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Saturday morning, Kampala was gripped with bad news after the Kiteezi landfill infrastructure collapsed, leading to loss of life and damage of property. As of Monday evening, 25 people had been confirmed to have died in the tragedy. Many more are in hospitals nursing severe injuries as government ponders what to do next.
On his part, President Museveni has spoken on the tragedy and offered some emergency monies to support families through this difficult period. Many have been rendered homeless and are being supported by the government, from the temporary shelter camp which has been erected at Kiteezi CoU Primary School, through the OPM, KCCA and Uganda Red Cross.
President Museveni has directed his State House Comptroller Jane Barekye to support the affected families with some money as a more comprehensive compensatory intervention is being worked out. In agreement with NEMA, which years ago declared all places adjacent to the 28-year-old KCCA garbage dumping site unsafe for human habitation, the President has demanded to know why the Kasangati-Wakiso area local government authority permitted people to build houses and settle in such a clearly unsafe place.
Rescue operations are continuing being spearheaded by UPDF, Police, Uganda Red Cross and representatives from KCCA. It’s being hoped that more bodies could be retrieved and life saved through the continuing digging through the ruble at the collapsed Kiteezi dumping site. Many citizens are understandably angry and a lot of blame has inappropriately been directed at Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago’s KCCA.
Maybe Lukwago inadvertently provoked some of this belligerence himself when he rushed to apportion blame in a very partisan manner as opposed to coming off as restrained, uniting, measured and more inclusive than the he spoke on Saturday as he went around the collapsed site. There was no need for the blame game even when the country is already counting down to 2026 during which Lukwago will be seeking reelection as Kampala Lord Mayor, just like President Museveni will be.
The truth of the matter is that the decommissioning of Kiteezi, which Lukwago and his entire KCCA leadership have been calling for, is long overdue. The garbage dumping facility was first established for Uganda by the World Bank in 1996, which is now 28 years ago. As of that time, Kampala roughly had 1m people coming around to eke a living from it everyday.
Today, this has greatly changed. Kampala has 5m people depending on it to eke out a living and still surviving on the Kiteezi landfill whose capacity was designed 28 years ago to cater for just 1m people! It’s also instructive that the site at Kiteezi, which is 13kms from Kampala City Centre was, as of that time (1996), not built in a manner that complied with globally accepted best practices; the World Bank involvement not withstanding.
Back then, 28 years ago, Kiteezi was a remote part of Kampala and the site wasn’t near or surrounded by any human settlement like is the case today. As of that time, it was a wasteland where no one was living. There was simply no incentive for any sane human being to consider building a house and begin living there.
But as of today, the population explosion resulting from rapid urbanization around Kampala, Wakiso, Mukono and other surrounding areas, has prompted humans to inevitably settle in all sorts of places including Kiteezi; totally oblivious of the dangers that come with poor sanitation conditions and the potential collapse of the landfill, as has happened.
This isn’t something over which anyone can blame KCCA which in any case is only concerned with dumping of the garbage there (on its own site called Kiteezi) without being vested with jurisdiction or authority to allow or disallow human settlements into villages surrounding Kiteezi. There are many powerful nice houses in the Kiteezi neighbourhood, whose construction has had to be cleared by the local authority which is Kasangati Town Council, supervisable by Wakiso district local government, and not Erias Lukwago’s KCCA.
The truth of the matter is that the weekend disaster wasn’t totally unanticipated. It was predictable and foreseeable that this infrastructure would cave in and cost lives which is why KCCA technical wing, and later on the political wing led by the Lord Mayor, raised a red flag long time ago. Its the reason why KCCA, having realised Kiteezi wasn’t viable anymore, acquired alternative land (135 acres) several kilometers away in Ddundu in Mukono district so as to facilitate the decommissioning or closure of Kiteezi.
However, all this was curiously frustrated by lack of funding in billions and generally lack of adequate support from the central government. Developing the Kiteezi-like solid waste management infrastructure at Ddundu requires billions of shillings, which only the central government (whose total tax collection is 75% comprised of taxable activities in Kampala) can avail.
On their own, KCCA can’t do much because everything they collect in Non-Tax Revenue (NTR) is passed on to the consolidated fund which is controlled by the central government and not the Lord Mayor.
Imagine the pain that comes with sitting in office, drawing out mitigation and intervention plans, clearly showing that you know what to do but you can’t do it for all those years. You are constrained and can’t do it because the cash you require to do the job hasn’t been availed to you.
Literature on KCCA website indicates that as early 2012, almost 10 years before the current Executive Director took office, KCCA took steps to improve solid waste management services in Kampala.
They considered the Public Private Partnership approach to be the most sustainable way to do this by collaborating private sector investors who had showed willingness to replicate the Ethiopian model by turning garbage into electricity or energy.
This is already being done in Ethiopia and other countries and doing so would kill many birds with one stone for Kampala. It would rid the city of garbage while at the same time generating almost 10MWs of electricity which would be sold and transferred to the national grid. The same initiative would create employment for Kampala’s young people besides creating additional revenue collection opportunities for the GoU through taxes for URA.
The same would save the taxpayer and government of the burden of having to spend on putting up a Kiteezi-like solid waste holding infrastructure as all the garbage would now simply be converted into electricity and thereby eliminating the need of having a dumping ground for it. The guys desiring to commercially utilise the garbage for electricity generation only needed to be guaranteed by the GoU, which is all they required as they went about globally fundraising for the the garbage-to-energy project.
Gratefully, the World Bank-affiliated International Finance Corporation (IFC) was on board and had offered to provide the Transaction Advisory Services to actualize the PPP. The IFC even carried out a feasibility study and confirmed the viability of the PPP project.
As of that time, small local Ugandan companies contracted by KCCA were collecting up to 30% of the garbage in Kampala by picking it from households in well off neighbourhoods, at a monthly fee of between Shs20,000 and Shs30,000.
They would pick or collect garbage from the homes at least once a week. This indicated the essentialty and prior involvement of the private sector in Kampala’s solid waste management activities. The proposed PPP was only going to strengthen such collaboration between KCCA and private sector actors. A few challenges were noted too and the IFC document proposed mitigation measures to make things better.
The IFC feasibility report also raised a red flag on the fact that Kiteezi, which has been taking up to 50% of the 2,500 tons of garbage daily generated and collected from Kampala, had been overstretched and long overdue for decommissioning. The same document also referred to safety and environmental concerns relating to continued failure to decommission or shut down Kiteezi.
The entire PPP and proposed decommissioning plan failed because the GoU was unable, refused or failed to issue out the guarantee the investors required to go fundraising for the project to convert garbage to energy (that guarantee was only required to signal government’s commitment to the proposed PPP).
In case, they aren’t comfortable working with the private sector, which the IFC feasibility study had established to be viable and necessary, the GoU had the alternative of going it alone by prioritizing funding of the operationalisation of the Ddundu solid waste management infrastructure.
This required, and still requires, hundreds of billions of shillings which the Museveni government hasn’t been able to promptly provide. All these frustrations have left the hands of the leadership at KCCA tied; knowing what needs to be done and not being able to do it because you haven’t been financially capacitated.
The Ddundu site was long acquired by KCCA and it covers up to 135 acres of land but it hasn’t been developed as yet again largely because KCCA hasn’t obtained the required levels of financial and political support from both the executive and even Parliament.
Besides the funding, political support is required to overcome curious resistance the Mukono political leaders are putting up while inciting Ddundu residents to resist relocation of KCCA’s garbage processing infrastructure and equipment from Kiteezi to larger and more spacious Ddundu.
Members of Parliament, including Kiteezi area MP Nkunyingi Muwadda, haven’t been as deliberate and outspoken on the Kiteezi issue as would be ideal. If they had, maybe the Ddundu residents’ resistance and hostility would have been circumvented long time ago.
In fact, as they clobbered him on Saturday, Kiteezi residents demanded to know why their Kyadondo East area MP Nkunyingi Muwadda hadn’t been able to use the Parliament platform they gave him in 2021 to publicise their plight and the Kiteezi disaster which had been impending for more than 10 years.
They rejected his opportunism and obscurantism of putting the blame on KCCA yet it was his primary duty as area MP to ceaselessly push the central government to release the required funding to have Kiteezi decommissioned and KCCA garbage dumping relocated to Ddundu.
Nkunyingi was also appropriately tasked by his own voters to explain why he hadn’t found it necessary to collaborate and work with the Kasangati town council and their supervisors at Wakiso district local government to prevent human settlement into areas surrounding the Kiteezi landfill as NEMA had prudently recommended several years ago.
The residents called out Nkunyingi Muwadda and directed him to stop being simplistic while seeking political capital out of their community misery. Having perceived and delcared him a mere media attention-seeker, the local residents attempted to beat him up but Nkunyingi Muwadda was saved by Police which had been deployed at the Kiteezi tragedy scene.
The local residents made it clear to him that, as area MP, that if he indeed was keen and interested in a more sustainable situation, he should have used his position as MP to pressurise the central government to provide the required financing for the Kiteezi dumping site to have been decommissioned long time ago.
While rejecting Nkunyingi Muwadda’s populism, the local residents unequivocally demanded that the central government provides the required financing so that the same disaster never happens again.
And gratefully, as KCCA resorts to using Entebbe Municipality’s garbage dumping ground at Nkumba along Entebbe Road as a temporary solution, the President has signalled his readiness to enact comprehensive and sustainable interventions which simply imply that the GoU is beginning to graduate from small-small interventions in favor of adequately investing in the Greater Kampala Metropolitan Area’s solid waste management going forward and for posterity.
One only hopes that Parliament, which will be having a session this Tuesday afternoon, comes out strongly and decisively call on the central government to avail the required funding so that no Ugandan citizen or Kampalan ever gets to die in Kiteezi-like circumstances again. For that is the only way to ensure that the 25 Ugandans so far confirmed to have perished in the weekend disaster, don’t die in vain.
There have also been online blogger attacks on Erias Lukwago, which are actually simplistic and unfounded. It would be escapist to blame Kampala’s service delivery inadequacies, including those relating to Kiteezi, to him as a person merely because of his relentless opposition to the President, because even other local governments which are famously headed by Gen Museveni’s political allies aren’t doing any better.
This failure or refusal by the NRM government to adequately fund local governments is widespread and ought to be appreciated and confronted as such across the country because there is simply nothing peculiar to Kampala. All the other LC5 Chairpersons, including in areas governed by President Museveni’s supporters, are stranded as Erias Lukwago, if not even worse, when it comes to funding social services delivery to their electors.
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