The management and staff of the Ogun-Osun River Basin Development Authority (O-ORBDA) on Monday staged a sensitisation and road show campaign round one of the busiest streets of Abeokuta metropolis, with a call on governments to step up actions against river pollutions to safeguard the health of the citizens.
With a principal focus on sensitising governments and residents on the dangers associated with river pollution, O-ORBDA management demanded that stakeholders in all its catchment areas of Osun, Oyo, Ogun, and Lagos states desist from human activities that have, over the years, constituted nuisances to the lives of all the Rivers and inadvertently impacted humans.
The sensitization campaigns, which was part of the activities marking the year 2025 edition of the World Rivers Day, specifically demanded that policy makers, as well as other key players must ensure that citizens desist from acts of dumping wastes on the rivers; stop open dedication on Rivers, as well as prevail on the bigger companies and Small Scale Enterprises Manufacturers (SMESM) from discharging sewage and other untreated effluents on Rivers.
Led by the managing director and chief executive officer (MD/CEO), Engr Deji Ashiru, O-ORBDA management urged key stakeholders in Nigeria’s water management sector to strengthen policies that sanction people, as well as improve enforcement of regulations prohibiting indiscriminate waste disposal across the four states.
The sensitisation campaign, however, had a stopover at the Laketu River, along the ever-busy Abeokuta-Ibadan highway of the Abeokuta metropolis, where Ashiru, represented by the O-ORBDA’s Executive Director in charge of Planning and Development, Femi Dokunmu, engaged in a symbolic river cleaning and tree planting with representatives of the traditional ruler of the host Alabata Community, as well as that of the Area’s Development Committee, alongside members of the Artisan Association in the state.
In his lecture at the symposium held at O-ORBDA’s headquarters to mark the day, the guest lecturer, Prof. Adeyinka Adebowale Sobowale, called on the governments of the Oyo, Osun, Ogun, and Lagos States to urgently install mini waste water treatment plants in all the abattoirs and other slaughter slabs so that their wastes being discharged into the rivers do not constitute a health hazard to the citizens.
Shobowale, a Professor of Water and Ecological Resources Engineering at the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (FUNAAB), Ogun State, specifically called on the Ogun State government to relocate Manufacturers of the “Adire”/Kampala fabric; one of the SMES for which the federal government has identified as a foreign exchange earning sector, alongside the abattoir away to a concentralised hub where their wastes would no longer constitute risks to the health of the people.
