Prime
Pollution: A ticking time bomb and silent killer
Author: Joseph Ochieno.
What you need to know:
- We either deal with it or like the Devil, it will deal with you, your children or children’s children, if you are lucky that far.
Last weekend, I attended a fantastic memorial event in Ndaiga village, Tororo District. The event was so well designed that the average take-away was that of celebration of lives – well lived - and well served including one, potentially joining a future list of national heroes so, I returned uncharacteristically late.
We passed Mukono just after 1.00m and for the first time I can remember, there was no traffic. We felt and, did talk about it.
But at Namanve, the outlook was tense. It was foggy, misty and yet thick. I opened the window and felt light in me; relative freshness but the thickets between trees were showing the obvious.
Kampala is massively polluted, among the most polluted cities in the world. Partly due to urbanisation and population growth, it is seven times more congested than the levels recommended by World Health Organisation.
A friend of mine and medical doctor of several decades’ experience in practice around the world told me last year that every time he spends more than a day in Kampala, he feels it from choke-of-congestion and air pollution.
But why? Since the death of the Greater Kampala Plan, designed by the first UPC government of the 1960s, it would appear, we live, grow, develop and survive, by accident. I recently met a group of young economists at a restaurant in the outskirts of Kololo overlooking Bukoto. They were shocked to learn that the building – in fact most of the buildings along the same street – were residential houses mainly designed for civil servants before they were sold when the NRA/M came to power.
Not far from this restaurant is a popular media house – housed in previously residential building – planned and designed as such. Along the road adjacent to where we were, is a law firm I know. We live, grow, develop and survive, by chance.
Yet with pollution, there are no tricks. We either deal with it or like the Devil, it will deal with you, your children or children’s children, if you are lucky that far.
The most common and obvious cause of pollution here beyond the ones stated above are: emission from vehicles, bad waste management and practise and, unpaved roads.
Those dusts! Then, those industrial emission, biomass and wild fires. I was driving some young Ugandan-American boys from Nambole stadium to Mbuya and one of them noted the artistic feature of waste along the railway line, a long snaky-design wrapped by wastes of plastic bags, old clothes and plastic bottles.
In Rwanda Paul Kagame would go sick. But this is Uganda; the railway line, the forgotten metals lining up the country from Kasese to Pakwach via Tororo and Busembetia, helplessly silent and rusty yet, once upon a time the roaring lion-like alternative transportation for goods and peoples across this country, a victim with Uganda Transport Bus Company (UTC) buses.
At Makerere University Business School (MUBS), whose own borders lean against these railway lines, none of their students know that electric trains were due well before they were born.
Had it happened, I would have travelled business class (good enough, no need for first class in those trains) from Tororo last weekend, arrived five hours earlier and saved an environmental life, lung or two.
The trailers that choke Kireka would have been rendered jobless for, one goods-train absorbs 50 of them. No need for a distinction in economics to make a considered conclusion on this, do you?
Like head of economics department at MUBS told her students while urging critical thinking, ‘normalcy’ is one serious threat. Feeling so very well and alright with the unacceptable junk around us that it becomes ‘normal and okay’ whatever the implications but, is it ignorance too?
Pollution is a danger to your lungs, heart, kidneys, brains and, likely to cause lung cancer, birth defects, emphysema and other respiratory diseases like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Like those who do not know their basic rights, thinking they are enjoying it; wake up to your realities, Ugandans.
The writer is a pan-Africanist and former columnist with New African Magazine [email protected]
