Govt should build disaster resilience

On Thursday afternoon, the nation tragically lost a marine engineer attached to the Uganda National Roads Authority (Unra), Yahaya Hassan, who drowned during the course of rescuing passengers who were aboard a taxi that floods had trapped after the River Tangi burst its banks.

How does one explain the fact that a rescue team made its way on a non-motorised canoe? What does it say about the level of cooperation between the different government departments and agencies?

Both the Uganda Police Force (UPF) and the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) have marine units. Why did Unra not tap into the capabilities of the two Forces? What does the River Tangi incident say about how prepared we are to deal with emergencies? The entire operation and the death, which would have been avoided, once again served to expose the glaring inadequacies in or lack of emergency response systems.

The tragic demise of Hassan at the prime of his life should now serve to wake us up to the need to embark on building the country’s disaster resilience. Government should take deliberate steps to build up the capacities of individuals, communities and government agencies like Unra, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Disaster Preparedness to not only learn from the many disasters that we have suffered in the past but to also arm them with the tools and equipment to enable them to deal with risks associated with such disasters as and when they occur in the future.

That calls for prioritisation of emergency response systems by availing resources to the relevant departments to put systems in place. In January 2014, the Ministry of Health, for example, unveiled the Uganda National Ambulance Service Project, as the first step towards the operationalisation of Uganda’s Emergency Medical Services (EMS) system.

The plan was to acquire 100 ambulances equipped with modern technology to allow for surgery. The ambulances were meant to be accessed via a toll-free emergency telephone number with a response time of 10 to 20 minutes. They were meant to be linked to designated emergency units and ICUs in different parts of the country, but the project never got off the ground.

The excuse was that the government could not raise enough funds to acquire the vehicles and equipment and recruit spe- cialised staff for the EMS system. It should not take the country deaths of the magnitude of a massacre before we find the funds to get the EMS and other related programmes up and running