Mr Charles Onyango-Obbo
I am a member of many minority groups in Uganda, one of them being the tiny 2-3 per cent of the population which is over 60 years old (and possibly hogs most of the country's wealth and power).
When we went to primary school at the tail end of the Milton Obote II government, before General Idi Amin deposed him in a military coup in January 1971, we used to have emergency drills. One of them was to simulate a response to an earthquake. There would be an alarm, and we would scramble under desks; to avoid all being crammed under there, those nearer open windows and the door would be taught how to exit safely and what to do once outside.
Today, with the population swollen by 400 per cent compared to what it was then and the failure to keep up with the growth in classrooms, there are over 85 children in the same space. With the sharp rise of criminality, the same school would have heavy metal grilles in the windows to prevent thieves from climbing in to steal desks, chairs, and chalkboards.
The challenges have also changed. Today, the danger is from climate change-related and political/security threats. A few days ago in Eastern Uganda’s Bugisu region, another mudslide in Bulambuli District killed over 20 people, injured hundreds, and buried homes and other buildings, including schools.
Around the same time, flooding along the Olwiyo–Pakwach road near Pakwach Bridge has crippled connectivity between Arua, Gulu, and Kampala. Floods earlier in the year killed dozens of people, especially in far western and eastern Uganda. If you live in Kasese District, you are threatened not just by mudslides and severe floods, but also by the possibility of Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebels crossing from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and burning you in your student dormitory, as they did last year. Extreme weather events are wiping out decades of halting progress.
Based on Kenyan allocation for infrastructure damage by floods, some projections put the cost of infrastructure in Uganda in the region of Shs400-500 billion a year. Overall agricultural damage across the country is potentially pegged at over US$10 million (Shs 37 billion).
It is not tenable. The country urgently needs to govern for climate disaster times and to organise differently as a society for it. Fortunately, a couple of countries have cracked the problem. We shall not look to nations like Switzerland with their advanced early warning and monitoring systems, including drones, ground-based radar, and GPS to monitor slope movement in real time.
You get pop-up messages on your TV screens, your mobile phone, or the billboards on the street side to run to a shelter. We will look to the global south. Bangladesh is one of the leaders. In its very bad floods in 1988, at least 2,379 people were reported dead. In 2022, with floods that were worse and affected more people, 71 people were killed. Bangladesh has developed impressive early warning systems and forecasts, and alerts which are sent through various channels including radio, TV, and mobile phones, but its winners are the community volunteers.
There are about 100,000 of them, highly trained in disaster risk reduction activities, and they are the fellows who follow up, banging on doors, and directing people to shelters and evacuation points.
We need to replicate this by introducing education in early warning and disaster warning in schools; and because many schools don’t have space anymore, meshing them with community activities. It would require us to reorganize the relationship between communities and schools.
In the Bugisu, Kasese, and Kisoro regions, there must be creative slope stabilization programmes. Countries with big budgets do things like soil nailing, where steel bars are driven into slopes to reinforce them, and construction of retaining walls designed to withstand landslide forces (you see them in parts of Rwanda), and underwater drainage cells.
In Uganda, we have (nearly moribund) local councils, which can be reimagined to be the nucleus of these new forms of organisation and move them away from being a crude power tool of the ruling party.
And some free market principles might help. Some of the money that goes into "wealth creation" and the Parish Development Model could be channelled to landowners to plant trees and build basic mudslide and flood prevention structures on their property. If I were asked, I would tell the government, "Give me a 120-year lease on land with degraded hills. If it is worth Shs 600 million, don’t take the money.
Require me to invest that Shs600 million to soil-nail the hills, reforest with indigenous trees, build drainage channels, dams in the valley, and so forth. Take 20 per cent equity, and when I (or my descendants) flog it on the carbon market some years down the road, you get your cut". And we save the community and the world.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist,
writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3
