Letter of the Day | NSWMA needs strong professional leadership

THE EDITOR, Madam:

More often, state enterprises and institutions fail because of nepotism. Why can’t we embrace a system of meritocracy to ensure that those enterprises and institutions are led by professionalism?

The National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA), for example. Over the years, both political parties used this agency as a ‘food-eating’ programme for the leadership as well as the operatives. I want to begin with logistics; this is the need to have a logistic department in the NSWMA to organise a smooth operation of garbage collection while there are motorists with people going to work and school.

During the rainy morning on October 25 along Grants Pen Road, between Shortwood and Barbican Roads, I was in the line for more than 15 minutes and did not move 200 metres because a garbage truck was on the road. This was happening while the flood water was rising on the road. I had to turn around, like many other motorists, to hustle for alternative route. This is a general scene not just in Grants Pen, but across the Corporate Area, and at times people are late for work and children late for school due to massive traffic jams cause by garbage collection.

I think there is the need to find a way to avoid garbage collection during peak hours, and this is where logistics applies. It is important to have the kind of leadership in the NSWMA that can lead change through a new system of solid waste management.

Second, I hear the head of the NSWMA with repeated calls for people to separate garbage and do composting. This is not how it is done. Separation of garbage must be a legal regime, and it is ludicrous to ask all people to compost to reduce garbage that are to be disposed. People, out of their good hear,t will enter into activities related to composting.

The modern solid waste management seeks to develop economic opportunities from the separation of garbage, such as recycling waste to energy and major compost facilities. This is why it may be a wise idea to decentralise garbage collection within the context of a re-energised local government. Local government must clamour for this change, because if central government has no interest in pursuing viable economic activities, then the local government must step forward to urge the return of garbage collection to the local administration. It is not easy to say to these political parties that this persistent practice of nepotism is most destructive to national development and contribute to our continued underdevelopment. The NSWMA needs strong professional leadership to lead change with new systems of solid waste management.

LOUIS MOYSTON

Kingston