We shamelessly buried Nakivubo alongside a piece of our small heritage

This column has for ages mourned about how we sit back and treat the ‘vanishing’ of Nakivubo stadium as a distant trouble that doesn’t register high enough on our priority list.

A few weeks ago, that pain was brought back to life following the court case between the developer and his bankers. Suddenly, images of what remains of Nakivubo returned to shock us but not for long enough to spur much more than the occasional murmur of disbelief.

We have since moved on to other things, but sometimes I struggle to grasp what it is about us that is more annoying? Our disinterest or inability to pick lessons? Why have we built around us a world in which nothing matters even when the dire consequences come through to us?

Right now, after all those years, there is still a gaping hole in the place where the charming stadium once stood. It is also now surrounded by a mall in all its unsophisticated seediness, and regardless of what the PR people or the architect’s artist impressions are saying, it is clear where the priorities of the developer lay and that isn’t with re-developing the stadium.

So, we have a developer who promised to get us stadium. Eventually. Probably off proceeds from the mall that would be done first. Then life happened. And now, as we learnt from the CEO magazine this week not even that promise is guaranteed anymore. Apparently, the developers funding strategy for the project is now complicated by all the litigation going on.

Basically, the re-development of Nakivubo Stadium is heavily reliant on the outcome of a legal conflict that could drag on for years and still not deliver the required financial closure for the project. Sad. Isn’t it?
But I will tell you what is worse. Right there in all that litigation and rubble are years of history and memories all doomed to be sealed off to host a mall that had no tenants beyond the second floor before the coronavirus struck to suck out even those tenants making a living on the ground floors.

And before we question the uselessness of that maybe we question our inability to be mad. Maybe in our cynical world it doesn’t matter anymore but here is one thing. We are a noticeably young country, and much of our population probably grew up thinking Namboole Kitende and Lugogo is all there ever was.

But some of us are old enough to have used Nakivubo as a temple to which we went to enrich our football loving souls. We therefore hate it that those memories are now buried beneath a dingy mall and legalese.
We regret losing all life’s references points and know it really would be nice to retain the knowledge of what is to be in an open green space right in the middle of the central business district.    

So, let me appeal to the sensibilities of town planners and real estate developers. We don’t need another mall in downtown Kampala. I would argue that even the stadium was increasingly out of place in a choked-up part of town without proper mass access infrastructure. But that area could have been preserved as a heritage site, a memorial park where people could go to just chill.

It is probably too late now, and you bet no one will heed the call. And maybe it is that hopelessness that makes one cynical. That is why we shall all retreat to our daily grind, where we can no longer see hear or feel the pain that surrounds us, as our history gets buried beneath concrete and words.

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Twitter: @MBanturaki