Isaac Danladi

NKRUMAH BANKONG-OBI/Lafia

The Commissioner of Environment and Natural Resources, Isaac Danladi, has called on residents of the State to regularly clean up their surroundings and keep the environment clean. The Commissioner who spoke to reporters in Lafia, after the monthly environment sanitation exercise observed in the State on Saturday, called for constant attention to the cleanliness of residential and official areas. “I want to encourage the people of Nasarawa State to take environmental sanitation very seriously, not only every month but on a daily basis, because the Nasarawa State Waste Management Agency is there to evacuate all your waste.

One of the experiences today was that we discovered that people, particularly in the suburbs, just gather their waste in their houses and wait till the end of the month before bringing it out. There are two implications: one, you are endangering your public health. Secondly, you are making sanitation exercise difficult because the dirt should have been cleared on a daily basis,” he advised, noting the effort of his Ministry to undertake advocacy towards maintenance of standard public health practices.

Mr. Danladi, a lawyer, described Lafia as one of the cleanest cities in Nigeria. He said the prediction of the rain volume for 2025 has heightened the necessity to clean up the drainage and stay ahead of the flooding season. “Again, the rains may come and come very heavily. Even NIMET has said it, and you don’t need anybody to tell you what is happening now, as far as the environmental system is concerned. From what NIMET has said, because of the heat we are experiencing now, the rains are likely to come very heavily. And when the gutters and the soakaways are blocked, the consequential effect is erosion or flood and so on. So, we must see how we must cushion the effect of all that. So, because of that, we are working assiduously with some of our sister organisations to see how we can take proactive measures to curb all these consequences, in the event that they occur,” he said