The new mayor of Maputo, Razaque Manhique, visited the Hulene dump on Friday, the main dump in the Mozambican capital, to “understand its impact” and “seek solutions”.
“We also want to experience what our residents live through, whether they live in the neighbourhood or those who are waste pickers, and then look for solutions,” Razaque Manhique told the media moments after visiting the Hulene dump in the suburbs of the Mozambican capital.
Since the incident in 2018, when 16 people died at the site after part of the dump collapsed, the municipal authorities have received a lot of support for waste management, but the closure, budgeted at around $110 million (€102.1 million), according to figures from that year, still has no date set.
“It’s exactly to understand the suffering of others that we are here,” emphasised the mayor of Maputo, without giving any dates for the closure.
The largest rubbish dump in the Mozambican capital made international headlines when, in the early hours of 19 February 2018, a section the height of a three-storey building collapsed due to heavy rain and fell on several precarious dwellings in the neighbourhood.
Of the 16 people who died at the scene, seven were children, in an episode that raised debate among environmentalists about the impact of the dump, the largest in the country, on a residential area.
Every day, it is estimated that more than 1,200 tonnes of solid waste are deposited on more than 25 hectares of Mozambique’s largest dump, located along one of Maputo’s main avenues, Avenida Julius Nyerere.
Lusa
