Garbage choking cities, towns as budgets dip

Walking along Kafumbe-Mukasa Road and Nakivubo Road near St Balikuddembe Market (Owino), it’s impossible not to notice the heaps of garbage taking over the tarmac.

The garbage has become a permanent fixture, even driving away stubborn street vendors.

Shop attendants on Kafumbe-Mukasa Road say they no longer make sales because their customers have nowhere to park. Additionally, the stench from the rotting garbage repels potential customers.

The garbage used to be collected in the parking yard inside the market, but infrequent collection and the resulting stench, which deterred customers from visiting, forced the management to dump it outside.

Efforts by the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), now in charge of the market’s management, to remove the garbage have been futile due to a shortage of funds.

The situation isn’t unique to St Balikuddembe Market. Many urban areas in the country are being buried by mountains of garbage which have accumulated on the streets and roadsides.

On April 9, 2024, President Museveni issued an executive order to get rid of what he described as mountains of rubbish in cities and towns.

The order was aimed at ensuring the authorities get rid of garbage within a year.

“In every town and city of Uganda, the concerned authorities must ensure that there is a skip for rubbish every 200 metres, without fail. That every skip must be empty every three days, or more frequently, the volumes are big,” the order reads in part.

It adds: “Within a year, every urban authority (city, municipality or town) must ensure that there is a plan for recycling that waste so that the dumping sites do not become mountains of rubbish. The plastics should be recycled into new use forms (bags); the organic waste (peelings –abihatiro) should be turned into manure; and waste paper should be recycled into new uses of paper (toilet paper).”

Mr Museveni asked for ideas on what should be done to broken glasses and old clothes.

“The bottom line is that our urban centres must be free of open disposal of waste. Waste must be temporarily properly kept, then safely transported to the dumping site and thereafter, recycled into new uses,” he said. 

A year later, there is no significant change in waste management on the ground. The recycling plans are nonexistent in nearly all urban authorities.

Officials from the Ministry of Local Government and KCCA say they have done everything to implement the President’s order, but the task is enormous and requires a huge budget, which is yet to be availed.

Mr Charles Magumba, the commissioner of Urban Administration in the Ministry of Local Government, says implementation of the presidential order is still ongoing with several initiatives put in place in several urban areas.

“Efforts to implement the president’s order are underway. We have done some work and it is the reason you aren’t seeing the situation as bad as it was before the executive order was issued,” Mr Magumba says.

He says they are now collecting data on the quantity of solid waste each urban centre generates per day to enable them to budget for each area effectively.

“Lira, Kabale and Kamuli have used weighbridges and have found it easy to generate the data. It has been difficult to budget for solid waste management without actual data. With data, we will be able to know how to use resources effectively,” he adds.

Mr Magumba says Jinja and Mbale cities use black fly larvae to reduce waste dumped as they help in breaking down wastes.

“KCCA in partnership with Marula Proteen has tried out this in Wankoko, Kanyunga and Kasese. Lira has also attracted five private firms...to collect plastic bottles. So far 1,218.7 tonnes have been collected since July 2023,” he says.

Mr Magumba says they are in the process of acquiring land for the projects mentioned in the presidential executive order, and their budgetary proposals have been forwarded to the Finance ministry for consideration.

 He adds that they have, however, used the available financial resources to implement the executive order under Uganda Support to Municipal Infrastructure Development (USMID), providing each new market with garbage disposal equipment, including trucks.

 “Sometimes, littering garbage can’t be attributed to bins being far away. It is an issue of mindset, where people carry garbage in their cars and then dump it in the wetlands miles away. This is a behavioural change issue, which we have to deal with,” he says.

The commissioner says they are working with the local governments to have by-laws on solid waste management.

“Together with Global Green Growth Institute, we have assisted Mukono to enact waste management by-laws and strategy and we hope to help cascade these by-laws to other entities,” he says.

Mr Magumba adds that urban authorities that will perform better than others in the country would be given an award while those that will emerge the last would be sanctioned.

He says the generator-pay system should be encouraged and implemented in urban areas where the residents pay a company to collect solid waste from their homes and offices.

“In areas where it has been established, it has been effective and there is no littering of garbage,” he says.

In Kampala, the system has been effective, but the clients only complain about the high charges.

Each shop or residence is charged over Shs30,000 per month by the garbage collector companies.

One local government official, who declined to be named, says the executive order was issued in the middle of the financial year when all the budgeting and funding plans for all activities in that period had already been done.

“There was no money to execute the order. What we did was to reorganise the little that had been allocated for sanitation management to implement the order. The Ministry of Finance has been informed about the budget needed to execute the order. They are yet to avail resources,” the official says.

The official says the idea of having skips every 200 meters has challenges as it requires land acquisition where they will be put.

“The skip modern is an old waste management system that was discarded in many urban areas in Uganda. They attract vermin. Because of people’s bad waste disposal habits, they often dump garbage outside the skips, which becomes a challenge to the neighbouring residents. It is one of the reasons why we no longer use them,” the official says.  

Mr Francis Balabanawe, the Secretary General of the Urban Authorities Association of Uganda, says many urban authorities have resorted to privatising waste collection and management, especially in residential areas.

“In Mbale, Lira and Mbarara, they have privatised garbage collection. The garbage generators (residents) pay some money to the private companies to collect it,” Mr Balabanawe said.

Private garbage collectors have had successes in commercial areas such as the Central Business District where they collect waste from shops and private businesses.

They have not been able to resolve the garbage accumulation problem since they don’t have the mandate to enforce payment of garbage fees in residential areas.

Some residents often choose to dump garbage in isolated areas and drainages or junctions at night to avoid monthly payments.

On May 4, two women and two juveniles were seen in a viral video dumping garbage in a drainage channel at Nsumbi Zone in Nansana Municipality, Wakiso District.

The four were arrested and two of them, Mariam Ndagire and Moreen Nakavubu, have been produced in court on offences of littering domestic waste contrary to Section 97 of the National Environment Act of 2019.

Such waste is not collected by both the urban authorities and the private garbage companies.

Private garbage companies only focus on homes that have paid for their services, and the urban authorities don’t send public waste collectors there since they consider those areas as covered by private service providers.

Abandoned waste in public bins and those dumped on the roadside isn’t collected. 

Speaking to Daily Monitor, while still deputy spokesman of KCCA, Mr Robert Kalumba, said in Kampala Central and Makindye Division, they have put up dustbins on the roads and streets.

“Plans are underway to establish dustbins in other divisions of Kampala City,” Mr Kalumba said.

The few dustbins that were erected in two divisions last year are now filled with garbage that hasn’t been collected for days.

In city markets such as Nakasero, garbage builds up in open spaces producing an unpleasant stench that can be smelt as far away as Kampala Road, where the top banking institutions are based.

Local governments attribute the piling of garbage in urban areas to a shortage of funds and the new system in the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development (MoFPED) in which they have to remit all their revenue collections to the Consolidated Fund.

The MoFPED is supposed to send the money back to urban authorities to pay service providers, but the local government leaders say it often delays or isn’t sent at all.

Unpaid workers at the mortuaries started dumping unclaimed bodies at the offices of the chief administrative officers (CAO) or town clerks. It is the duty of the CAO or town clerk to bury unclaimed bodies.

Cash-striped cities are now unable to pay cleaners and those who transport garbage to the dumping fields.

KCCA cleaners have gone for months without pay prompting them to go on a sit-down strike. They even stormed Parliament to share their grievances with the Speaker of Parliament and the Members of Parliament.

The KCCA officials haven’t been able to secure funds to pay the workers despite committing themselves to do so.

The spokesman of MoFPED, Mr Jim Mugunga, says local governments raised issues of delay by the Finance Ministry to resend the revenues to the source, which they are currently working on to ensure that they get funds in time.

“The revenue will continue to be sent on a single account and it would be sent back to the local government when they have presented budgets or on specific authorisation from the PSST (Permanent Secretary and Secretary to the Treasury). What we are working on is to ensure that there is no delay in sending back the money to the local government,” Mr Mugunga says.

The results of the delay in the remitting of funds to the urban authorities are reflected on the roads like Kafumbe-Masaka in Kampala City, where the garbage has seized prime space to create unpleasant odour and waste. The waste is often carried out to the Navikubo channel, which also transports it to Ggaba into Lake Victoria, where water for domestic consumption in the city and its suburbs is pumped from.

The over-polluted Ggaba is one of the reasons why the National Water and Sewerage Corporation had to look for billions of shillings to establish a source of water miles away from hazardous areas. The wastes also block some drainage channels, causing flooding in the capital city.

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