Few days ago the Khartoum State Governor pledged to find drastic solutions for the waste crises in the state and to demonstrate

the will to address this grave hazard to citizens’ health. The Khartoum State Council of Ministers visited and held a meeting at the site of the disposal of waste and the factories that recycle the waste and the Governor said that this is a sign to affirm the State Governor concern with financing drastic solutions for the waste problems. In our view it is now more a problem but has reached the crises level.
We hope that the Governor as he promised will witness a concentration on collecting of garbage from houses, streets, factories, public places and transporting it to waste dumps.
In addition that he will visit next week all the localities of Khartoum State to meet with officials concerned with cleaning and to agree on a certain programme for transporting the waste.
All these are good promises but it is not the first time that we have heard them and in the case of some of the officials who attended the meeting more than once but the end result was a big zero.
The performance in garbage collection during the last five decades has proved that the basic factor in the failure to address the challenges is human incompetence and not the lack of machineries and equipments.
It must be pointed out that this crisis was evolving since the regime of the late General Jaffar Nimeiri who during his rule had received a huge donation of tens of the best quality of German waste collection trucks and equipments. But in less than two years all these equipments became useless and scrap due to negligence, mismanagement and even in some cases corruption.
The solution starts first by the implementation of the principle of accountability as regards the present and past officials for their failure to perform their duties. This will be a warning to all officials that they will be held accountable for failures.
Another important step is to design a monthly system of monitoring and evolution for the programmes that will operate in waste disposal .Also, the civil society and community based organization (CBOs)  must not only share in implementation but as well as in the design of the programmes. In this context the role of the CBO is crucial.
Once again we stress on the fact that any new programme for waste disposal management must contain mechanism for monitoring, evaluation and accountability.