No fertiliser, power plant at Kiteezi in 22 years, KCCA plans to close landfill

The promise:
In 1994, Kampala City Council (KCC), the predecessor of Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), acquired about 37 acres of land in Kiteezi in Mpererwe, Wakiso District, to establish Uganda’s only sanitary engineered landfill.
In 1996, KCC degazetted Kiteezi landfill as an area where minerals and chemicals from most parts of the city would be processed.
During the course of preparations to open the landfill, officials at KCC also promised to construct a health centre to cater for populations in Mpererwe and neighbouring Nangabo Sub-county, to tarmac the Mpererwe-Kiteezi Road and extend safe running water to the area.
They said processing the water would entail the establishment of a factory that would turn most of the organic waste into fertilisers.
It had been projected that the factory would create at least 300 jobs in direct employment and open up another 700 or so in indirect employment.
Besides the factory, it was also expected that some of the garbage would be used to generate electricity, which would be sold to the national grid.
The process of producing power from waste entails burning garbage to boil water and turn it into steam.

The steam is then directed towards the blades of turbine to make it spin. The turbine spins a shaft connected to magnets, which are surrounded by copper wires. It is from this movement that power is generated.
This, too, had been expected to be beneficial on several fronts. It would not only help create some jobs, but would also earn KCC money and also help it in disposing of some of the huge volumes of garbage at the landfill.
According to a research paper, “Characterisation of municipal waste in Kampala, Uganda”, which was written by Allan John Komakech and Noble Banadda of Makerere University; Joel Kinobe, Girma Gebresenbet and Björn Vinnerås of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Levi Kasisira and Cecilia Sundberg of the Royal Institute of Technology and published in the Journal of the Air and Waste Management Association, Kiteezi takes in about 28,000 tonnes of waste per day, which represents approximately 40 per cent of the total amounts of waste collected from Kampala City.
The research findings showed that during the wet months, the waste consisted of 88.5 per cent organics, 3.8 per cent soft plastics, 2.8 per cent hard plastics, 2.2 per cent paper, 0.9 per cent glass, 0.7 per cent textiles, and leather, 0.2 per cent metals, and 1 per cent others.
During the dry months, the report said, the waste consisted of 94.8 per cent organics, 2.4 per cent soft plastics, 1.0 per cent hard plastics, 0.7 per cent papers, 0.3 per cent glass, 0.3 per cent textile and leather, 0.1 per cent metals, and 0.3 per cent others.
The organic waste on average had a moisture content of 71.1 per cent and contained 1.89 per cent nitrogen, 0.27 per cent phosphorus, and 1.95 per cent potassium.
“The waste had an average gross energy content of 17.3 MJ/kg. It was concluded that the organic waste generated can be a suitable source of some plant nutrients that are useful, especially in urban agriculture,” the report reads in parts.
The research also showed that there was never any significant reductions in the amounts of waste that was being generated. In other words, there was always going to be enough waste to run power generation and fertiliser production.
Now, more than 22 years since the promises were made, the fertiliser factory has never been opened, there is no power generation plant and the health centre has never been built.
The only activities going on at Kiteezi include sorting the garbage to remove plastics and other useful materials that can be recycled or used in the making of arts and crafts, and the treatment of waste in an effort to ensure that the water that runs off into the environment is not harmful.

Impact
Failure to set up a fertiliser plant and a power generation unit meant that KCCA missed out on the opportunity to make money and also create some jobs for the community, but it also affected more than 10,000 people in Lusanja, Kiteezi, Bumbu, Kabwoko, Kyambogo, Kitetika and Mpererwe, in different ways.
Whereas KCCA has been treating the waste in order to ensure that the water that runs out of the landfill and into the environments in Kiteezi and Mpererwe is not harmful to the communities, it is clear that what is being done is inadequate to make it safe for the people and animals.
Water from the three boreholes that were sunk by KCCA in the area shortly after the landfill opened had within less than four years of opening become contaminated. Residents claimed that the first 20 or so jerry-cans that would come out of the boreholes would have to be poured away as it was always brown and smelly, but even then, there was no guarantee that whatever would come after the 20 would be fitter for human consumption.

Some residents were forced to pay for water carted from other areas, with a jerry-can going for as much as between Shs500 and Shs1,000.
Leachate, a liquid that leaches into landfills and usually contains dissolved and suspended materials, also soon found its way into the wetlands there.
In January 2013, residents of Kiteezi led by the Nangobo Sub-county chairperson, Mr Tony Ssempebwa, petitioned the KCCA executive director seeking her intervention in the apparent failure by the authority’s directorate of public health and environment to treat the waste. This, they claimed, had led to a pungent smell that was polluting the air in the area.
They also demanded compensation for families which gave up on their properties due to destruction of the roofs of their houses by the droppings of Marabou stokes, invasions by mosquitos, rats and stray dogs or the pungent smell that had come to characterise the area. At the time of the petition, there were about 350 complainants and KCCA had made a commitment to pay. It is not clear how much the authority spent on reaching an out of court settlement with the complainants.
Some residents complained that waste from the landfill would find its way into their compounds whenever the skies would open, a development on which an increase in cases of dysentery and cholera were blamed.

What’s on ground

KCCA has acquired 135 acres of land at Ddundu for purposes of setting up a new land fill. The authority held an investor promotion conference in 2016 where it was made known that it was open to having an investor in the area of waste management.

Mr Kaujju has since made it clear that the new landfill shall be run on the basis of a public-private partnership.

This is a welcome move, given the various accusations of corruption and incompetence that have previously been levelled against officials of the authority’s directorate of public health in as far as the management of the Kiteezi landfill has been concerned.
Information from KCCA indicates that the investor “will design, build, operate and maintain” the sanitary landfill “in compliance with Ugandan and international standards, and close the landfill sites at the end of their useful life.
The operator is also expected to employ appropriate choice of technology, for example composting, energy from waste, anaerobic digestion, among others of disposing of the waste. All this sounds great, at least on paper.

The problem, as has been the case in the management of the Kiteezi landfill, lies in how the provisions are applied. The only way this will work well is through a more strict enforcement of the provisions of the public-private partnership.

It is important that we provide within the public-private partnership penalties for either flaunting the provisions or not fulfilling the corporate social responsibility side of the public-private partnership.
That is the only way that KCCA’s idea of having a clean city with innovative citizens can be realised. That after all, is every Kampala resident’s and every Ugandan’s dream.