From as early as 8am on Thursday, compactors and workers of the about 360 members of the Association of Waste Managers of Nigeria (AWAM), better known as PSP Waste Operators, were positioned in about 15 points across the three senatorial districts of Lagos State.

Sanwo-Olu

Their heavy duty vehicles were adorned with flex banners with the inscription: ‘PSP Operators Free Refuse Evacuation Exercise in Support of Babajide Sanwo-Olu, APC Governorship Aspirant, Lagos State.”

The atmosphere was carnival-like with detachments of the Boys Brigade, banding out melodies at every point. Members of the association bore some of the banners and marched to the dictates of the melodious banding in this support rally for the bid of a former Commissioner for Establishment and incumbent Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, Lagos State Development and Property Company (LSDPC), for the governorship ticket of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the state.

All over, huge crowds gathered and discussed not only the interesting and unfolding political drama in the state but also to take on the gauntlet and enthusiastically join the celebration.

As the trucks and workers, manning each point slowly dispatched into the now vastly waste ravaged highways across Lagos to embark on the free refuse cleaning exercise, the swarming crowd moved along to join hands with the cleaners of the PSP operators to clear and evacuate the waste heaps on their routes. Residents poured out to take advantage of the exercise, singing and celebrating as they emptied their homes of months of stack piled refuse into the PSP operators’ vehicles.

Residents on Agege Motor Road as well as Oshodi Road, who stated that their cases had been made worse by the surrounding markets around them, were joyful that they had the opportunity to get rid of the waste that had piled all over for a while.

Around Kodesoh Street and Computer Village, Ikeja, where trucks of the PSP operators also intensely worked to evacuate heaps of refuse, traders and residents expressed their relief at the carting away of the overwhelming wastes, which they said were almost getting to a point of making breathing unbearable.

At Ipaja Road, around Abesan Estate on the way to Ayobo in the hugely vast Alimosho Local Government Area, where the Chairman of the Waste Operators, Alhaji Ola Egbeyemi, and his executive committee members gathered to formally flag off the exercise, the line of trucks adorned with banners and Sanwo-Olu’s campaign posters for the exercise in the area stretched to no end.

Amid the executive committee members of the operators, some of whom were decked in the governorship aspirant’s branded vests and Fez caps, Egbeyemi urged Lagosians to ensure that Sanwo-Olu does not only get the ticket to fly the APC’s flag in the 2019 elections but that he also wins the election.

According to him, the PSP operators have been assured by Sanwo-Olu that if he is elected, waste management will be a cardinal programme of his administration and that he would restore Lagos to its former clean state and the jobs of the 25,000 workers of their members.

The association’s Vice Chairman, Mr. David Oriyomi, added his voice: “We have gone political because the waste management template put in place by our grand patron, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, which ensured that we were in all the 357 wards in the state to ensure that every nook and cranny of our environment was clean has been thwarted through political means. It is, therefore, necessary that we put it right through a political means”.

Mr.OlugbengaAdebola, AWAN spokesman, on his part, said the PSP operators were sad to see their achievement of making Lagos one of the cleanest cities in the world, being reversed in the last three years.