Ban on plastics: An ill-conceived law

April is the one year anniversary of one of the most asinine and thoughtless piece of legislation ever implemented: the ban on plastics.

The argument among others is that they degrade the environment including water sources. Give me a break. All urban areas of the country are plagued with water shortages, none of which can be directly linked to the use of plastics. It is an excuse for poor urban planning and water resource management.

What is thoughtless about this piece of legislation is the financial strain it is putting on the back bone of the economy: the market women. The ones that pay taxes; support their families and send their children to school. They are the engine of the economy. They are found in every setting in the country.

Instead of the government finding ways to encourage them; it is finding ways to punish them for being enterprising. This legislation does just that. It is punitive.

I was told of a woman in the Ntarikom area of Bamenda this past January who paid a fine of 20,000 francs for using plastics. Although this allegation was not independently verified, I had a conversation with an enforcement officer in the regional office in Bamenda who bragged about their January exploits with fellow goons from Yaoundé. They came to town to wreak havoc on merchants mostly the market women faced with little choices.

What an outrage! I should mention that when I walked into his office in up station Bamenda he was taking his siesta with a TV on. When I requested the English version of the law he told me that would only be possible if the Regional Delegate was in the office. At that moment he was in Yaoundé.

The best he could do was give me a flyer which was in French. Here we are in bilingual Cameroon in Bamenda of all places and I can’t get a copy of the law in English!

Why is this law bad? It is punishing the economic engine, the family bread winner: the ubiquitous market woman.

Should the use of plastics be banned or limited? Perhaps but not for the reasons advanced by the government and certainly not for the draconian and thoughtless measures taken. Plastics, while undesirable do not pose a real threat to the Cameroonian environment, the health of its citizens and certainly not to animals as the argument goes. There are better ways to manage the 10% of municipal waste that is attributed to plastics.

A thoughtful and beneficial piece of legislation should have included some of the following elements. Education/Outreach: Although there was some outreach, it was limited mostly to TV. There was not enough at the grassroots level. The outreach period was short; not long enough to reach the intended audience. In addition, the outreach focused on the ban not the alternatives.

Incentives to Reuse/Recycle: Plastics are indispensable in any economy. That is why they were invented in the first place: to improve on the quality of life. For the urban areas recycling containers can be strategically placed for people to dispose of their plastics. This is what most industrialized economies do.

People are encouraged through education and incentives to recycle. They are not punished (as is the case in Cameroon). Education is an ongoing process; it is not accomplished overnight or with the threat of fines.

Technology: Plastics technology is relatively simple. Plastics can easily be recycled, create new industries along with new (skilled) jobs that are prerequisites for industrialization. The government has to provide the incentives: less cumbersome regulations and a fair (not arbitrary) tax code. There are plenty of entrepreneurs in the Mutengene corridor who will seize the opportunity.

The substitutes: There are no large scale industries to support the biodegradable substitutes advocated by the law. Who produces raffia or jute bags on a commercial scale or handle large plant leaves such as bananas? These are opportunities that the government can encourage for private enterprise through incentives.

Right now the market women are left with a very poor substitute: paper. So we now eat “sawyer” and other foods from newspapers. We do not know what the paper and ink are made of. They probably contain more potential toxins and carcinogens that the plastics they are purported to replace.

In conclusion the only beneficiaries from this law are the enforcement officers and other government bureaucratic s that administer the ill conceived law. I think the legislators owe it to the electorate in particular the market women revisit the law. They can start by putting in place systems that will benefit not punish.

The writer can be reached at: sambatata04@gmail.com or findo@verizon.net.