TheHILL. Posted by Kingsley S. Benjamin.
The unceasing commitment and overarching pace reached by Governor Udom Emmanuel of Akwa Ibom State towards a habitable environment has been evidential to the government’s priority on the cleanliness and healthiness of the State’s environment.
The current government is environment-spirited; healthiness and safety of the environment for all, means to Udom Emmanuel what the shepherd means to the sheep and the lactate means to a baby – the government upholds the environment as the life-wire of human cohabitation and a cynosure of the government’s completion agenda.
This explains squarely the real reason for the much concentration of the governor on the environment. For it is the quality of the environment that shapes the prospects for economic development. To Udom Emmanuel, there is no more critical variable than the environment – it determines the durable links between the state and the society he promises to govern.
Governor Emmanuel holds an ideology that is at variance with the widely circulated “blackman’s maxim” of cleanliness, that “dirty no dey kill Africa” and that a clean and safe environment does not have a linear effect on the economic fortunes and overall development of a society: he holds a different view to both ideologies and repudiates them whenever need beckons. For him, the environment is the nexus of human and social development – the be-all-end-all of human endeavor – a philosophy that reclines about the real reason the governor has massively deployed necessary approaches and apparatuses to making Akwa Ibom a 21st Century environment nirvana.
The evidence of this effort abound and speaks volume of its far-reaching tendencies. From vegetation control, to flood control, to decontamination, to waste management, to waste transportation, to waste evacuation, to pollution control, to public sensitisation, to global best practices, to policy mainstreaming, to waste conversion and consecutive emergences as cleanest State – are evidential to the narrative.
On a daily basis, the agency the governor reconstituted to manage the environment, that is, the Akwa Ibom State Environmental Protection and Waste Management Agency (AKSEPWMA) has made heightened efforts in sustaining the governor’s volition on environment. Evidence abound as AKSEPWMA routinely – day in day out – does a check up on the pace at which activities are executed, goals are interpreted, exercises are monitored and objectives are coordinated to match the desired outcome, while putting off contravening factors to the sidelines.
More often than not, outright sabotage, through callous disposition by residents and citizens to these evidence, abound. Even when the populace in their habitual mien desist from keeping their part of the environment management pact, the government does not fall short nor relent on doing its bid. For instance, the sabotaging attitude of emptying waste into gutters which the residents have continued unabated amidst countless sensitisation and warnings, has never deterred but buffered the elan of the government through AKSEPWMA, to persist.
That persistence is the outcome of daily waste evacuation the agency embarks upon across the state. That persistence is the reason the desilting team is always in the gutters, drainages and canals to mitigate flood and back flows on a daily basis. These and more are evidential of the environment-spiritedness of governor Emmanuel and his untiring effort on the good footing of the environment.
