Abstract
ABSTRACTIn Nigerian cities, as across much of Africa, sanitation practices at zone, ward and street levels inscribe – in patterns of circulation and interaction around waste – not only the hopes and fears of urban residents and managers, but also the aspirations and failures encoded in colonial and post-colonial national and regional histories. Adjusting to numerous challenges – the interplay of racist colonial zoning strategies, rapid post-colonial urban expansion, the withdrawal of public services amid the liberalization programmes of the 1980s, the increasingly abject character of the social contract, and the ongoing tenuousness of economic life and activity – urban environmental sanitation in Nigeria has long struggled to keep pace with the historical dynamics of the country's emergent metropolises. Following the activities of a cohort of inspectors and volunteers at the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources, Oyo State, this article examines the politics of performance and coercion surrounding the monthly observance of Environmental Sanitation Day in Ibadan amid the heightened political tensions of the electoral season in 2011.
Highlights
In Nigerian cities, as across much of Africa, sanitation practices at zone, ward and street levels inscribe – in patterns of circulation and interaction around waste – the hopes and fears of urban residents and managers, and the aspirations and failures encoded in colonial and post-colonial national and regional histories
The interpenetration of these areas across the city’s topography, as described by Fourchard, and the reliance on a number of key routes for circulation across the city, rendered a policing structure based on a small series of checkpoints an effective mechanism for the projection of the particular politics of sanitation emerging from a combination of totemic performances of municipal environmental responsibility, and individuated and distributed spatial practices of surveillance and care
The environmental health officers (EHOs) who had briefed me on the monitoring duties of the task force had informed me that across the 5 LGAs of the city, containing 20–25 enforcement points in total, there were 6 or 7 magistrates sitting, in order to punish the infringement of Sanitation Day regulations, whether by travelling or by failing to maintain a clean streetscape
Summary
Environmental sanitation connotes a series of social and technical practices converging on the circulation and management of waste from human activities. Able to deduce from experience the duration of the abandoned roadside afterlife of this ‘fellow citizen’, it is only on later reflection that the abject repercussions and resonances of this mute and accusing presence unfold (Adebanwi and Obadare 2010: 4–5) This signal of decomposition and degradation as an insistent existential murmur translates into a broader querying of political categories of state and citizenry, positing a malign core to government ritual, figuring the citizen as excremental cast-off, and focusing on insubordination as the primary means of enacting civic values in the face of state excess. It is important to note that there exists a political and public vocabulary around issues of sustainability and rights in the clean city, and that this vocabulary is mobilized and invoked for a variety of purposes – which, unsurprisingly, do not always articulate well together
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