Benin Cleaned Their City in a Decade. Can Lusaka's New Mayor Do the Same?

On the day he was declared Lusaka's new mayor, before he had even outlined a policy platform or named a deputy, Simon Chitambala Mwewa said just one thing mattered most. "I only have one thing to say, the number one issue in the city is cleanliness," he told reporters after his narrow, 4,988-vote win over NRPUP's Gabriel Kibombwe on 19 August.

"There is a lot of work to do, I think we can start from there." Within days, he was out on the streets with a loudhailer, personally urging traders, motorists and residents to "throw it in the bin," a catchphrase that has since spread across Zambian social media faster than almost anything else said by a newly elected official this year. Roughly 2,600 kilometres away, another African capital spent the last decade proving that this kind of instinct, however sincere, is not enough on its own.

WHAT COTONOU ACTUALLY DID

A decade ago, waste management in Benin's largest city, Cotonou, was close to non-existent in any organised sense. As recently as 2013, roughly 90 percent of Beninese disposed of household waste indiscriminately, burning it, burying it or dumping it in open ground, and in Cotonou specifically, only about a third of households even owned a proper bin.

The turnaround did not begin with a mayor's loudhailer campaign. It began in 2018, when Benin's national government created SGDS, a dedicated public company with a specific legal mandate to manage waste and sanitation across the entire Grand Nokoué metropolitan region, 2.8 million people spanning Cotonou, Porto-Novo and the surrounding communes. A modernisation programme followed in 2019, systematising collection routes, pre-collection at the neighbourhood level, and controlled landfill sites to replace informal dumping entirely.

The results took years to show, but they are now unmistakable: Cotonou ranks third among Africa's cleanest cities, according to The Africa Report's most recent rankings, behind only Kigali and Rabat, up from sixth place previously. The city now formally processes an estimated 607,000 tonnes of household waste a year, capacity that did not exist a decade ago. None of it happened through a single campaign or a single term in office. It happened because an institution was built, funded consistently, and given years to work.

WHAT MWEWA IS UP AGAINST

Mwewa's early instincts echo something real: residents have responded warmly, with social media users praising City Market already looking cleaner within days and joking, with real optimism, that Lusaka was headed for "a very busy five years of cleaning." But a loudhailer and a catchphrase are the easy part. Sustaining that energy into Cotonou-style results means answering harder questions Benin had to answer first: who collects the waste, how often, and from which neighbourhoods; where it actually goes once collected, rather than simply being moved out of sight; and, critically, whether the system survives Mwewa's own five-year term rather than fading once the novelty of a mayor with a megaphone wears off.

There are early signs of that harder work already surfacing, not all of it comfortable. Mwewa has proposed introducing a mandatory monthly cleaning day modelled on Uganda's national cleaning exercise, a move that has drawn concern from Zambia's Seventh-day Adventist community, whose Ugandan counterparts have clashed with authorities there over cleaning days falling on the Sabbath. Whatever the outcome of that specific dispute, it illustrates something Benin's own experience confirms. That is, durable cleanliness requires institutional decisions, schedules, funding, enforcement, and the friction that comes with mandating civic behaviour, not just public enthusiasm for a good slogan.

WHAT LUSAKA COULD BORROW

Benin's transferable lesson is less about the specific technology it used and more about sequencing and durability. Cotonou's system was funded as a multi-year institutional commitment before it produced visible results, not judged after a single budget cycle. It was staffed by a dedicated entity with waste management as its sole mandate, rather than treated as one responsibility among many inside a general city council. And it was paired with parallel investment in the sanitation systems, drainage, sewage treatment, that keep a city clean beneath the surface, not just on the streets residents see.

Mwewa has five years and, for now, considerable public goodwill, the kind Cotonou's reformers did not have to win in quite the same visible way, since their transformation unfolded gradually rather than as a single mayoral promise. Whether Lusaka becomes one of Africa's cleaner capitals within that window will likely depend less on how many more loudhailer campaigns follow, and more on whether the city builds something resembling what Benin built: an institution, funded and staffed for the long haul, that keeps collecting the rubbish long after the applause for throwing it in the bin has faded.