The damage after the storm

January 22 is a day many residents of Luzira Portbell will not forget soon. Their quiet Sunday morning was rocked with caterpillars razing their houses down and at the end of it all, two people were shot dead. As some of them say, life will not be the same again.

The white chicken lay by the hot busy dusty tarmac road draining down into Port Bell in Luzira. They were little chicks, piled on top of each other into a motionless heap. Flies flew and buzzed above the heap, for the chicks were dead. Half a metre away from the pile, and down a short cliff into a plot of land, was a protruding head of a light blue hurricane lamp.

It was partly covered by a urine-smelling blanket, which sat inside a collection of food stained sauce-pans, which sat on a two-metre-long wooden chair, which sat tilted on one side, with the legs resting on a coverless coarse-feeling dirty-yellow mattress. Below the mattress was a mixture of brittle red earth and dry reeds, the material which made up nearly the entire housing structures of the houses that were graded down only 24 hours earlier.

It looked like an earthquake had just driven through the small plot. It’s the remains of an eviction by Kampala Capital City Authority’s (KCCA) agents that went wrong, with an armed man shooting dead two people, and injuring another. The actions were captured on video footage and watched on country-wide television.

The piece of land, stretching across more than 100ft, took the form of your typical slum setting, an abode for the very poor of the urban dwelling populace, a place where the city’s many unemployed migrants settle and try to make ends meet.
It boasted of pork joints, a bar, a poultry house, restaurants, shops, and drinking joints, according to Fred Baguma, the landlord. Baguma says he had 20 households renting on the land, plus an extra 30 commercial tenants. 20 households would translate into anything in the boundaries of 80 occupants, on an average of two children per house.

The tenants have been parting with Shs40,000 per month to rent a one-roomed mud and wattle house while the more permanent houses, with provisions of electricity, cost Shs80,000 per month. The tenants fell within a section of the semi-skilled. Some houses were rented by a security company that provided guarding services to a ware-house nearby. Other tenants tried to run small businesses, especially in the section of food and beverages.

Baguma claims a right to the land as a first settler. Although he officially has no lease for the land, he says he was in the process of securing one from KCCA. He says he has been on the land since 1993 and that no one had ever tried to evict him. He denies ever receiving a notice of eviction.

A sombre mood reigned across the port yesterday. Residents sat by the shops relieving one piece of the action after another, and just how sad the whole affair was. In the plot of land, affected tenants sat back and tried to count the cost.

Deep inside, the frustration of being part of the urban poor, of living in an urban rich setting and yet they are so deprived, of having even the little they own destroyed by a system they consider rich and unfair, continued to stir. “We have nothing to do now,” said Mable Mwesigye, a tenant who lost chicken and property. “We will go back to the village. You people only want rich people in Kampala. You don’t want us the poor ones anymore. Okay, it’s fine. We will go back and leave the town for you,” she added.

The anger among the residents is heightened by the fact that the assailant who murdered the tenants, shot to kill. Mwesigye says the assailant shot at the tenants after some tried to retrieve an axe and panga that had been confiscated. “That is when one of them got into the car, got a gun and started shooting at us,” she adds.

A 15-year-old girl whose arm was shattered by a bullet is said to have been standing over 80 metres away from the road, behind a section of houses, by the time the bullet struck her. The assailant shot in the same direction that people ran for cover. She was a Senior Four student at St Maurice Secondary School in Masaka. She is however said to be recovering now in Mulago Hospital. John Onyango, one of those killed, is said to have migrated to Kampala from Bugiri as a security guard, but had recently changed to freelance manual work. This was the second time he was involved in a shooting incident.

A tenant, 25-year-old Betty Tibiwa, when asked to estimate just how much she could have lost in the eviction, said she could not estimate. Why? “Because it is my husband that bought the things. I don’t know how much they cost.” The residents of this evicted plot strike you as very simple people, as a section of a poor under-privileged class whose efforts at surviving away from the village, have been met with brute force and ever worsening economic realities.

jabimanyi@ug.nationmedia.com