The Minister of Water Resources, Suleiman Adamu, on Monday, said state governors are not ready to end open defecation in their domains despite efforts by the Federal Government to halt the menace.

Adamu, who spoke in Abuja at the second national retreat for states on the “Clean Nigeria: Use the Toilet” campaign, said aside from Jigawa State, no other state in Nigeria had attained the open defecation-free status.

He said that at the federal level, he thinks they have done everything that they needed to do. The ball is now in the courts of the states and that is why this retreat was called, to keep reminding them that they are off-target. Some states are still upcoming. For instance, Katsina State is hopefully going to be the next one, but there are states that there is virtually no progress at all.

This, he said, was why the Federal Government kept reviewing the situation from time to time, in order to ginger the states to act accordingly. He said that states should understand that sanitation is a personal obligation and responsibility, and that once they are able to take that to heart, then he thinks this campaign will go on auto-pilot. It can happen in 2024, it all depends on Nigerians at the end of the day.

Water, sanitation and hygiene stakeholders and government officials from various states attended the two-day function, where they pledged to further intensify the campaign against open defecation in their different domains.