40 Million Nigerians Still Defecate Openly – Water Aid

Expired raw materials extracts of malt and glucose owned by Guinness Nigeria Plc being destroyed at a dump site in Otta, Ogun State, recently.

Water Aid, an interna
tional non-governmental organization has alleged that over 40 million Nigerians still practice open defeacation.
The organization which said this in an interview with newsmen in Abuja also called for the erection of toilets in schools, markets, parks and along highways across the country, so as to discourage open defeacations.
The Advocacy and Partnership Manager of the organisation, Mr. Saheed Mustafa, however, attributed the situation to the absence of public or mobile toilets at strategic locations. “Right now, Nigeria is going through what we consider a sanitation crisis.
“Every time we measure progress, we find out that instead of going forward we are actually going backward,” he said.
According to him, “as at 2015, about over 100 million people still don’t have access to improve sanitation, adding that, “about 40 million of them are still practising open defeacation.
“And when 40 million people go outside to defeacate, it is a big issue and of course that leads to health issues,” he said.
The group, which also alleged high infant mortalities as a result of the problem, stressed the need for the government to sit up and find solution to the problem.
According to him, “this also leads to about 68,000 under-five children’s death every year because they don’t have access to water and sanitation. “Government needs to sit up and take action, we have opportunities to take action now based on the newly developed global goals that now have water and sanitation as a target goal on its own.”
Mustafa also stressed the need for government to formulate policies that would check the spread of common diseases as a result of open defeacation.
He also called on governments at all levels to have a budget line for sanitation as doing so would help to eliminate practices such as, open defeacation.
“We say water is life and sanitation is also life, without sanitation we cannot live healthy and part of the solution is government to actually budget for sanitation.
“We can also get laws and policies in place that will help ensure that people will build houses and they build a latrine with them. “It’s also a problem for government to create a budget line for constructing public toilets that is very important” he said.

Patricia Karibo