By Funmi Olasupo

As part of activities marking the 2016 World Environment Day WED, Civil Society Organisations CSOs, in the country have urged Nigerians to adopt good sanitation habits and personal hygiene practice on daily basis.

File: Open-Defecation

Making the call in Abuja, the coalition of CSOs comprising Resources Conservation Development Initiative RCDI, in partnership with National Youth Service Corp NYSC, Connected Development CODE, and the New Nigeria Initiative, NNI, in a show tagged “Clean Up Abuja”, demonstrated the essence of clean environment through sanitation exercise.

The Coordinator, RCDI, Afoke Igwe, said the exercise was to raise awareness and consciousness of Nigerians on healthy and clean environment as part of health needs, pointing out that the environment surpasses everybody living in it.

According to Igwe, “If the environment is not clean, we are going to have series of diseases. We are hopeful that the members of the public will take this home and begin to live a life that is environmental friendly as much as possible”.

Also speaking, the founder, New Nigeria Initiative NNI, Tracy Okoro, said that the exercise has to be part of the culture of the people to keep clean and safe environment in order to prevent diseases, adding that the CSOs embarking on the sanitation exercise symbolises a re-launch of environmental health consciousness and culture in the country as well as showing the level of environmental degradation in the country as a result of indiscriminate disposal of solid and liquid wastes.

She noted that the environment has been degraded by waste water disposal which causes air pollution, adding that the inability of the nation to have a recycling culture is what the group intends to instill in the mind of people.

In his own assertion, the co-founder and Chief Executive of Connected Development CODE, Hamzat Lawal, said there was need for collaborative effort with the government to see how people can be empowered to take actions over their environment.

He said, “For us in CODE, we have been taking actions before now, but for the World Environment Day, it is an opportunity for our renewed commitment where we can add more voices to our campaign and ensure moving forward on how we can coordinate and collaborate better in this kind of clean up and beyond the clean up.

“Many Nigerians do not know how the environment affects their lives, but over time we have been able to penetrate those bottlenecks where necessary and we have been able to penetrate them using local languages to communicate to them”

“Beyond just cleaning and gathering the wastes, we are also dumping the wastes. But how can we see this as an opportunity to create jobs, where we can have recycling plants considering the huge investment this will bring to private sector”, Lawal said.