Mr Daniel K. Kalinaki
If the collapse of the rubbish dump at Kiteezi was an accident waiting to happen, the sacking this week of the top brass at Kampala Capital City Authority was a foregone conclusion. The trio – Executive Director Dorothy Kisaka, her deputy David Luyimbazi and the public health tsar, Daniel Okello – must feel that they have taken the fall for a problem that was both longstanding and systemic.
It sucks, but c’est la vie. Leadership is about taking responsibility. It is about extreme ownership of the good and the bad. With almost two scores dead in the dump and others still missing it was surprising that they continued to turn up. Only the absence of a social safety net can come close to explaining why they chose not to jump before being pushed. The officials should be relieved if no criminal or civil lawsuits follow.
The litany of failed plans, unheeded warnings and missed opportunities around Kiteezi and the urban garbage crisis have been widely documented here and elsewhere. There is not value in recycling them. We now need to zoom out and see that while individual culpability might have tipped the trash can over, the structural misaligned governance of the city is the real problem.
Consider the argument that officials at KCCA presented funding requests to solve the problem at Kiteezi which always returned as unfunded priorities. KCCA sits in the ambit – some might even say armpit – of the Presidency. It was set up explicitly to take power away from the opposition-leaning elected officials and serve as a conduit through which the central government could run the capital city.
Riding the benefit of novelty and by sheer force of character, KCCA’s first executive director Jennifer Musisi pushed through several reforms, many of which were progressive. She made omelettes but also broke many eggs, including those in the patronage basket, and ultimately quit in frustration.
I could say something here about chickens coming home to roost, but these are serious matters so let’s simply state that it is now clear that this governance model is broken. It lacks the political weight to ringfence budgetary allocations for the city, the legitimacy to build consensus, or the political nous to turn social and economic progress into electoral votes. To rebuild trust and urban infrastructure, the power, decision-making and financial resources currently centralised in KCCA need to be decentralised to the municipalities and divisions. This is true for other urban areas outside Kampala as well – and one might even argue for peri-urban and rural areas. There are two systemic misalignments. The first is the distance between citizens and the officials making the real decisions, such as which roads to rebuild, which health centres to refurbish, or whether to build schools or go for trips abroad.
This wedge is made possible by the second misalignment; of where we pay our taxes and where we get our services from. In the current model, most of our taxes are paid through Uganda Revenue Authority into a pool controlled by the central government. The officials holding those purse strings don’t know – and quite frankly don’t really care – that the road to my house has more potholes than the moon surface, no streetlights, not garbage cans, no signage, no nothing.
The elected local official knows because they live nearby and suffer the same shoddy services, but they do not have the power to determine how much of my taxes they will receive and what they should do with it.
This is the Gordian knot that we must undo. More of our taxes should be paid, collected, and spent by local governments so that we can have more transparency and accountability. The service delivery across Kampala only reveals the bipolarity in public policy.
Across the country, we decentralised political offices without power while centralising control of the finances. In Kampala, we hang onto the money while also trying to water down the political authority of the elected officials. Both models have failed.
The residents of Kampala did not vote for the government when service delivery was in the hands of the old corrupt city officials. They did not vote for the government when service delivery shifted to more powerful technocrats. They are unlikely to vote for the government now that even these technocrats have been weakened.
The siege of Kampala has failed. We can’t get in, and the people can’t get out. Firing a few officials gives us the sense of doing something but the new office bearers will face the same lose-lose set of cards. To ensure that we do not waste the crisis of Kiteezi, we must throw the current governance model into the garbage and start again.
Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and poor man’s freedom fighter.
[email protected]; @Kalinaki
