For Iyabo Aduni, a 29-year-old mother of three, home in Lagos, Africa’s biggest city, is a wooden shack next to a huge, burning garbage dump.

Located on the edge of a canal that drains into the lagoon that splits the city’s islands from the mainland, the refuse has not been collected for years. Residents of Iganmu regularly set the dump on fire, using the burned rubbish as a means of reclaiming land from the swamp and building new shacks as soon as the ground appears firm enough.

“When it rains our homes are often flooded because garbage blocks the canal, making it difficult for the water to flow,” said Aduni as her children played on the fringe of the dump. “And we have to sweep up plastic bags and other trash that washes into our rooms.”

As the population of Lagos has exploded in the past two decades to more than 13 million people, the infrastructure to deal with the resulting waste was not improved to keep pace.

It is a problem repeated all across the large cities of Africa, where urbanisation is outpacing the capacity of governments to keep up and improve infrastructure and waste-collection networks.

The equatorial heat makes matters worse by turning the garbage into a toxic, fetid compost of organic, chemical and hazardous waste.

Health risks

Lagos, Nigeria’s sprawling commercial capital, lacks an effective garbage collection network and has no central system for treating sewage and effluents from industries. Filling the vacuum are self-employed collectors who push carts through the streets, collecting rubbish from residents for a fee. Similarly, private operators evacuate sewage for the city’s residents.

Lagos State health and environment officials acknowledge that most of the garbage and sewage collected by these private operators, as well as the effluents from industries, ends up in the lagoons and creeks. Much of the rest is burned either in the numerous illegal rubbish dumps that dot the city or in the three official dumps run by the government. Tendrils of black smoke are a frequent sight on the Lagos skyline.

The untreated sewage not only pollutes the lagoon waters, but also destroys marine and aquatic life, says Kenneth Iwugo, a marine scientist affiliated with the University of Bristol, who has studied water pollution problems in Lagos. In places where rubbish and other solid waste are dumped in officially appointed landfills, contaminants are released that leak into both ground and surface water, he added.

“This brings about the risks of water pollution and destroys marine animal and aquatic food sources in the metropolis,” said Iwugo.

He said Lagos is particularly susceptible to water pollution because the water table is very close to the soil surface, sometimes only 3m deep. The soil is also relatively loose and easily permeable, allowing the infiltration of contaminants.

For the millions of inhabitants of the city the health risks inherent in the poor disposal of waste are many. According to Iwugo there is always the danger of viral and bacterial diseases such as polio, meningitis, diarrhoea, cholera, parasite infection and fevers spread by waterborne carriers. Heavy metals discharged by industries are an additional health threat.

Poor infrastructure

Lagos State Governor Bola Tinubu blames previous governments for failing to address the city’s waste disposal problems. Following his election in 1999, Tinubu introduced a system of government-licensed, private refuse collectors. They go around neighbourhoods collecting trash for a monthly fee and dump it in the officially designated landfills.

While only 100 trucks picked up rubbish at the start of the project about five years ago, now more than 600 trucks collect refuse, tipping an average of 4,000 tonnes of waste every day, said Tunji Bello, the Lagos Commissioner for Environment. The government has also signed a deal with two international companies specialising in waste management to recycle waste at the landfills and produce fertiliser.

“The project has a twin objective of ridding Lagos of garbage and providing gainful employment to many citizens,” Bello told reporters in Lagos.

With funding from a US $20 million World Bank loan the government plans to tackle the city’s drainage and flooding problems by dredging more canals and new channels to ease the flow of water, Bello said. The loan was granted, he said, because the government was successful in cleaning out the garbage that used to litter the city’s highways.

Although efforts are underway to rid the downtown of refuse, things remain unchanged in the city’s crowded, outlying districts such as Iganmu.

“I will be happy if they can take away this rubbish,” said Iyabo Aduni as she watched a child with a stick pursue a goat near the burning dump. “But I don’t think the authorities know we exist.”