Ethiopians from all walks of life have rolled their sleeves today to take part in a nationwide sanitation campaign. Sunday’s event will be accompanied by drive-free campaign.
The campaign which Prime Minister Dr. Abiy Ahmed announced has two fold objectives, contributing to clean environment and taking action to free the mindset from filth of hatred, ignorance and discord, among others.
It is in first place to clean residential and working areas so that everybody will have a more pleasant, healthy and attractive living and working areas. Most importantly, the second objective, is by far so relevant to do away with the mess, piled up for the last decades and persisted as if entrenched in our minds and souls.
It would be setting a challenge to our old attitudes which are characterized by hatred, revenge- seeking, intolerance, ethnocentrism, denial of others etc. The second objective sounds most in line with the new philosophy of “medemer” or synergy the country is promoting.
While it is a universally acknowledged fact that individual’s health is directly linked to personal hygiene and environmental sanitation, studies indicate that human behavior can also be affected by other environmental factors, such as sanitation and pollution that are completely out of personal control. That is why since the late 1960s, environmental psychology has been accepted as an interdisciplinary field which has primarily been studying the interplay between individual and natural or built in environment.
Thus, the cleaning campaign is important and timely. We need to keep our nation clean from any sort of garbage. Although the changes brought about in this country just a year ago is meant to remove all the negative energy that was threatening the very survival of the nation, they are not so strong to ward off possible challenges.
Institutional reforms underway in various sectors cannot become fruitful unless they grow up in a subtle environment, wherein peace and security reigned. And certainly, this cannot be achieved with the efforts of government alone at whatsoever level. Keeping the ongoing reforms safe and strengthening them to withstand any threat to them require concerted efforts. Everybody has a role to make them sustainable and ultimately ever-lasting.
Individuals are key players. They must be vigilant to keep the momentum of the changes that surfaced as a result of enormous sacrifices.
That is why the call to clean our mess is so sound and timely. The cleaning must not be compounded to physical surroundings. Most important of all is, it must change the old mind-set. The time requires cultivating a new way of thinking.
We need to nurture tolerance instead of hatred and violence. We need to be considerate to others’ feelings, instead of denial, individualism or ethnocentrism. Dialogue and civilized discussions need to give way to our old practice of dictatorship or antagonism.
These are all some of the garbage we must do away with right now. Thus lets establish a new mind-set, that would decisively ward off our old thinking of hatred, denial of others, and ethno-centralism so as to have a better future.
The Ethiopian Herald April 13, 2019
