African press review 30 June 2015

The South African press raises waste management as a national emergency, and the scandal of "jumbo" wardrobe allowances of Nigerian lawmakers underscores the extent of graft in Africa's largest producer of oil.

We begin with an example from South Africa of what the media can do to boost the success of the Cop 21 Climate Summit in Paris come December. Mail and Guardian’s multimedia column focuses on an ugly face of an environmental problem facing the rainbow nation. In a video posted in its multimedia column, Mail and Guardian says that the country generated nearly 19 million tonnes of municipal waste in 2011 citing statistics from the Department of Environmental Affairs.

Johannesburg, the country’s biggest city with a population of 7.8 million inhabitants, is the country’s greatest polluter, producing more than 9.6 million tonnes of garbage per year representing 45 per cent of South Africa’s overall waste. The 124-acre Robinson deep waste disposal site, the largest in the province, is the main issue for concern to the newspaper.

According to the newspaper, the facility in the strategic Gauteng province is expected to reach capacity in 10 years followed by closure for up to 20 years for rehabilitation. Mail and Guardian quotes experts saying that the city must find another site to dump its garbage in a country running out of land for its 52 million people or revert to alternative sources of waste disposal before then.

Only 10 per cent of Gauteng’s households recycle now, according to Mail and Guardian. That is despite previous findings by researchers of environmental degradation by greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide, and ammonia and sufides which are the cause of mounting health problems in the world’s urban areas.

Despite the government’s enactment of a waste management strategy since 2012 the paper says people have not bought into the whole idea of separating their recyclables from other strains of waste. Hence Mail and Guardian’s decision to join the campaign ahead of a 2016 deadline for the launch of a waste generator separation at source program.

The debate about the opulent lifestyles of elected officials in Nigeria is a towering issue in today’s Nigerian press. This follows the disclosure by the Revenue Mobilisation and Fiscal Allocation Commission (RMFAC) that a National Assembly lawmaker earns a wardrobe allowance.

The Guardian reports that despite President Muhammadu Buhari's recent announcement that he would take a pay cut to his salary as well as that of his aides, lawmakers continue to take as high as 600,000 naira, or 2700 euros, as wardrobe allowance annually. This is on top of the “jumbo” monthly wages attributed to Nigerian lawmakers, according to the chairman of Eminent Person Group (OSEG) in Ondo State.

Banji Alabi told the newspaper that the MPs' wasteful lifestyles constitute a gross contempt against the average Nigerian whose monthly wage could not sustain him for a week. They are the people who bear the brunt resulting from the woefully mismanaged economy.

The Nigerian press has been calling for a probe into an audit report showing that members of the former Seventh National Assembly were notoriously and selfishly allowed to earn fat but undisclosed salaries and other related allowances.