the offender may be the target of their aggression. This is Qatar’s position since FIFA has been ‘cleared’. South Africa suffered a similar bad publicity leading to the 2010 World Cup. And so, did Brazil in 2014 and Russia in 2018.

Next week, the global showpiece begins in Qatar. We will be watching as we whet our appetite for the 2026 World Cup which will be held by Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Coincident? 

Kaputa District Celebrates Open Defecation Free status

 After having been certified and declared open defecation free (ODF) in 2021, Kaputa district held its celebration on Friday, 21st October 2022. The celebration was also used as an opportunity to recognize community members for their hardworking through the awarding of certificates to al the 212 headpersons and Community Champions who pushed for such an achievement. This makes Kaputa the 5th ODF district (out of 116 districts) in Zambia. ODF is a situation when the entire communities have shifted to using toilets instead of open spaces. a highly undignifying practice. This practice is a common cause of diarrheal diseases as human waste usually returns to communities through many pathways and contaminates streams and wells, which in most cases, are the only source of drinking water. Despite more than a year having past from the time certification was made, the district has managed to sustain the achievement (for now) by having approaches that are encouraging people to climb the sanitation ladder and also be their 'neighbours keepers' in providing peer to peer sanitation compliance monitoring.

To show its commitment to ensuring that the entire country is by 2030, Government of Zambia rolled out the 2030 ODF Strategy and has courted many stakeholders to realize this vision. One of the approaches government and development agencies are using to achieve this the Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), an innovative methodology for mobilizing communities to raise sanitation and hygiene standards in their localities.  In Zambia, CLTS programming has been using a 3 Rope Approach (3RA) or 3-pronged approach as a facilitation management strategy with traditional leaders, civic leaders and technocrats forming a power influence triangle to scale up access to good sanitation.

The Kaputa achievement wouldn't have been made possible without the leadership from traditional leaders - Senior Chief Kaputa and Chief Mukupa Katandula - who provided and continues to do so through a quarterly monitoring of all villages and weekly radio program dubbed Community Concerns, the backstopping by penalizing defaulters on the agreed-on by-laws which pushed for a greater sanitation coverage and positive CLTS outcomes. Working with District Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Education (D-WASHE) committees, the project mobilizes communities to act on improving household sanitation and hygiene through the construction of toilets and installation of handwashing stations.

The private sector must see this as an opportunity for introducing and strengthening the sanitation value chain. This will reduce the possibility of slippage and provide people with wider sanitation options. ODF achievement involves to a great work of behavioural change, sustenance of which requires concerted efforts by all stakeholders.

https://melomediazambia.com/2022/11/01/kaputa-district-celebrates-open-defecation-free-status/