LAGOS State government on Monday gave effect to the total ban it placed on cart pushers and wheelbarrow operators as it arrested 30 cart pushers for dumping refuse indiscriminately on road medians in some areas of the state in the middle of the night.
Chairman of the State’s Task Force on Environmental and Other Special Offences (Enforcement Unit), SP Olayinka Egbeyemi, disclosed this in a statement made available to newsmen by the agency’s spokesperson, Mr Taofeek Adebayo, saying that the arrested suspects would soon be charged to court for prosecution.
According to Egbeyemi, the arrest was in line with the recent ban on the activities of cart pushers and wheelbarrow operators by the state government.
The Task Force maintained that the activities of cart pushers in the state are illegal, saying that investigations found them culpable in dumping refuse on the roadside especially at night thereby sabotaging efforts by the government to keep the State clean.
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He assured the state government was poised to go all out to prosecute any persons found to be working against the new Waste Management Policy encapsulated in the Cleaner Lagos Initiative (CLI), saying the programme was designed to revolutionalise waste administration in line with global best practices when fully operational.
“There are reports that refuse are littering the Lekki, Victoria Island, Ajah and other parts of the state and investigations revealed that it is the handiwork of unscrupulous elements within Lagos State Waste Management Authority (LAWMA) and their outside sponsors who are not comfortable with the new arrangement for the management of waste in the state and are hell-bent on sabotaging government effort and frustrating them from carrying it out.
“The state government has vowed to go all out against the saboteurs and after their sponsors and punish them in line with the laws of the state,” Egbeyemi said.
He said there was a need to let Lagosians know that it was illegal to use cart pushers to evacuate refuse and should stop encouraging such operation, contending that there were PSP vehicles in place to do an evacuation of refuse, which should be patronised instead of the cart pushers.
“We also need to let Lagosians know that it is illegal to use cart pushers to evacuate refuse and they should stop encouraging it. There are PSP vehicles that come around to pack refuse and they are the ones they should patronise and not these cart pushers.
“We want to notify all these cart pushers that their activities are illegal in Lagos. Lagos is a mega-city and we have all it takes to collect refuse. So, the issue of going to the streets and collecting refuse and then dumping same on the road is an act of sabotage to the government,” he said.
Egbeyemi, while saying that the suspects would soon be charged to court for prosecution and assuring that government would leave no stone unturned in keeping the state safe and clean, further assured that the enforcement would continue across the state until activities of cart pushers and other unscrupulous elements found to be frustrating government’s efforts were completely brought to a halt.