Leave urban planning to professionals

The Nakivubo Park Yard Market in Kampala has been razed, traders and politicians assaulted and thousands of men and women who sell motley merchandise there displaced.
Monday was a heart-break to many struggling families. Bulldozers overnight forked out or smashed their commercial-value possessions in market stalls into a pile of debris.
We denounce the brutality unleashed by stick-wielding gangsters, who pathetically rampaged alongside uniformed police, for the physical harm they inflicted on their victims manifested barbarism, not strength.
City Hall could, and should have, handled the matter better and professionally especially that there was a week to the lapse of a one-month deadline the line minister issued to the traders to vacate. Behind a collapsed business is deprived opportunity for education, good healthcare, and, in some instances, it means no food on the table. It also means piling burdens of loan repayment on borrowed business capital.
We abhor Monday’s exercise as an economic rights breach: an intentional deprivation of livelihoods in a country of widespread unemployment.
The informal sector absorbs the jobless, clothing communities against possible criminal pathways others could take.
That notwithstanding, we remain steadfast that a well-executed urban planning would and should resolve the contradictions and development conflicts without pollution by retrogressive politics. The Park Yard market dispute is about land use, which is a function of physical planning.
There is no evidence that Park Yard is a gazetted market, although it has operated as such over the years.
When it caught fire multiple times in the past, it was found out that some of its makeshift stalls blocked access lanes for fire tenders or lay over high pressure water points, obstructing rescue operations.
Kampala Capital City Authority technocrats, and their counterparts in other ministries, should be accorded space and support to assign land use and enforce compliance with development standards.
Whereas the traders likely plied business in an ungazetted place, throwing them out is a recipe for disaster. Let us, to borrow a leaf from former US president Barack Obama’s flagship programmes, and be our brother’s keeper.
A functioning planning process by professional default should cater for the interests of all categories of its dwellers, particularly the vulnerable with the least means or ability to cope. Our capital and towns are the wombs for economic enterprise. Therefore, urban activities’ space conflicts such as witnessed on Monday can sink our economy and country.
Adopting sentimental hodge-podge answers, for political correctness, will only create more intractable problems.

The issue: Nakivubo Park Yard market.
Our view: Kampala Capital City Authority technocrats, and their counterparts in other ministries, should be accorded space and support to assign land use and enforce compliance with development standards.