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Namugongo: Lack of crowd control is a disaster waiting to happen
Tororo Diocese was the organisers of this year’s Martyrs Day celebrations, so a group of us walked a humble 10km to make our pilgrimage to Namugongo Catholic Shrine to join our parishioners in an electric night of vigil, characterised by celebration of the sacred sacraments and a pilgrimage spiritual journey enhanced by liturgical and devotional music.
It was spectacular performance led by Archbishop Dr Emmanuel Obbo, religious men and women, plus lay apostolate. Apart from asking for Karoli Lwanga and other martyrs intercession in our lives, we were paying homage to a diocese, which had nurtured us during our formative years. If you grew up in eastern Uganda, you are most likely to have been born, educated, went to church, treated in an institution, started/ promoted by the Tororo Diocese like St Peters College Tororo, which shares a compound with the diocese headquarters.
Future organisers of the event and the police will have to pay great attention to the subject of crowd management and avoid potential stampede in the future.
A sight of religious men and women, priests, nuns, pregnant women, young and old, screaming and sprawling on the ground with their immaculately white vestments, ignominiously stripped off all their dignity trampled on, gasping for air, feet off the ground was traumatising to watch.
In 2016, a study published by the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction (IDRR), points out that religious gatherings and pilgrimages have been venues for 791 of the stampedes in India. In one of such tragedies in recent history, 110 pilgrims died during a Hindu festival of Navrati, when a stampede broke and on September 26, 2015, 717 people died during Hijja in Saudi Arabia. No crowded event is immune from these tragedies.
Yet scenes of masses of faithful pushing against each other, walking in opposite directions, shoving, pushing, jostling for space, gasping for air, trampling on each other, surging, rushing, swaying this way and that way was a common sight inside the fully parked holy ground, particularly around walkways, entrances and places with ‘Holy Water’.
That Namugongo is vulnerable to a deadly stampede is not an exaggeration; it is not if it will happen, it will happen sooner than later and stampedes are wholly preventable, predictable and avoidable.
Conceptualising the threats that the pilgrims face, I am sure, pre-occupies the organising teams of the event. More attention needs to be placed on the seamless flow of the crowd, controlling the entry and exit points, adequate space for movement for a dense crowd.
Infrastructures within the venue like roads, corridors, entrances, exits, pathways, open spaces should as much as possible, be left unoccupied to allow easy flow of people in and outside the shrine, and allow for emergency teams to reach all places at the shrine.
As the shrine becomes a world religious tourist site of repute, the pilgrimage experience will need special attention, particularly access to crowd facilities like toilets. It was a common site for pilgrims to use the “Kampala flying toilets” because pathways are occupied making any movement impossible.
Pathways must at all times be clear of human traffic, the vulnerable high flow areas like sights for “Holy water” need full-time crowd monitoring and directional information erected at the site. Improvements done by the Archbishop Cyprian Lwanga-led team during the Pope’s visit are visible and beautiful.
The urgent issues are for police enforcement, for example, the sprawling makeshift market from Kyaliwajjala teaming with hundreds of shoppers running right opposite the entrance to the shrine, one does not need a calculator to know how dangerous it was to the pilgrims in terms of crowd movements and a terrorist attack.
The police, rightly so, stopped motorised transport at Kyaliwajjala, but allowed a dangerous crowded commercial activity within meters of the shrine where perhaps two million people were gathered.
On the eve of the Martyrs Day, I was in CPS Room 9 to help get bond for a suspect and plain clothed CID officers were narrating how on all the occasions they have been deployed at Namugongo, they have appeared only for purposes of their bosses seeing them, and after they would disappear and go to “eat cash outside’’ and that partly explains low police presence within the crowds.
Mr Odumu is a lawyer.
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Twitter:@odumuokumu
