On #TheBalcony today, watching yet another dumped evening unfurls, I clutch my coffee tighter, because clearly some of our leaders have had too much of theirs already. And it must have been spiked.
We’ve talked about coffee before mostly in my letter to my man Lwanga in Bukomansimbi – about how if even half of Uganda’s 10 million households bought just two kilos every fortnight, we wouldn’t be whining much about international prices. But today’s not about coffee. Today we descend into the murky pit (pun fully intended) of Ugandan urban planning, or the lack of it.
This week, straight from the land of matooke and grasshoppers, where lions and drums now stare blankly from the middle of our esteemed ‘welokamu’ because someone with too much free time thought it made sense, came yet another pronouncement.
Masaka City’s mayor, Florence Namayanja, boldly declared that developers will no longer get building plan approvals if their plans include pit latrines.
Let me just take a sip of this coffee.
The mayor, with what one assumes is a straight face, argued that pit latrines are contaminating ground water. She said that once filled, the latrines overflow when it rains, releasing human waste into water sources and endangering people’s health. “We must stop this,” she thundered and my friend Tonny Kalyango was rightly placed to put her on record.
Now, I have no doubt that her heart is in the right place; somewhere between a WHO report and a power point presentation she probably slept through at a donor conference in Kampala. And yes, pit latrines have their risks, and yes, modern sewerage systems are the way to go.
But Madam Mayor has anyone told you to wake up and smell, well, Masaka?
Let’s be blunt. What she announced is what happens when leadership becomes unmoored from the reality it governs. Political pronouncements made in a haze of idealism and donor jargon, with no thought spared for the actual context on the ground.
Has she bothered to find out how many kilometers of sewer lines Masaka City actually has? Has she checked on the capacity of the (if it exists at all) sewage treatment plant to handle the city’s waste? Has she taken a stroll, say in the one-mile radius around her nice house in Kitenga, to count how many households have waterborne toilets?
For those still clutching their coffee cups like I am, let me help paint the picture more vividly. Masaka City is a mid-sized urban center draped in shiny municipal titles but still firmly rooted in rural habits, where over 80 percent of households continue to rely on pit latrines, and nearly 30 percent even share those with neighbors.
Nationally, the picture is no better, according to the Sanitation and Hygiene Fund’s 2022 report (yes, one of those fancy reports our leaders love to wave around at conferences), a staggering 83 percent of Ugandan households depend on pit latrines, while a mere three percent use flush toilets. Those flush toilets, predictably, are concentrated in Kampala, which boasts a comparatively luxurious 17 percent coverage, and a sprinkling of upscale enclaves elsewhere. Masaka, needless to say, does not exactly feature on that privileged map.
To put her lofty pronouncement into perspective, the ever-caring mayor presides over a city with just eight public toilets — yes, eight — as reported by the Daily Monitor. (Some would argue there might be a few more, thanks to those attached to the newer public markets, but the point remains.) Of these eight, six were built before Uganda even gained independence and today stand as grim monuments to decades of neglect, most in a pitiful, unhygienic state that residents often avoid altogether.
Meanwhile, Masaka still has no proper, standard landfill to handle its mounting solid waste, leaving garbage to pile up in open spaces and drain into water channels. This is the same city where sewage often mixes with stormwater during heavy rains and where most residents live in neighborhoods that have never seen a sewer line laid. Yet here we are, being told pit latrines — the only affordable, workable solution for the majority — are now public enemy number one.
So, in her dreams, Madam Mayor envisions a city where everyone has a flush toilet hooked to a sewage system that doesn’t exist, powered by water supplies that are already erratic. In her reality, the city’s residents, most of whom live on incomes barely above the poverty line , should somehow afford to construct expensive septic tanks or pay connection fees for non-existent sewerage.
This is the delusion of leadership out of touch with its own population. A sort of governance-by-slogan that mistakes good intentions for practical solutions.
If Namayanja really cared about “endangering our people,” she would start by lobbying for massive investments in public sewerage infrastructure, pushing National Water and Sewerage Corporation to expand to underserved areas, and supporting subsidized household connections. She would pair that with hygiene education campaigns, and yes — enforce pit latrine standards to minimize contamination.
But banning pit latrines outright in Masaka? That’s like banning boda bodas because you don’t like traffic jams in Kampala.
The mayor should know better. Or at least, she should walk her neighborhood and see how her constituents actually live before she begins wagging her finger at them.
Good policy is rooted in good sense. And good leadership is rooted in reality, not in conference room fantasies.
Masaka deserves better than a mayor who mistakes donor buzzwords for a development plan.
Until then, we’ll keep our pit latrines because they’re the only thing standing between our people and open defecation.
And as for the lions and drums at Welokaamu roundabout? Well, that’s a pit we fell into long ago.
-CKW-
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