By Shafa’atu Suleiman
Clean Up Nigeria (CUN), an international nongovernmental organization (NGO) on Thursday announced that performance indicators from its December 2021 to November 2022 studies showed that over 176.3 million Nigerians are living in unclean environments.
Delivering its 2022 report in Abuja, the NGO also named Akwa Ibom state as the cleanest state in Nigeria. According to the CUN report, Akwa Ibom state scored 54% to emerge as the cleanest state in Nigeria followed by Ebonyi and Bauchi states respectively.
The founder of Clean-up Nigeria Prince Ene Baba Owoh Jr. while speaking at a press conference organized to announce the results of the report in Abuja stated that there is a need to encourage alternative actions on personal hygiene/sanitation in order to ensure a cleaner, healthier and safer Nigeria for all and in the end make the world a better place to live.
According to him, their organisation’s statistical data indicates that 32 out of 36 States including the rest of FCT, are rated as unclean States.
“Performance indicators from our studies show that over 176.3million Nigerians in 2022 are living in unclean environments, compared to 172 million in 2021.
“There has been no increase in the number of States with sanitary landfills beside Lagos, Oyo, Abuja and Bauchi while the remaining 34 States operate open dumping. This development is not only alarming but clearly indicates lack of seriousness by governments at levels to key into the global best practices of waste modernization with related benefits.
“As our graphic chart statistics on monitoring and evaluation of the states have shown only 7 States (Akwa Ibom, Abuja, Cross River, Bauchi, Ebonyi, Lagos and Kaduna) who scored above 10% out of the 30% on the streets/roads cleanliness indicators have clean roads in the country.”
