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The most heroic struggles in development work are slow and unglamorous, and they often come down to problems as mundane as trash. Abdel Rahman Al-Muasib has made garbage his life’s work.
It isn’t easy to get a public service to function in a place afflicted by poverty and war. In Al-Muasib’s case, it took about 20 years. Now 51, he is one of only a few hundred Yemenis of his generation to have studied in the United States. He attended Portland State University, and then, with the help of a Fulbright scholarship, earned a master’s degree in public administration at the University of Pittsburgh. During graduate school, he had a health crisis when he came down with malaria and also discovered that he had a benign brain tumor. He thought the latter was due to bilharzia, a water-borne disease he had caught at home. “I thought, if I survive this, I’ll do something for the environment,” he told me. When he returned to Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, in 1981, he looked around and saw garbage. He took a job overseeing environmental health with the Ministry of Public Works.
Step 1 was to hire garbage collectors, and this he accomplished quickly, despite a shoestring budget cobbled together from a stingy finance ministry and foreign donors. Trash collection became entrenched, and today in Sanaa you can easily spot the garbage men in their bright orange jumpsuits. They now earn 12,000 riyals a month, or about $65 dollars, almost $800 per year. (Estimates of the average national income range from $500 to $800.) Shopkeepers tip them too.
The next step was education. Al-Muasib created a short public-service announcement called “Your Attention Please,” and after watching it, Sananis, who had been in the habit of throwing their trash out of windows or into empty lots, started putting it out for the men in orange suits. But Al-Muasib still didn’t have anywhere to put the garbage, and the government provided no help. So, in 1984 he created a dump site on a patch of land outside his office, right in front of the Ministry of Public Works. The trash piled up. “Mountains of it,” Al-Muasib said. The pile grew for six months until it covered two and a half acres and was getting more fetid by the day.
Finally, his protest had the desired effect. The president drove by and was moved to ask just what was going on. The minister of public works told the president that he needed money and space. A foreign donor paid for some trash compactors, and the problem was temporarily solved.
Around 1991, Al-Muasib got interested in decentralization—that is, he thought rubbish pickup would be better handled if cities, rather than the central government, were responsible. But right when he published a paper called “Decentralizing Solid Waste Management” and planned a conference of the same name, “decentralization” became a forbidden word. A bit of Yemeni history is required here: In 1990, North Yemen and South Yemen, the latter a Marxist state, had unified to form one country. But by 1994, while Al-Muasib was thinking garbage, the country was moving toward civil war between the two not-quite-integrated sides. In this environment, “decentralization” came to suggest communism and a south that wanted to revert to independence. Fearing the consequences of being branded a southern sympathizer, Al-Muasib put his garbage-reform dreams on hold.
After a brief but brutal civil war, in which the south attacked Sanaa with Scud missiles and the north subjected Aden, the southern capital, to a devastating siege, the secessionist movement was defeated. When it was safe to raise his head again, Al-Muasib launched plans to privatize garbage collection in Sanaa, thinking that a private company would handle the work more efficiently than the government. Things got off to a dysfunctional start and culminated with the mayor, the private contractor, and the minister of public works pointing fingers at one another on a TV show called Who Is Responsible? As it turned out, the contractor had been promised collection fees, but no one had ever actually passed a law requiring citizens to pay them.
The system now works. When I first visited Sanaa in 1992, nooks and crannies between buildings had been made into ad-hoc dumps, plastic bags seemed to breed in the night, and a wide waterway along the edge of the old city was stuffed with garbage and raw sewage. Crossing that waterway was a sad welcome to the city’s spectacular architecture, which consists of mud-brick towers frosted with white trim, inset with arched windows of stained glass. Now, the rubbish is gone, and the waterway is paved with flagstones and crossed with graceful stone bridges.
Not everyone loves a clean city. In his book Yemen: The Unknown Arabia, author Tim Mackintosh-Smith sniffily equates the cleanup with “the transformation of Sanaa into a museum.” A longtime resident of the old city, he sounds as put out as some New Yorkers were when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani scrubbed the smut from Times Square. Mackintosh-Smith writes, “Street traders were also swept away, and without its second-hand clothes, tobacco, alfalfa and impromptu poets the suq outside my house was eerily quiet.”
With no sentimental attachment to trash, I think the city looks great. (The new coat of white trim, recently provided to all old-city residents at government expense, also helps.) There are still parts of Yemen covered with litter, especially outside the cities, but Al-Muasib is a satisfied man, and rightly so. He is particularly proud of the fact that Sanaa’s garbage system pays for itself, rather than relying on foreign aid, which always dries up sooner or later.
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Al-Muasib informed me, is considered the shining example of Third World rubbish handling done right, but he believes that Sanaa, Yemen, could usurp that role. “We’ve already surpassed Egypt and Jordan. They rely too much on donors. In the future we could be a model for African and Arab states.”
