The saying goes that you are never too old to learn and the accuracy of that statement was proved to me this week.
I was completely unaware that there is a World Toilet Organisation, formed in 2001.
One of its fundamental tenets is that sanitation should be available to all.
In fact, a declaration by the United Nations in 2010 states that ‘access to clean water and sanitation is a human right’.
Didn’t we already know that, hence the increasing number of service delivery protests in and around our fair, but sometimes smelly, land?
However, to get to the bottom of the issue, there is to be a World Toilet Summit to be held in Durban in December.
Talk about back to basics, which is obviously the starting point of so many things, particularly when it comes to the seat of power. Naturally it would be necessary to go around or negotiate a few hidden bends in the process – but I digress.
The supreme irony of the timing of this conference struck me, dealing as it euphemistically does with waste disposal, sanitisation and cleanliness, when our country is in the midst of positive mounds of the smelly stuff and the attendant essential frantic muck-raking required to bury it, applied with varying degrees of urgency .
I sincerely hope that, before the present incumbent who is currently seated albeit slightly uncomfortably on the throne is able to flush away all the potentially sticky issues likely to cause a blockage to his progress, sufficient clearance of said blockages is successfully carried out.
With due deference to the inventor of the indoor ‘water closet’, Mr Thomas Crapper, who lent his name to a whole host of interesting stories, isn’t it time we flushed out the water closets of power and sanitized everything, properly, before all that smelly unhealthy stuff infects us all beyond redemption?
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