Deadly Landslide of Garbage Displays Uganda's Missed Opportunity

After floods wash away a heaving dumpsite — killing at least 35 people — Kampala is looking for better ways to deal with its trash.

The collapse of Kampala’s only landfill over dozens of homes in Uganda’s capital underscores the dangers of poor waste management.

Over almost three decades, what started off in 1997 as a big garbage pit for the city grew into a 15-hectare (37-acre) mountain of rubbish spanning the size of 27 soccer fields. After days of unrelenting rainfall in August, tons of the waterlogged mass at the Kiteezi dumpsite slid over sleeping families, killing at least 35 people.

At least 700 houses — mainly semi-permanent structures — were either buried by the deluge or bulldozed to create access roads to the Kiteezi disaster site, according to Charles Odongtho, a spokesman for the Office of the Prime Minister.

President Yoweri Museveni fired three top city executives in September over the negligence. A month later, Uganda handed Kiteezi to Jospong Group of Ghana, which planned to convert its waste into fertilizer and other recycled goods. But a week after that, the nation's inspector-general overturned the contract and ordered suspension of all activity, citing irregularities in awarding the work, the Daily Monitor newspaper reported.

Kampala is now seeking waste-to-energy investors as well as producers of gas and fertilizers to save it from teeming garbage, said Minsa Kabanda, the minister in charge of the city.

Officials from Infinitum Energy Group, a Cayman Islands-based waste-to-energy developer, have engaged with the city’s management and the environment ministry about this; the hope is that they will partner with the local municipality and waste collectors for a project that will generate renewable diesel, Chief Executive Officer Lindsay Nagle said.

The company estimates it will ultimately invest about $500 million in the program and expects project planning to conclude in the next 12 months if the initiative materializes, Nagle said.

Unless the city formalizes waste management and sets up a mechanism to facilitate collection at scale, “collectors will continue to work on a bilateral basis, and the bulk of the residential sector will suffer to find a way to get waste collected,” he said.

Kabuye Kyofatogabye, the minister of state for Kampala, didn't respond to requests for comment on the agreement with Infinitum.

Separately, President Museveni held talks with the leader of Beeah Group, which manages waste in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, about doing the same in Uganda and potentially building an electricity-generation plant.

“These are the doctors I have been looking for to combat the disease of waste products in our country,” Museveni said in a Jan. 15 statement after meeting Beeah Chief Khaled Al Huraimel in Abu Dhabi.

The city founded as the Buganda king’s royal court in the late 19th century has a population of 2.5 million people during the day and churns out 2,500 tons of refuse daily, but it can only manage about half of that, according to spokesman Daniel Muhumuza Nuweabine.

For the rest, citizens often resort to tossing garbage into waterways or simply burning it, a common consequence of inadequate waste-disposal strategies in Africa and the developing world.

Kampala allocates about 4.1 billion shillings ($1.1 million) to garbage disposal annually, an inadequate amount that’s often diverted to more urgent needs such as street cleaning, according to Kabanda.

Residents have called for Kampala to close Kiteezi since 2008, but authorities have only done so now. A few years back, they bought 130 acres (53 hectares) at an alternative site 30 kilometers out of the city to clear the site, but residents in these areas don’t want authorities to dump garbage in their neighborhoods.

Since the disaster, waste-disposal costs for households have jumped 25% because trucks are now depositing rubbish at other landfills further out of town. The weekly fee is now the equivalent of about $7, according to resident Ismael Katumba.

Despite the tragedy, there are still hundreds of people scavenging for recyclables such as plastic and scrap metal at Kiteezi. The odor from the landfill that’s about 14 kilometers from Kampala’s city center fills the air for miles around.

“Kiteezi was long overdue,” said Sam Stewart Mutabazi, a Kampala-based transport and urban-planning consultant. The city needs an incinerating plant and authorities need to now consider generating power from garbage, he said.

Cover photo: Bags of plastic waste, collected to be sold for recycling in Kampala.Photographer: Luke Dray/Bloomberg