By Lilian Owusu-Mensah
The Director-General, National Environment Management Authority of Kenya(NEMA), Mamo B Mamo has said that in a bid to ban plastics from their country, Kenya, he is sure there were job losses, but the bigger picture had to be taken into consideration regarding the impact of plastics on the environment and on human health.
Speaking on the GTV Breakfast Show, May 13, 2022, the Director-General said, “as an authority charged with the responsibility of looking after the environment, we had to take responsibility to ensure that we needed to address the issue of solid waste management and specifically plastic. So on 27th February 2017, the ban on plastics was gazetted and on 27 August 2017, the law took effect in Kenya.”
Discussing the challenges Kenya faced in a bid to successfully ban plastics, Mr. Mamo said they had to undertake lots of sensitization in schools, institutions, fm stations before the implementation. As difficult as it was, the people were with them because the country was faced with a problem and they needed to address it collectively.
“There are a lot of challenges in the first instance because we are also to sensitize the people. We have to put adverts in the media to sensitize people. We also had forums. We had to get into institutions, schools, local fm radio stations, just to sensitize local communities on the ban. The general public were with us because they saw there was a problem in the country and they needed to collectively address these issues,” he stated.
The Environment DG added that Kenya also had a good Constitution that gave the people rights to a clean healthy and secure environment under and he believes this helped in getting the public support to have a clean environment.
“The country had a very good constitution that was promulgated in 2010 that gave citizens right to a clean environment under Article 42 and I think this also helped us a lot,” he said.