As she sits between her bags of maize just outside the Karonga district market, Bertha Nyondo has to strive to deal with three things: an offensive smell from a drain lying nearby, scorching heat and customers.
One hand stands still under the pressure of an umbrella; another keeps flying across her face from side to side. She has to fan off the offensive smell and wipe the sweat dripping down her face. As all this happens, her mind has to focus on the customer.
Nyondo and other, mainly, female businesspersons and their bags of maize sit just above a drain full of stagnant water. A look at this water cannot be sustained. So you can concentrate on negotiating the price of a tin of maize with Nyondo or others. But the smell from this water quickly aborts such negotiations.
“This stinking is how the situation is like here. We have complained to the district council about this situation but we cannot force them to come and improve it. So I just have to concentrate on my business,” says Nyondo.
“I leave everything to the people from the council. After all, we pay something to them every day for us to sell our maize here. So they have to come and clean this place every day.”
Nyondo’s sentiments can easily fuel debate as regards who is responsible for ensuring that the environment like where she sits every day is free from any disturbing developments like the stench from nearby.
However, she attests that one thing is exact: the more the sanitation is poor around her, the more people shun her business.
About 100 metres from where Nyondo plies her trade, 30-year-old Mercy Gondwe testifies to how poor sanitation has left her struggling to pin down customers.
With her baby on her back, she sits on a bench just outside a small room. She stares at a small hill of trash just in front of her, stagnant water all around it. She has prepared a variety of meals and her being out here is to woo customers to buy the meals.
“I struggle everyday to get a customer into my restaurant because they say they do not enjoy their meals while seeing trash just outside the restaurant,” she said while pointing at the collection of stinking trash that included leftover foods.
“There was a bin there in which people were throwing waste matters. But although the bin is no longer there, people are still dumping their wastes there. And our businesses are what suffer because of this.”
The collection of trash she referred to produces a strong smell, and it is this smell that makes one feel uncomfortable when in Gondwe’s restaurant.
The trash gets wet during night downpours and although it is often very hot during the day, this trash maintains moisture thereby keeping the environment around it wet.
Poor drainage also worsens the situation. Even if it rained days ago, stagnant water remains all around Gondwe’s place.
She lacks comparative figures for each of the corresponding seasons, but Gondwe remains sure that poor sanitation causes business misfortunes in her restaurant because such misfortunes are not there in the dry season.
“All these things were not there when I was doing the same business within the bus depot complex even during the rainy season. The situation there is a little bit clean,” said Gondwe.
“So many people were coming to eat from my restaurant and I did not even have problems to get them into there.”
Like in many urban and suburban locations in the country, waste management in Karonga is a problem. Trash litters almost everywhere around the boma area and collecting it to dumping sites is usually a problem.
A report prepared by the Environmental District Officer (EDO) late last year indicates that there is only one vehicle to collect and ferry the trash to the dumping site. Unfortunately, the vehicle is old.
“Apart from the district council, not many members of the civil society or private sector are taking part in waste management in the district,” says the report.
It adds that only the only organisation coming closer to ensuring proper sanitation in the district is the Malawi Red Cross which is undertaking a sanitation project involving construction of sanitation facilities in some of the rural areas. The facilities only include hand washing facilities, urinals and pit latrines.
This means that there is no private sector involvement in the collection and dumping of wastes like that in front of Gondwe’s restaurant. Hence such a responsibility remains the district council’s.
“The presence of only one vehicle makes the town council fail to implement the collection of the refuse from the households to the dumping site,” says the report of the 3-tonne tractor.
“Workers in the markets [also] complain about shortage of financial resources, human resources, working materials and safety gear. Working materials include: shovels, wheelbarrows, rakes, bins; and safety wear includes gumboots, overalls and many other tools.
“These are really in short supply and they defuse the morale of the cleaners to perform effectively. The town section has ever supplied some of these items but vandalism has been a discouraging factor.”
According to the report, there are currently no strategic plans in place to improve the status of waste management in the district. There are only proposals and suggestions on how the situation can be improved.
As such, for now, people like Nyondo and Gondwe are doomed to doing their business in this poorly sanitised environment. And this means fewer customers coming to buy from them.
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