Sanitation Laws: Health Officer Accuses Govts.

An environmental health officer, Mr Augustine Ebisike, has criticised state governments for imposing fines on sanitation offenders without recourse to the courts.

Ebisike, who is the Registrar of the Environmental Health Officers Registration Council of Nigeria, told newsmen in Enugu that such state governments usually employed touts to enforce environmental laws.

He said the council had made case for states to use the professionals in their employ but regretted that the affected states had remained adamant.

The registrar said such states used touts in the name of contractors to collect illegal funds.

“The rule is if your house is dirty, I come; I educate you to say these are the reasons why you should keep this place clean. If you don’t accept, I serve you a notice; that notice is not called a contravention notice, it is called an abatement notice – a notice to abate, to clean up your compound.

“If after one week, two weeks, one month, depending on the time frame I had given, you still did not do what we want you to do or you didn’t do it the way we had agreed it should be done, then I now complain to a court, and the court will listen to my complaint, now summons you to come and state your case.

“It is when you state your case that the court will either find you guilty, or discharge and acquit you. If the person is found guilty, a fine is imposed not by the health officer, not by the tout, not by any other person but by the court. ’’

Ebisike stated that the idea of engaging sanitation officers was to engender a clean environment and not necessarily to generate funds.

He called on the various state governments to return to the use of environmental health officers, formerly called sanitary inspectors, to eradicate certain diseases caused by poor sanitation.

He said the huge amounts spent on health programmes designed abroad could be saved if people obeyed simple environmental or sanitary laws.