By Taban Henry
The Mayor of Juba City has on Thursday said they are going to extend the payment of the garbage collection fees to the residential areas within Juba City.
This came after some residents of Juba City complained over the failure of the City Council authorities to remove garbage being piled up within their residential areas blocking water ways and leaving their houses in pools of water.
Speaking to the media yesterday, the Mayor of Juba City Council Michael Ladu Allah-Jabu said they are going to extent the charges of the garbage fees to the people living in the residential areas in order to clear their residences.
He said people in the residential areas will have to pay the fees according to the classes of their plots as they are classified to; first, second, third and the fourth class residential plots in the city. He added that they will designate amounts of money for them (plot classes) separately.
“Those in the first class areas, we give them to pay more because the size of their plots and even the number of people leaving would be more than those of the fourth class. The garbage that comes from them is bigger than what comes from the third, second and the fourth class. We have already put that in our new rate schedule that will be launch soon in order to see that we collect money from the people in their households in the respected 56 area quarter councils within the city of Juba,” he said.
According to the City Mayor, the residential areas are also benefiting from the money paid by the people from the markets as they pay garbage fee and they are not paying adding that he could not blame them because in the beginning the former authorities did not initiate this program despite it being in their rate scheduled.
“It really happened that some garbage had been accommodated in some markets within the city of Juba of which, I as the city mayor I visited some of the garbage points like Hai Malakal graveyard and also another garbage point in Juba next to telecommunication authority and custom has two garbage points, one that blocked the police operation forces on the route leading you to mango Star,” Allah-Jabu noted.
He acknowledged the outcry of the people concerning the garbage, promising that they are going to see that those services are effective to everybody because for anything that took long it is very difficult to maintain and to fix it in place at the same time.
He said for all the garbage that comes from the household they have not yet decided to collect any money from them but soon they will start collecting may be in the beginning of this month.
“We are going to extend our garbage collection fees to the residential areas as you know people cry a lot but they don’t know who is taking the garbage and that is why people in the market complain in the market about the city council blaming the city council for collecting the garbage fees and are not taking their garbage at the right time this is because parts of their money we use for collecting your garbage,” he explained.