While I do not know when the idea of hiring cleaners in this great university came into being, I know that its usefulness cannot and can never be doubted. Through the work of the cleaners attached to various halls of residence, faculties and even roads that dot our campus, we have a university for people and people for a university.
However, one obvious thing about our dispositions towards our beautiful and clean scenery is that we rarely think of how it comes to be. We seldom advert our minds, every morning when we see spick-and-span bathrooms, toilets, roads, and classrooms, to the fact that it wasn’t a fairy godmother that turned them out beautifully during the night, that it wasn’t that an angel benevolent came all the way from heaven to deterge our surroundings for us.
We forget that it is human beings like us who toil daily to do the dirty work. We forget that these human beings are not those who God overlooked in opportunities allocation, but they are aunties and mothers that nature and fortune has placed to do the thankless task.
In our desired amnesia, we treat our environment like it is scornful that we have been endowed with it. In our selective memory loss, we treat our toilets like they are inessential. Some do not even poo in the toilets again, they find comfort in the bathrooms of their hall and you wonder whether the culprits are human beings or abnormal beings. We litter the bins like disposing waste properly therein will cause the bins to bite us. But our ignorance is informed; informed by the fact that the following morning, the angelic mother of cleanliness will have done it again, with everywhere squeaky clean. Quite ironical is that the miscreants are those who appear well packaged and celestial in the open but are bestial when it comes to real cleanliness.
Of course, the nicest of the cleaners do the grunt work without grunting, doing over and over again what we have done while the most rabid of them transmute into enflamed beings, shooting embers of curses at the anonymous culprits. Well justified, if I may add, for no one desires to see his laboured work destroyed.
Further infuriating, many of these cleaners work under the most unclean state. They wash soiled toilets with bare hands, dispose of wastes without mouth masks and eat just the same with their bare palms. While they cleanse our dirts to make us dignified, they distain their own dignity.
In the wake of the deadly Ebola virus, I asked one of these cleaners in my hall, as a concerned human being, why their mouth masks are missing, why their hands scream of rubber gloves, why we cannot see their legs covered with strong boots, why they are only covered with half-sleeved, short uniform gown and not a jumper. Her response sufficiently represented non-chalance, not their own chalance, but that of the management and their employer’s and wholly the disdain with which many of us look at the cleaners. She said “How can we have all these when they don’t give us, our oga should at least have mercy on us and provide us with these things, I don’t want to contract Ebola.” She actually said and pleaded in Yoruba.
Going by the inherent indifference of employers towards their employees in Nigeria and prevalent job insecurity, it will not be out of place to conclude that telling her employer of the necessity of these things will be like giving a farewell speech to her means of livelihood. As students, how many of us have at least made a case for these women in our halls or faculties. But how can we when we are part of their plight due to our messy disposition towards the facilities cleaned by these women?
Like the proverbial clarion call, I hope this write-up rings clearly and far-off that a person might be an expert in any field of knowledge or a master of many sills and accomplishments, but without cleanliness, that person’s brain is a desert waste.
Dispose your waste properly and dutifully in the waste bins, they won’t bite! Use the toilets like you are coming back to eat there. Respect the cleaners and be part of their cause.
Remember that their cleaning makes you clean and your cleanliness is their own cleanliness.
ESTUDIANTE.
