The chairman of Brikama Area Council has denounced allegation of imposing registration fee of D250 on the newly launched council’s “Seneyaa’’ waste collection initiative project.  

Yankuba Darboe tried to rebut the allegation in an interview with Home Digital FM of Brikama following ongoing social media accusations of putting a 250 dalasi registration charge on residents before any collection of their residential waste. 

“What I want to inform the people about, especially residents of West Coast Region, is that the council has never initiated a fee of 250 dalasis to register as a resident before any collection of your generated waste,” he said.

“Whoever is registered as a resident of the region, for your waste to be collected and disposed, should simply know that you are not part of the ‘Seneyaa’ waste collection project initiated by the council.”

Mr Darboe clarified that the “Seneya” waste collection project was initiated by the council to mainly ease the management of waste collection and its disposal among residents of West Coast Region. He added that the council went into partnership with private truck owners to collect and dispose waste from residential homes.

“The only reason for introducing the ‘Seneyaa’ waste collection initiative is to make it easy for residents of the region to properly manage their residential waste,” he said, setting the record straight: “So to make it very clear: the Seneyaa waste collection project has no registration fee attached to it.

“Our decision to also hire private truck owners to collect waste from homes is that, even if the council spends 70 million dalasis, we can only purchase 10 waste collection trucks, which cannot even cover one part of the region.”  

He further mentioned that the ‘Tambana’ waste dump site in Brikama which KMC had started using to dump their waste would have an official from the council permanently stationed to issue tickets and collect fee from every truck waste collector, which could approximately generate revenue of 4,000 dalasis every day for the council. That revenue, he added, could also be used to maintain the ‘Tambana’ waste dump site.

“Our plan as a council is to maintain the ‘Tambana’ waste dump site, which can be used as waste recycling centre where a waste plant will be constructed to produce other beneficial products like fertilizers for our farms,” he explained, saying: “So the ‘Tambana’ waste dump site is one of our priorities as a council.”