School battles factory over pollution

Heavy smoke blowing out of Tembo Steel Mills in Kasolo village. PHOTO BY YAZID YOLISIGIRA

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Bukoyo Secondary School claims Tembo Steel Mill turned a deaf ear to their appeals for a solution to the pollution.

IGANGA. Parents at Bukoyo Secondary School in Iganga have directed the school’s administration to ask National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) to resolve a standoff between the school and the management of Tembo Steel Mills over alleged pollution of the air around the school.
The parents want NEMA to direct the steel mill, which is located in Kasolo trading centre, to cease operations until it has put in place mechanisms for filtering what it discharges into the air.
The directive was one of the resolutions reached last week during a parents’ general meeting. It arose out of a report by the headmaster, Mr Ali Kayuyu, that the plant discharges lots of smoke into the air around the school, which is becoming a danger to both students and members of the school’s staff.
Mr Kayuyu said the school’s administration has for the past two years been calling on the firm’s administrators to do something about the situation, but their calls have gone unheeded.
“We have tried to talk to them and members of the community gave them threats of staging a demonstration over the heavy pollution but nothing has changed,” he told the meeting.
Former Iganga District environment officer Nathan Mununuzi told Daily Monitor the pollution was arising from the use of two boilers by the factory yet it had been licensed to use one boiler for heating up materials before they are molten into steel.
When contacted on phone on Monday, the director of the company, Mr Raul Nair, told Daily Monitor that a lot of things have been done to address the pollution problem at the school, but declined to go into details.
“We have worked with the politicians and leaders and done a lot of things to address the matter, but we cannot just discuss everything on phone like that. If you want come to my office and I will tell you,” he insisted.