By Daniel Tyokua
The chairman Abuja Municipal Area Council (AMAC), Christopher Maikalangu has taken steps to promote sanitation and healthy environment across the twelve political wards of the council.
This followed the inauguration of ‘Maikalangu Vanguard 2023’ which is saddled with the responsibility of maintaining clean environment through sweeping and sensitization of community residents.
During the inauguration at Apo town hall, Tuesday, Maikalangu said the initiative was to complement the effort of the existing WASH COM and the Environmental Services Department to sensitize the people living in communities on the dangers of open defecation and the gains of personal hygiene.
Maikalangu who distributed sanitation materials worth millions of naira to members of the vanguard, disclosed that all the women selected was in line with his administration’s commitment to curb open defecation in rural areas and sustain the hygiene drive.
According to him, the women are to be working with tractional rulers and other stakeholders to ensure that the exercise is sustained.
“This initiative is geared towards educating, sensitizing and mobilizing our communities against open defecation and proper waste management.
“These women selected from the 12 political wards of the Council will work with the traditional rulers and other relevant stakeholders to make sure that they reduce open defecation to the barest minimum in the Council.
“AMAC constitute 65% of FCT population due to influx of people into the Council on a daily basis thereby making us to generate heavy load of waste within our communities and cause our facilities to be overstretched. Unfortunately, most of our villagers do not have toilet and some of them are not making use of the existing public toilets.
“We have been embarking on sensitization campaign on the values of clean environment and dangers of communicable diseases that come from dirty environment. Consequently, I want to use this opportunity to call on our people at the grassroot to imbibe the culture of good personal hygiene, desist from open defecation and indiscriminate waste disposal as these are likely to bring different diseases to our people.
“As a government, we shall continue to partner with all relevant agencies and stakeholders to make sure that we reduce open defecation in AMAC”
The materials distributed include dozens of broom, rakes, cutlasses, wheel barrow, plastic buckets, leather bags and many others.
