The pre 1980 Jinja was a clean town.
The municipality leadership could afford to pay casual labourers to pick garbage and to sweep to keep the streets in mint condition. There were garbage skips across town placed in locations identified by the town planners as garbage collection centres. The town residents understood their role in keeping the town clean.
After the collapse of the town in the 1970s occasioned by the Structural Adjustment program (SAP) policies, the municipality became finically incapacitate to finance the town cleaning budget and so the casual labourers had to be laid off. The streetlights went off and the garbage started overstaying and overflowing in the skips.
It was the mass exodus of the town residents that made matters worse—Jinja became a dirty ghost town. To fill the void that was left by the mass exodus, rural folk came into town. Sadly, they had never known how a clean town looked like. In rural Jinja, just like other rural areas, littering is not frowned upon, and garbage management is not high on the agenda of social living.
The rural folk that invaded the town have not left. Some have ascended to high offices in council, others are now running shops downtown and others manning stalls in markets; their relatives are riding boda bodas and their children are walking the streets. They seem to have never wrapped their heads around what a elan town is and why they need to live in one.
Therefore, when I saw Daily Monitor post on X about dirty streets in Jinja, my surprise was not about the garbage pile but rather about the surprise the post expressed about the matter.
Failure to manage garbage and associated odour in Jinja has been piling for the last 15 years.
At the Amber Court Round About, the Main Gate into the City, there is a collector of dirty bottles who piles his dirty work right by the road and the city authorities have let that dirty eyesore welcome its visitors for years now. It is an announcement of what awaits them in the city.
Shops in town do not have garbage bins and so dispose of garbage in the streets in the hope that if the one-off garbage collector passes by, they will take it or of not, a rain or a strong wind will sweep it down Lake Victoria or river Nile.
The Garbage skips are long gone, and the good council leaders have since dealt, the small plots where the skips used to be, off to small business that have since set up mobile money kiosks and other stalls selling fake commodities.
The jury in Council is out about the use of a landfill and whether we still need it right in the centre of the city now that the city boundaries were expanded to the rural. Some council leaders had unscrupulously dealt it out to a developer but without a clear alternative for where to dump the garbage. Now the excuse is that the road to the landfill is impassable and so the trucks cannot reach there.
The local government act places the responsibility of keeping towns and cities clean on local councils. The recent presidential directive on the garbage did not give any contrary orders on the same. The local leadership in Jinja, however, have always used a political approach to a management problem. For example, in an attempt at using the meagre resources optimally, they agreed to give the garbage collection responsibilities to themselves. The village LCs run the garbage business in their areas. To them it is now a business than a responsibility.
To solve the garbage problem, one needs understand where and how it started. From the genesis already explained, it is clear the problem is both social(upbringing) and political (policy). Cleanliness is a function of upbringing.
Why is garbage bad? Why should I keep my surroundings clean? Why is cleanliness important? Simple questions with obvious. To someone who has lived in a place like our rural areas where garbage is normalized, understanding why it is wrong to litter might not be as obvious as to someone who has lived in Kololo.
At first, the rural people entered a formally clean city. Now the city has been extended to the rural. Without a deliberate sensitization drive, all top-bottom interventions will be futile because one will clean and the next minute a boda boda rider or a taxi commuter will throw used water bottle through the window to the street or a garbage collection truck will after collecting the garbage leave a trail of garbage in its wake on its way to the landfill because those manning them probably do not care anyway.With sensitization, the garbage problem will be a social concern. People will then start actively participating in solving the problem and condemning those who litter.
With the sensitization will come increased garbage collection in private homes and in public areas and an increased demand on the politicians to put in place practical mechanisms for garbage collection and disposal, not turning themselves into garbage collection businesspeople as they currently do because then they cannot supervise themselves.
With the current high numbers of unemployed idle youth in both the rural and urban part of the city, and because we may never go back to the pre-SAPs times in terms of funding, the city authorities should, after the sensitization, encourage the formation of youth garbage collection cooperatives. Deliberately and as a matter of policy allow the youth to run those garbage collection businesses and through a partnership between the youth cooperatives and the city, lobby for grants to procure garbage collection equipment and if possible, a recycling plant.
The garbage problem will keep recurring if we do not manage its root cause. Jinja city can easily go back to how it used to look like pre-1980. The people just must appreciate why and their role in getting there. Not assuming that their role is to litter, and the city leadership’s role is to clean.
The writer is the publisher of Busoga Today newspaper and the Executive Director Gabula Royal Foundation
