Calabar Residents Suffer Slow Pace Of Waste Evacuation As Refuse Pile Up

By Ushang Ewa

Residents in Cross River state capital city of Calabar may soon again question the ability and will of the present administration to maintain the clean status of Calabar following the slow pace of waste evacuation which has seen refuse returning to the streets after a temporary absence.

In the past four months, the media was awash with pictures of sorry sites of refuse piled around Calabar with several actions taken by the government culminating in the termination of contracts for waste evacuators and the governor, Senator Ben Ayade directing the state’s official waste evacuation agency to take charge.

The development was blamed on the non payment of salary for months. The workers CrossRiverWatch can authoritatively report, were paid on October 1, 2015 but this has not helped the situation as residents still complain of the slow pace of waste evacuation with some areas such as Umoh Orok in Calabar South, some parts of New Airport road and Jebs road see waste evacuated once in about ten days or fortnight.

CrossRiverWatch visited close to 100 sites and refuse was yet to be evacuated in almost a week in some areas.

Major streets were however, clean with interlinking streets suffering a worse fate as the bins closest to the major streets were attended to while those further inside were not, most notably is Whitehouse street with the Chamley by Whitehouse and Mayne Avenue by Whitehouse axis clean while bins in the street have not been attended to with a mountainous heap located just after Whitehouse by Hart not evacuated for almost a month residents say.

The Watt market axis produces a lot of garbage which saw some traders dump theirs into gutters and drainages causing blockade, some simply threw them by the roadside while the bins at Nelson Mandela opposite the bank had no capacity to hold a days’ refuse from the market but its evacuated once in every two or three days with attendant gridlock during evacuation.

The traders have found a way to adapt as they sell their wares sitting less than a meter away from the garbage.

Below are images of how dirty, Calabar is currently;