No civilisation without clean toilets

Which presidential aspirant can promise that Kenya will have the best toilets in East Africa in five years? Before dismissing this as petty, consider the following.

Recently, the New York Times reported China National Tourism Administration’s five-year plan to enhance the country’s tourism industry, including a project to build, expand and renovate 100,000 toilets in the scenic areas and along tourist routes, with a plan to add 57,000 modern public toilets nationwide by late 2017.

A government institution drawing up a management plan for toilets sounds such a lowly initiative, but only to the most ignorant.

This agency has gone ahead to inspect public recreation areas on the basis of the conditions of their public toilets and, we are told, after inspections last December, “it delisted, downgraded or warned 367 A-rated scenic sites for a range of violations, including outdated or unsanitary restrooms.”

It is the most basic and universal object of hospitality, yet the subject of public toilets in Kenya hardly features in tourism discourse. We are obsessed with international marketing, hardly reflecting on small internal details that can make the country more appealing to local and international visitors.

Sunny Bindra, the dazzling Sunday Nation columnist, warned a few years ago that if we cannot get matters of basic hygiene right, there is hardly much else we can hope to achieve.

But why is it so difficult to have clean public toilets? A bureaucrat will rush at the hackneyed textbook answers about high population and rapid urban expansion or even lack of funds, none of which is true. Our policies are always focused on the form but not the essence of development. That’s why we are fixated on external manifestations of progress while never working hard to build the foundations of civilisation like culture, morality and decency.

In the past two years we have hosted high calibre international conferences, but we keep wishing away this subject of the poor state of public toilets and sanitation in Nairobi and other towns. Yet this will continue to be a big obstacle to tourism. Kenya’s main tourist attraction for a long time has been wildlife.

You would imagine then that our national parks would devote a significant portion of their revenue to better international standard toilets in their gates, campsites and viewpoints.

Yet it is here that one encounters some of the most rudimentary and unsightly pit latrines that even locals find revolting. Tanzania, our stiffest tourism competitor, with much less conservation budget, has been able to modernise its restrooms in national parks and viewpoints along highways.

The shortage and poor standards of public toilets are due to lack of vision, not funds. In Nairobi, human waste is a common sight around the Globe Cinema roundabout, potentially a very scenic part of the city, and next to Maasai Market, perhaps the most popular indigenous craft fair.

It’s also contiguous to Meridian Court and Kahama hotels, which are very popular with budget tourists. What kind of image do we portray of ourselves and country?

We need to urgently unlearn the apathy that attends the subject of toilets.

The World Toilet Organisation reminds us that clean toilets are the foundation of human dignity, health and wellbeing.

Mr Njaga is a travel consultant. [email protected]