Hon. Tondoneh said he was “very much impressed with the orderliness and degree of responsiveness of citizens to President Julius Maada Bio’s clarion call to keep their environment clean and thanked all who in diverse ways have contributed to making the exercise a success.
He intimated that the new Garbage Collection Trucks donated by the Chinese government have been inaugurated and distributed in Freetown and other district headquarter towns in the country and thanked President Bio for his “visionary leadership” and the Chinese government for the gesture.
The new trucks, he said have created serious impact on the exercise as their services have grossly reduced the burden of renting trucks for garbage collection and disclosed plans to design local garbage collection trucks in due course with a view to complementing the effort of the others for effective service delivery.
“The more trucks, the better”, he said. On challenges facing the process, Hon. Tondoneh said, Government and partners will work out modalities to identify new dumping sites as the current one is very small to accommodate huge number of trucks during national cleaning days.
The Deputy Minister also assured the various partners and volunteers that government will ensure that basic requirements such as safety gears, more labour and other incentives are provided and commended members of the civil society including the Media and Youths who had come out in their numbers to participate in the process for their cooperation.
He disclosed plans by his ministry to visit homes in partnership with the ministry of health with a view to ensuring that they adhere to sanitary rules and entreated residents to ensure their domestic dirt are cleared on a daily basis.
He described the rate of citizens’ participation in the ongoing process including those in the provinces as very encouraging.
Youths in the various cleaning points and dump sites, commended government for the initiative and thanked the deputy minister for his inspiration and motivation.
