JUBA, South Sudan – Juba City Council caretaker Mayor Christopher Sarafino Wani Swaka has set December as a deadline to end indiscriminate garbage dumping in the capital, saying the administration has moved from public awareness campaigns to enforcing sanitation laws.
Wani said the council had spent months mobilising residents, engaging community leaders and educating households about proper waste disposal before intensifying enforcement measures over the past two weeks.
“We have declared that by December, the city must be clean. This issue of people throwing garbage randomly is not going to happen,” Wani said in an interview.
He said the administration had adopted a three-stage approach involving public awareness, legislation and enforcement to address persistent sanitation problems in Juba.
The mayor said the Keep Juba Clean campaign was designed to change residents’ behaviour rather than produce temporary improvements during organised cleaning exercises.
“The whole idea of clean-up campaigns, it’s not about just to keep Juba or to clean Juba that particular day. But campaigns are designed to raise awareness because the issues of cleaning the city or keeping the city clean or keeping your household clean, it has to be a culture,” he said.
Wani said the council had involved national and state leaders, governors and community representatives in the campaign, alongside 57 quarter council committees responsible for mobilising residents in different neighbourhoods.
He said public and environmental health officers had also been deployed to work with the committees, identify sanitation hotspots and improve communication with residents.
The administration is also working to ensure its awareness teams can communicate in languages understood by different communities living in the capital.
Wani said the council passed a Solid Waste Ordinance through its legislative council in April, giving the administration a legal framework to regulate waste management and enforce sanitation rules.
He said residents needed to be educated about the regulations and provided with opportunities to dispose of their waste properly before penalties could be imposed.
The mayor said enforcement had intensified over the past two weeks, targeting indiscriminate dumping in public spaces.
“We’ve done the awareness, we have the law, and now we’re enforcing. And you see people are behaving,” he said.
Wani acknowledged weaknesses in waste collection services, saying the council was working to improve reliability by strengthening coordination with quarter council committees.
He said additional municipal workers had been deployed to support the committees, while health officers were expected to identify problem areas and report challenges affecting waste collection.
Flooding and urban planning
Beyond sanitation, Wani identified blocked waterways, inadequate drainage and rapid population growth as major challenges facing Juba, particularly during the rainy season.
He said the city’s population had grown from about 170,000 before 2005 to more than one million in its metropolitan area, putting pressure on existing infrastructure and available land.
According to Wani, some residents have built homes along natural waterways, obstructing the routes through which rainwater traditionally flows towards the Nile.
“When you obstruct waterways, what would all this find its natural course? If you try to obstruct it, you find a new course. And unfortunately, the new course that they would find is always very catastrophic and disastrous to human settlements,” he said.
He said the council needed to revisit Juba’s master plan and conduct further studies to determine how to address flooding without unnecessarily disrupting existing settlements.
Wani acknowledged that some structures might have to be demolished to reopen blocked waterways, but said the administration also had to consider residents whose properties had been officially allocated.
He said the council had engaged multilateral institutions, including the World Bank, to seek support for infrastructure improvements under urban resilience programmes.
The proposed interventions include road improvements and upgrades to infrastructure in areas affected by flooding, particularly in the western parts of Juba.
Wani said the administration had identified cleanliness, a greener urban environment and public safety as its three main priorities.
He said the council ultimately wanted every household to receive a tree seedling to plant and maintain, but stressed that residents first needed to develop a culture of keeping their homes and neighbourhoods clean.
“The issue of cleaning the city should not be an issue of the government. It should be an issue of every single citizen because the citizens are the owners of this city,” he said.
The mayor said the administration would continue enforcing sanitation regulations beyond December, arguing that maintaining a clean capital required sustained public participation and reliable municipal services.
