The inundation of downtown Kampala in the wake of Monday’s torrential rain makes distressingly clear outcomes of building in flood plains.
The high toll exacted in human misery should pique interest into what made a bad situation worse. While downtown Kampala has been at risk of inundation for a protracted period, the submerging of shops and stalls in the area on Monday occurred with a terrible inevitability.
Experts had, with wide-eyed certainty, warned that a dubious construction project atop the Nakivubo Drainage Channel would inflict the damage it is expected to.
One of the recommendations in a 1999 World Bank report made public in 2010, following an environmental assessment for the Nakivubo Channel Rehabilitation Project, was that the waterway of Kampala’s principal drainage channel be widened.
Constructing atop the channel, as is currently being done under the auspices of Ki-Ham Enterprises, does the exact opposite. The waterway has been narrowed, considerably, leaving everything to disintegrate with such catastrophic results. This has rightly led to a flurry of condemnations, and we join the right-thinking members of our society in registering our horror and dismay.
Above all, after a terrible secret being brought into plain view, we wonder if those responsible for making a bad situation worse will learn the error of their ways.
The capital dissolved in uproar in August after President Museveni used a blue letter to give Ki-Ham Enterprises the all-clear to embark on the dubious mess it has created in downtown Kampala. Parliament’s Committee on Commissions, Statutory Authorities and State Enterprises (Cosase) commendably took interest in the matter, only for the rug to be pulled from under its feet.
Nearly two months on from the intervention of Speaker Anita Among, which stopped Cosase in its tracks, Kampala residents affected by flooding are justified in questioning whether the action gave it the truth of innocence.
The Speaker’s constitution of a so-called fact-finding team was seen as a serious procedural lapse, if anything because it flew in the face of how either a select or an ad hoc committee can come into existence.
At least when doing parliamentary work. It did not help matters that the fact-finding team that Speaker Among willed into existence was entirely made up of lawmakers from the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party. Worse still is the slumber the fact-finding team appeared to have slipped into.
While it is unclear what sort of timeframe the team is/was working with, a moratorium should have been immediately put on Ki-Ham Enterprises’ construction activities pending the outcome of an environmental social impact assessment.
Little wonder, downtown Kampala finds itself struggling-unsuccessfully-to keep its head above the storm water. This is a classic example of the distinctive set of poor outcomes bound to be produced in the absence of bona fide checks and balances.
It is terribly difficult to weather a perfect storm occasioned by presidential blue letters and a Legislature that bears resemblance to an appendage of the Executive, if not the presidency. We need to return to the normative foundations that are known to stand a democracy in good stead. Short of that, we will-excuse the pun-keep drawing in a flood of problems.