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To ensure that disasters like Kiteezi don’t happen to Uganda again, the government must begin to adequately fund local government units like KCCA. This is so because what happened at Kiteezi last Saturday can potentially happen to any other Ugandan City. And these days Uganda has several other cities which are rapidly urbanizing. Examples include Gulu, Mbarara, Masaka, Jinja, Mbale, Arua, Hoima, Mbale, Fort City and others.
Like Kampala, each one of these cities will soon have a lot of people and this will make the garbage or solid waste management problem worse and more complicated in each of those cities. This means that the government of Uganda must learn to plan better and allocate more financial resources to these urban local government units than is currently happening.
And in doing this, the government of Uganda must start with Kampala because its the capital city on which other smaller and newer cities can benchmark. Even though we have sometimes have corruption problems of some of the money getting stolen, the government must adequately fund Kampala because there will be no short cuts or alternatives to doing that.
There is no way you are going to attract tourists and serious investors to Uganda when it’s capital city Kampala is not funded enough to provide basic services to the people such as solid waste management, road and street lighting infrastructure.
As Kiteezi has shown and taught all of us, we either fund KCCA with enough money or we risk having to live in a city that will always be choking on uncollected garbage heaps.
The other alternative is to keep underfunding Kampala and we end up with disasters like Kiteezi. There are many other disasters in waiting, as the Lord Mayor has been highlighting, including the Nakukolongo drainage channels which could in the not-so-distant future burst up and flood the entire Rubaga Division.
The government should mitigate all these impending disasters by giving KCCA enough money to have like 10 Kiteezis so that the city is sustainably clean and safe for of us.
The good thing is that KCCA already has its 165 acres of land at Ddundu in Mukono district near Gayaza which can be used to develop another garbage dumping site which is 4 times bigger than Kiteezi which is sitting on just 36 acres of land.
The MPs should relentlessly pressurize the President and Cabinet to make the funding of Kampala a priority because it’s the Capital City. The capital city must have high standards of hygiene and the best solid waste management systems or practices which can be replicated in the other newer cities of Uganda.
There is also another reason why President Museveni has to make funding Kampala a top priority of his government. 75% of the economic and business activities from which the government gets taxes, through URA, is done in Kampala.
This makes it fair, equitable and a must for the City’s development to be made a priority when the government is sharing out the national cake. Otherwise there is no way we can blame KCCA for failing to have a better garbage dumping site than Kiteezi when we didn’t give them money to do the job. The job that needs to be done is known and that is to put in place money to develop Ddundu so that Kiteezi gets decommissioned or closed down because it outlived its usefulness long time ago.
It was built and put in place for Kampala by the World Bank in 1996 and at that time Kampala had only 1m people whose garbage was to be dumped there yet today the City has 5m people who generate that garbage everyday of the week. The Kampala leaders at KCCA should be given money to put in place Ddundu very quickly so that Kiteezi can be safely closed down.
The government should also encourage private investors who want to partner with KCCA to turn the 2,500 tons of garbage generated per day into electricity. This will be a good idea because it will give the country an additional 10 mega watts of electricity onto the national grid.
And once we have that electricity generation project up and running, we actually won’t require even sinking billions in developing the Ddundu site because in that case, all the garbage will be used for electricity generation and KCCA garbage collectors won’t have a job anymore.
And even Ddundu will in the long term not be necessary because the city will no longer have any garbage to dump there. The billions for setting up more such garbage dumping sites like Ddundu or Kiteezi will then be saved and diverted to doing some other more useful service delivery work for the people of Kampala.
Smaller local governments like Wakiso and Kasangati town council should also be deliberately empowered to become better regulators of human settlements and housing construction in their rapidly-urbanizing area of geographical jurisdiction.
It, for instance, wouldn’t have been possible for people to build and unsettle in an unsafe place or area like Kiteezi if Kasangati town council leaders had been empowered and skilled on how to effectively regulate human settlements and housing construction in an urban setting like Kyadondo East which is less than 15kms from the Kampala City Center.
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