NKRUMAH BANKONG-OBI/Lafia

The Nasarawa State Environmental Protection Agency says cases of diseases resulting from environmental factors have been reduced in the State. This follows the agency’s monthly environmental sanitation exercise and advocacy which takes place every last Saturday of the month. The General Manager of the Agency, Yusuf Adeka stated this while briefing newsmen at the end of this month’s exercise in the Lafia, the Nasarawa State capital.

“Another area of success is the environmental diseases. They have reduced drastically. Statistics from the Ministry of Health have shown us that these environmental diseases have reduced tremendously in Nasarawa State,” an elated Adeka said

He also noted that from a relatively obscure activity, the sanitation exercise is gaining traction across the State. “Today being the last Saturday of the month and this coincided with the last Saturday of the year, honestly this sanitation recorded huge success in the sense that this is the fourth year, getting to the fifth year now since we started this sanitation. The reason I said we have recorded a huge success is in the area of declining defaults. Before, we used to arrest over a hundred people. Every month, the number is reducing. Today being the 31st of December, we only caught about 15 people that have defaulted. That is why I said we have recorded a huge success.”

The General Manager added that sustained advocacy and enforcement of the rule ensured the achievement of the results. “The fact that people were running about, vehicles would be plying the roads on the sanitation days was worrisome but as time went on, as we are carrying out the monitoring, we are also going with sensitization, asking people to sit down and clean their environment, bring out dirt from their drainages because there are vehicles that used to come and convey these things to the final dumpsite,” appealing to Nasarawa State governor, Abdullai Sule to “strengthen the exercise, that is to say, to compel or to direct all the local government councils in the state – because our environmental or sanitation officers used to go to all the local government areas and some development areas to carry out this exercise, sometimes we used to have problems with these local government officials. So, my appeal to His excellency is to kind of, direct all the executive chairmen of Local government areas to key-into this exercise – to reconstitute the taskforce in all the local government areas such that this thing will be a success.”

He also called on residents of the State to keep their environment clean at all times and a dirty environment is detrimental to good health. One way to do to do this, he said, is to ensure that waste, once generated is properly disposed off.