The Island Editorial

Rotting garbage and stinking politics

19 April 2017

 

The death toll from the Meethotamulla disaster continues to rise. About 30 bodies had been recovered at the time of going to press. Experts have warned that the garbage dump may collapse again in the event of heavy rains. They have called for evacuating many more people. Their warning must be heeded if another disaster in quick succession is to be averted.

Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa would have us believe that his administration was about to launch a project to rid Meethotamulla of rotting garbage when it was dislodged in 2015. He seems to be blaming the people who defeated his administration, for the disaster! His government was in power long enough to solve the garbage problem. After all, it crushed terrorism in less than three years and built two expressways. While keeping urban areas clean by shifting municipal waste elsewhere it unveiled a grand plan to transport the Meethotamulla garbage all the way to Puttalam and dump it into deep pits left by the overexploitation of limestone for cement production. The proposed solution would have proved to be as bad as the problem! Unless the Rajapaksa government had been defeated it would have polluted another part of the country.

Having brutally crushed a protest against groundwater pollution in Rathupaswala, the Rajapaksa regime may have felt confident that it would be able to overcome resistance to its garbage project in Puttalam in a similar manner. You don’t need a government to remove garbage from one place and dump it elsewhere, do you? That is what some irresponsible members of the public have been doing all these years!

Solving the Meethotamulla waste issue was not high on the development agenda of the Rajapaksa government. Instead, that administration was preoccupied with mega projects to impress the public and get their votes in return. True, some of its infrastructure development projects have stood the country in good stead, but the fact remains that public funds were wasted on some Ozymandian schemes to boost the egos of the then rulers. If the Rajapaksa government had cared to prioritise the country’s development needs, rationalise its expenditure and curtail waste, enough waste recycling plants could have been put up and, perhaps, people would not have been buried alive in garbage at Meethotamulla.

The less said about the incumbent administration the better! Its leaders are apparently capable of only one thing—talking. It has undertaken to create a Megapolis though it cannot even ensure that the roads in the Colombo suburbs are properly lit. One lane of the Southern Expressway has remained closed near Kokmaduwa due to a minor earth slip which occurred in October, 2015. How long this government will take to build a new highway is the question. As for the Meethotamulla garbage dump, it only sought to pacify irate residents of the area by making various promises instead of finding a viable solution.

The government is desperately seeking foreign investment. But, will any foreigner in his or her proper senses ever want to invest his or her hard earned money in a country, which is not capable of managing even its garbage?

The Sirisena-Wickremesinghe coalition has been in power for nearly two and a half years and it had enough time to launch a project to tackle the garbage issue. It is only natural that the resentment of the Meethotamulla people finds expression in booing and cursing whenever government ministers and high ranking police and military officers visit the disaster site.

Surprisingly, the Meethotamulla tragedy has not jolted the government into calling an emergency session of Parliament to discuss how to solve the problem once and for all. Both the SLFP and the UNP must stop playing dirty politics with the garbage dump disaster and get together to clean up the mess they have created over the last three decades or so. Their hypocrisy emanates a far worse stench than the rain-soaked, rotting garbage at Meethotamulla.