By Mulengera Reporters
A group of MPs have spoken out acknowledging the President’s decision to force KCCA’s three top officials (ED Dorothy Kisaka, DED David Ssali Luyimbazi and Public Health Director Daniel Okello) out of office, likening H.E’s decision to being escapist while hiding one’s head in the sand.
Led by Jinja City’s Dr. Timothy Batuwa, Kampala Woman MP Shamim Malende, Makindye’s Allan Sewanyana, Rubaga’s Abubaker Kawalya and Mukono North’s Abdullah Kiwanuka Mulimayuni, the legislators refused to be simplistic and subsequently becoming excited because of what they called cosmetical moves being made by the President who doesn’t seem prepared to comprehensively address Kampala’s well-known problem which is political interference and underfunding.
The MPs, speaking in separate interviews at Parliament, asserted that what Gen Museveni had done, purging the three officials, amounted to merely treating symptoms as opposed to tackling the patient’s underlying medical condition (underfunding and political interference by his cadres) which has been well known for decades.
Batuwa challenged the President to fund the City’s service delivery agenda sufficiently as opposed to using mere City technical officials as sacrificial lamb in order to calm down the public angry opinion which has clearly been baying for some blood. Besides demanding that Kampala’s two Ministers (Minsa Kabanda & Kyofa Togabye Kabuye) be equally sanctioned by the President, Batuwa made it clear that, in the current circumstances constraining the City, any seasoned manager (not just the sacrificed Kisaka) would fail to do much. To Batuwa, one doesn’t have to be incompetent to fail under the current circumstances the country’s very crippling bad politics has created for every public institution and not just KCCA.
Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago had earlier on explained during a BBS TV interview that, whereas there are a few things on which the City’s technical wing ought to have done better, including being more accountable with the Shs4.1bn that would annually be allocated to flatten Kiteezi garbage heaps, it would be asking for too much for anyone to expect a better-ran Capital City under a President whose 40 years’ rule has demonstrably ruined and crippled all the other public institutions of government.
The MPs are saying that mere removal of Kisaka & Co won’t improve the situation for as long as the deliberate capture and strangling of the country’s public institutions continues to be unaddressed. That it will require collective realization and acting of all Ugandans for the Uganda-wide governance and social services delivery situation to get better, as opposed to Kampala citizens deluding themselves that their Capital City is going to all of a sudden get better merely because the Executive Director, her DED and Dr. Daniel Okello have been purged.
Kampala Woman MP Shamim Malende observed that it would be delusional for anyone to imagine that mere change from Kisaka to someone else will solve Kampala’s problems and cause the service delivery situation in the City to suddenly get better.
HOW KITEEZI DISASTER EVOLVED SINCE 2013:
The landfill had for long exceeded its capacity yet operations carried on, in absence of any alternative by the GoU which takes away all the NTR KCCA collects. The Kiteezi Landfill has been in operation for 28 years as the primary waste disposal site for Kampala City since 1996.
And as of 2013 (when Jennifer Musisi was still in charge and at the height of her power), the National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA) took note of the diminished capacity and declined to renew the landfill’s operating license saying that it had reached its full capacity. However, the landfill operations continued since there was no alternative waste disposal site. Defying NEMA became inevitable because there would be Kampala-wide public health crisis arising from unmanaged waste accumulation in the City. So, clearly, since 2013 (which is 11 years ago) Kiteezi has been operating in crisis mode.
Inadequate Funding had been the other constraint for KCCA regarding Kiteezi. In 2016 (when Musisi was still in charge), KCCA acquired 135 acres of land in Ddundu Mukono to establish a new landfill and thereby preparing to decommission Kiteezi. However, the residents of Ddundu rose up in strong opposition to that plan and foiled the peacefully and lawfully planned relocation to Ddundu.
Again, Kiteezi continued in operation despite of its well established inability to accommodate more garbage which stretched it further. But there was no alternative site and there was no budget provision for a new site. By 2020, KCCA included this money in the budget framework paper but it was reflected by Parliament and Finance Ministry as unfunded priority in the budget appropriation. In the subsequent years, the request was repeated.
And, fatally, this lack of funding meant that KCCA could not move forward with the planned decommissioning of Kiteezi and neither could they buy alternative land. Meanwhile, the garbage continued to pile up into a garbage mountain.
The other dynamics relate to population growth in the entire Kampala Metropolitan Area. In its case, the City of Kampala has seen significant population growth over the past decade, a factor that directly contributed to increased waste production. This exponential growth placed unprecedented pressure on the Kiteezi landfill which had originally been designed to serve a much smaller population.
In 1996, the Kampala City population was 1,013,000 people. And yet by 2024, the day time population of Kampala had doubled to 2,503,174 people and yet the solid waste management budget remained stagnantly the same.
The geographical area of the landfill is 39 Acres. The buffer zone created around the periphery has over the years been encroached upon by new populations. Consequently, waste has had to be stacked vertically; a practice that introduced new risks of unstable slopes and excessive waste heights. KCCA technical team, continuously monitored the landfill’s condition and implemented all feasible safety measures which only managed to prolong and delay the Saturday 10th September disaster.
As Medard Segona’s COSASE recently established, KCCA leadership has consistently been explaining and flagging the impending Kiteezi disaster (to both MPs and the Finance Ministry) while lobbying for money for decommissioning since the year 2021, when the now ousted Dorothy Kisaka had just become ED and assumed office for her first term. This is why a lot of people are of the view that in a normally governed country, the entire government would have to take responsibility and resign as opposed to merely sacrificing and forcing a few officials at KCCA. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at [email protected]).
