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Kiteezi falls inside Kyadondo East constituency which is represented by NUP MP Nkunyingi Muwadda.
The weekend disaster, which saw the Kiteezi KCCA garbage dumping site collapse on houses and in the process costing lives, could have been averted if leaders of Kasangati town council and Wakiso district local government, which supervises them, hadn’t slept on the job.
Kasangati town council and Wakiso district leaders are the ones mandated to allow or disallow human settlements in that area of Kiteezi where the disaster happened. It’s in their territory and not KCCA’s.
They should have listened to and respected the technical advice and guidance given by NEMA many years ago, and blocked people from getting plots of land and building houses in Kiteezi which clearly isn’t a safe place for human settlement and habitation.
NEMA raised environmental concerns and advised that the Kiteezi landfill gets closed or decommissioned and people avoid living near it. This was enough information to guide the leaders of Kasangati town council and Wakiso district to make sure nobody built a house or lived within this area.
Nkunyingi Muwadda as the area MP had all this information but he never bothered to explain to his people the dangers of building and stayed in such a risky area.
And because Muwadda and the other Kasangati leaders slept on the job, people ended up dying, losing their lives and property as a result of the disaster that befell Kiteezi last Saturday.
KCCA has only 36 acres of land in Kiteezi which they bought in 1996 to use as a dumping site for garbage from Kampala. KCCA doesn’t have power to allow or disallow people wanting to build houses and live near its landfill at Kiteezi because that is the mandate of Kasangati town council and their supervisors at Wakiso district headquarters.
The problem was that the Kasangati leaders, who Muwadda was supposed to advise, slept on the job and allowed people to settle and build houses in the unsafe place near the KCCA garbage dumping site which was imprudent as was advised by NEMA.
As area MP, Nkunyingi Muwadda is supposed to have led from the front by guiding Kasangati and Wakiso district leaders to heed NEMA’s advice, which he didn’t do. He was also supposed to use his office as MP to make a lot of noise in order to publicise the plight of people who had built and were living near the landfill. Even this one, he didn’t do.
He should also have made noise and lobbied fellow MPs to vote for and allocate money to enable government decommission the Kiteezi garbage dumping site but he didn’t.
He was supposed to rally fellow MPs to make noise for KCCA to be given enough money to stop dumping garbage at Kiteezi and relocate to Ddundu village in Mukono where KCCA has 135 acres of land but he didn’t. He instead preferred to talk about other things like people’s casino businesses in UAE.
One wonders why the same MP can ask the speaker for permission to talk about the casino like he did recently but not time to talk about problems of his people such as the Kiteezi disaster before it happened.
The larger problem is that the Kasangati leaders slept on the job and allowed people to settle and build houses in the unsafe place near the KCCA garbage dumping site which was imprudent as was advised by NEMA.
Being area MP for Kyadondo East where Kiteezi falls, Nkunyingi Muwadda could have influenced the Kasangati mayor Tom Muwonge to do the right thing, namely to evacuate the Kiteezi exposed persons on good time before disaster struck, but he didn’t. All this leaves him with no moral authority to raise an accusing finger to blame any other person or leader over what happened at Kiteezi.
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