WRITING  in his book Under An African Sun; Memoirs of a colonial officer in Northern Rhodesia, Frank Bennet, an ex-colonial officer noted that Lusaka was a modern, spotlessly clean city with an abundance of parks and gardens.
Mr Bennet who was writing about the city in the 50s up to the early 70s observed that Lusaka was cleaner than Lancastrian towns in England.
During the centenary celebration when Lusaka turned 100, the former Lusaka mayor Daniel Chisenga observed that it was unfortunate that the city has since lost the concept of being a garden city.
Mr Chisenga said there was need for residents to exercise responsibility in terms of cleanliness in order to retain the concept the city was built on.
Sometime back, the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Lusaka the third worst city to live in only better than Tehran in Iran and Kenya’s Nairobi.
All these concerns need heeding since Lusaka is disorganised, dirty and an unregulated concrete jungle that need massive re-planning.
As expected of a metropolis that is unplanned and over-populated, Lusaka has become one big dumping ground of litter since the council has no capacity to collect garbage.
Thus plans by the Lusaka City council (LCC) to compel every Lusaka resident to pay for garbage collection through airtime deductions is a revolutionary announcement that should be welcome.
The mayor of Lusaka Mr Wilson Kalumba says the exercise will be done to finance the garbage collection project which will see street vendors relocated to designated trading areas.
The major problem of congestion is spawning a cocktail of challenges among them garbage collection which the Lusaka City Council has admittedly failed to manage.
With the understandable inadequacy of manpower, we can forgive the Council whose capacity in offering services cannot match the fast growing population.
The Council has always attributed failure to collect garbage in the city to irresponsibility among citizens.
However, this is just one of the problems to the multi layered crisis that cries out for immediate intervention.
Even areas that are supposed to be in the city’s major avenues like Cairo Road, people use secluded corners like alleys, trees and unused booths to dispose garbage.
While condemning the colonial policies that at one time made the city inaccessible for most ‘natives’, one can conclude that such regulations though racist managed to control human movement.
We say this considering that nothing has changed since 2015 when the then Lusaka City Council town clerk Alex Mwansa revealed that only 40 per cent of garbage was collected while 60 per cent of garbage remains uncollected in Lusaka.
The town clerk said the council has always had a challenge of equipment and machinery to use for effective garbage collection.
He advised Lusaka residents to be responsible enough by ensuring that they disposed of garbage in designated areas.
All these suggestions have failed to make Lusaka the garden city it used to be since it is now a garbage metropolis that can win prizes in this category.
The solution is e-garbage collection which has proven to be effective in keeping cities clean in other countries.