The Osun Government has warned residents of rural communities against open defecation so as to forestall the spread of diseases in their neighbourhoods.
Mr. Segun Moyinoluwa, Director of Sanitation and Hygiene, State Rural Water Supply and Environmental Sanitation Agency (RUWESA), gave the warning in Osogbo on Monday at a meeting with members of the State Task Group on Sanitation.
He said the state government had embarked on serious enlightenment campaigns to sensitize people in the rural communities to the need to promote healthy living.
He stressed that effective sanitation of all communities was critical to efforts to improve the people’s standard of living.
The director said that the agency was working assiduously to ensure that all the rural communities in the state were free from open defecation.
Moyinoluwa urged the community leaders to support the government’s efforts to prevent the outbreak of diseases in the state.
He said that Governor Rauf Aregbesola’s administration had been striving to improve the citizens’ living standards and reposition the state for economic development.
He appealed to the people to always include toilet facilities in their building projects so as to avoid indiscriminate defecation in public places.
Moyinoluwa said that the task group would visit 109 communities in Ayedaade, Odo-Otin and Ifedayo local government areas between November 7 and November 9 to ascertain their open defecation status.
Mr. Samuel Ayantola, RUWESA’s Head of Sanitation Unit, said, while presenting a paper on “Criteria for Community Certification’’, that the agency had been able to ensure the liberation of over 100 communities from the menace of open defecation.
Ayantola, who highlighted the preconditions for the certification of communities as open defecation free, urged the sanitation group to check all important facilities in the communities under survey in its efforts to ascertain their open defecation status.
He called on all stakeholders in the sanitation sector to be alive to their responsibilities, saying that the task of making the state free from open defecation was the duty of all the citizens.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R–UrLDRhD0]
