Nowhere to hide as hospitals and universities literally stink

It must be mighty hard to run functioning public entities, especially in areas of health and education, in Uganda.
Daily Monitor, the daily version of this newspaper, reported on Wednesday that Kawempe and Kiruddu hospitals in Kampala are bathed in stench.

“A visit by Daily Monitor to Kiruddu hospital yesterday [Tuesday] came face to face with reality of septic tanks that were full to capacity with sewage overflowing and leaking into the drainage channel on Salama Road.
“Likewise, at Kawempe hospital, the unbearable stinking sewage and uncollected garbage had forced the patients and hospital staff to cover their nostrils and mouth with handkerchiefs.”
These are new hospitals. Banange.

There is much good happening in Uganda, like the “peace ushered in”. But how to explain the kind of rubbish the two hospitals are in — a miasma so symptomatic of the healthcare system and much of the public sector — after more than three decades of enlightened leadership?

No one who should be embarrassed by the stench actually is — no public apology, no sanctions announced against the planners, supervisors, and contractors of these hospitals.
How could any idiot not anticipate sewerage issues in these places and provide accordingly? Who gave occupancy permits? Under what matrix?

Dr Diana Atwine, the health permanent secretary, says in the same story that Shs5 billion has been budgeted to construct a lagoon at Kiruddu to ease the flow of sewage from main septic tank.
For Kawempe, her ministry has contacted National Water and Sewerage Corporation, which has promised to rig the hospital to the main sewage line.

The journalists should have probed this typical officialdom answer with follow-up questions on timelines, contractors, and what happens in the meantime.
Why were these things never done at the time of construction? What other corners were cut in the entire process that delivered these hospital structures? A journalist may want to look into this fetid matter.
On the same Wednesday, New Vision’s Mwalimu pull-out section carried a headline that reads: “Universities grapple with poor sanitation”.

But, of course. Anyone who has visited or studied at our universities, mostly public, can sniff the stench.
Apparently, the situation is so bad across East Africa that Ms Harriet Kebirungi stuck her nose into the dung to snatch a doctorate, which is sanitised as being about gender responsiveness in providing and managing of water and sanitation in EA universities. Good woman.

Search me, but what genius powers does one need to have a grasp of how to keep water running and toilets flushing?
If you increase the number of students and staff, it means you have to expand the number and/or capacity of classrooms, and of water and sanitation facilities, amongst others.

In other words, you budget for the changes you undertake and be sure you proceed at a pace that does not compromise the quality of service the hospital or the university is rendering.

Even if one were to cut slack for older, creaking and enduringly mismanaged places like Makerere University main campus, what has befallen new ‘marquee’ institutions like Kawempe and Kiruddu beggars belief.
No surprises that cholera finds it easy to establish in the country. We should get used to it.
Except that even if we get the leaders we deserve, too much is almost always too much. We need to break official mediocrity.