Ethiopia: New draft policy evokes protest from waste collectors
The draft policy regarding solid waste
management does not represent the interests of
the small private businesses and associations
28 March, 2009
Reporter - The Beautification and Park Development Agency has drafted a policy which small private businesses and associations involved in solid waste management think is a threat to their survival.
For the last eight years, the small private businesses and associations of solid waste collectors have been working with license from the Ministry of Trade and Industry and have been paying taxes from their income.
Over 600 licenses are currently operative, the majority of them owned by poor women with 20,000 employees under them. One of the associations, the Association of Addis Ababa City Sanitation Service Providers, which was formed in 2005, spoke to The Reporter this week regarding the plight of the associations and their employees.
The draft policy regarding solid waste management does not represent the interests of the small private businesses and associations. What's more, it misrepresents them and is totally set against them, they complain.
The associations say that they have repeatedly asked for discussion with the Agency on the draft policy but their requests received only scornful answers and evasions from the Agency.
The introduction section of the draft policy blames the small private businesses and associations for the inefficiency of the city's solid waste management. It accuses them of incompetence and of dumping solid waste in the city’s rivers, heaping it at open spaces anywhere in the city and strewing it around overflowing garbage tanks and monopolizing the work in some well-to-do neighborhoods that can pay them well.
However, the associations believe the Agency and its dump truck drivers are responsible for the inefficiency. “They say to us, ‘You are making about a hundred thousand birr, you have had enough money.’ And when we bring garbage to the dump trucks, they say, ‘Where do you get all this garbage from? We can’t handle all this’”.
Garbage is overflowing the tanks and polluting the areas around them. But that is not due to our carelessness or inefficiency; rather, it is because the Agency and its dump trucks do not pick it up on time.
The draft policy is not yet ratified but the Bole, Akaki and Yeka sub-cities are implementing it before the major stakeholders, the small private businesses and associations involved in solid waste management, had any chance to discuss it with the Agency.
The testing of the draft policy will go on at least for two or three months. The draft policy is financially disadvantageous for the associations and they are wondering if it is necessary that they stop eating and go hungry so that the draft policy can be tried out? We have to pay house rent to land- ladies who don’t tolerate any delay. “On a trial basis it will be changed if it doesn’t work. But is the change or modification going to be made after we die of hunger?”
The Yeka sub-city administration has distributed a letter to its residents instructing them that they should no longer pay the small businesses and associations directly for the services they give, but that a man or a woman assigned by each kebele administration will collect payments.
The payment thus collected will be deposited in the bank accounts of the businesses and associations after it is approved by a kebele supervisor. The associations fear that that kind of system is likely to make them victims of corruption.
"We know that it is not the government that's doing all this to us. The government has given us license and allowed us to organize ourselves in associations and create job opportunities for ourselves and for many poor jobless people like us including street boys and girls.
“But the Agency wants to make us its employees. If it does so, we are going to lose our status as private businesses. What's the meaning of our license if the Agency collects and controls our money through kebele administrations?”
The Ministry of Trade and Industry says that it encourages small private businesses and associations but the Agency is getting in their way and depriving them of their constitutional right to work as private businesses, the associations say.
The Bole sub-city Administration kebele 10 Administration Office has written a letter signed and sealed by Gizachew Addisalem, sub-city administrator, to Tiret Tsidat Association, in which it tells them to stop working because they are not willing to sign the new contract form designed for the implementation of the new Business Process Reengineering (BPR). If they don't stop working, the kebele will take measures against them, the letter threatens.
The associations know that the Agency is trying to drive them away from a business they developed over eight years and is forming new associations to supplant them.
Years ago this was how the Agency worked: the dump tracks would go around blowing horns and calling out for people to deliver their garbage. And it would take garbage from only as many houses as were ready by the times the Agency was calling upon them for such cooperation. But with the involvement of the small businesses who took up the responsibility of collecting garbage from households and delivering it to the trucks, the Agency was able to save time and fuel.
This week the associations were at the city hall to speak to the mayor. Three days they stood in the city hall premises waiting and waiting and waiting for some official to hear their case. Each day they were told to assign representatives. “But three days (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) they evaded our representatives. Now we are going to appeal to the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association for help for the majority our members are women.”
Garbage from 30 households amounts to one Cu.m. and they used to make 300 birr from it at the rate of ten birr from each house. If they collect about eight cu.m. of garbage and fill a garbage tank, they will make 2,400 birr, and they save that over a month and share it among their employees.
But now, in the new contract the Agency demands that they sign, the agency, through a kebele representative, collects 300 birr for one cu.m. of garbage but pays the associations thirty birr only. The Agency will keep the balance and use it to buy a truck or other necessary equipment for the associations, officials of the Agency told the associations unofficially.
The problem of solid waste management is now shifting from the issue of keeping the city clean to the job security of the waste collectors and their survival. Most of those engaged in the business of waste collecting were jobless people and the majority were women.
With the modest income from this kind of work, those involved in it have been able to support families and those who were homeless are now living in rented houses. They are doing everything they were unable to do when they were jobless.
Their commitment to their work stems from their desire to lead a decent life like the average citizen and their hatred of ever becoming dependent on anyone again.
The Reporter's attempt to contact officials of the Agency in order to solicit their view was unsuccessful. And the Agency did not try to reach The Reporter although the latter had left its contact address to the Agency.