“Congratulations to the Medan Mayor for receiving the Dirtiest City Award 2019. We wish you good health. Love Medan!” reads the flower board at City Hall in the North Sumatra capital.

The satirical congratulatory board was delivered to Medan City Hall on Wednesday by the Love Medan Alliance community group, after the Environment and Forestry Ministry named Medan as the dirtiest metropolis in the country.

Manado in North Sulawesi and Bandar Lampung in Lampung also ranks among the country's dirtiest metropolises this year, alongside smaller cities like Sorong in Papua, Kupang in East Nusa Tenggara and Palu in Central Sulawesi. 

In an unexpected move, the ministry presented its list of dirtiest cities during the recent Adipura Kencana Award ceremony to recognize regional efforts to maintain clean and healthy cities. This year’s Adipura environmental award went to Surabaya in East Java, Balikpapan in East Kalimantan, and Kendari in Southeast Sulawesi.

Love Medan Alliance member M. Yusuf Hanafi said that the group had sent the flower board to criticize Medan Mayor Dzulmi Eldin.

“We really 'appreciate' the title, although our appreciation is [actually] criticism of the mayor,” Yusuf said on Wednesday, adding that the community group was very disappointed with the city’s title.

“It’s proof that the Medan administration has offered no solutions to deal with the waste problem. We want Medan to be a clean metropolitan city so many tourists will [come to] visit,” he said.

Medan spokesman Ridho Nasution said that the administration had tried to improve safety and convenience for its residents, as well as the city’s sanitation.

Ridho said that the city's residents needed to take an active role to maintain cleanliness in the provincial capital. 

“It must start with the residents. We can start by not littering garbage [...] in rivers or gutters,” he told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.

Ridho also urged Medan residents to support and work together with the city administration to achieve their goal. 

Environment ministry spokesman Djati Witjaksono Hadi said Medan had scored the lowest in cleanliness under the metropolitan city category.

“It is not necessarily the dirtiest, but we basically measured the cities' waste management [programs] and its appearance, among other criteria,” he said.

The Adipura jury committee also looked at the end processing of waste and decided not to award any cities that still had an open dumping site. 

The environment ministry’s waste management director general, Novrizal Tahar, said that the ministry also evaluated a city’s progress in implementing the presidential regulation (Perpres) on waste management, which requires cities to draft a detailed strategy on managing household waste. Perpres No. 97/2017 mandated regional administrations to submit their strategies by October 2018. 

Novrizal said that only 300 out of 514 regencies and cities and 16 out of 34 provinces had met the deadline. He also noted that Medan had scored low the previous year.

“This year, the President wanted us to announce [the cities with lowest scores],” he said. (swa/swd)

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