Uganda’s parliament closed for the Christmas break on a dramatic note: members resolved to suspend a year-long Uganda People’s Defence Forces operation against bad fishing methods on Lake Victoria.
The MPs’ declaration was dramatic because President Yoweri Museveni has been passionately supportive of the operation amid complaints of soldiers’ not-too-gentle handling of the fishermen.
But if the parliamentarians thought the army was going to comply with their decision, they were shocked when the operation on the water intensified over Christmas. Its commander in the Lake Victoria islands, Captain Aaron Abaho, explained that the MPs were actually complicit in the fishing mischief, opportunistically seeking to boost their votes ahead of the February 2021 elections.
In the Christmas operation, arrested fishermen included several Congolese, Rwandese and Tanzanians, speaking a language the soldiers say they couldn’t comprehend! Looks like we have another East African nation in the making in the common waters.
But while a poor captain is trying to defend the army doing its work, someone is not helping to tell UPDF’s developing story of saving Lake Victoria and its fish. Blame it on government operating in silos.
The pollution of Lake Victoria that is making many fish species die is a matter of global concern which featured recently at the December American Geographical Union convention (the largest collection of scientists in the world). The biggest culprit is Kampala city which empties industrial and untreated human waste in the water.
Victoria’s water samples were recently found to have only two grammes of dissolved oxygen yet four is the lowest expected to allow fish to thrive!
The industrial waste is mainly used engine oil from about one million old vehicles in greater Kampala. Almost all cars in Uganda are older than the country’s human median age of 15.7 years at the time they are imported. With each old car being serviced quarterly, some 20 million litres of oil is poured away and end up sipping into Lake Victoria every year.
We are not aware of any engine oil disposal standards enforcement despite the National Environmental Authority being headquartered in Kampala.
Now that the government’s Kiira Motors Corporation (KMC) is moving to manufacture electric buses as a strategy to decongest Kampala, it looked around the country for workshops with the capacity to build the buses, whose components are initially manufactured in China, but found none, until the parent Ministry of Technology helped them look inside the military industrial machine.
It is said that when KMC engineers entered the UPDF workshop at a remote underpopulated location, they were shocked to realise they don’t have to build the buses in China as the Uganda army had the requisite capacity to do the job. A deal was struck immediately and UPDF, already with a decade’s experience of building its own combat trucks, is ready to build as many buses as the market and KMC want.
By helping the country embrace clean energy vehicles, the army is doing much more to save marine life in Lake Victoria. But as the public is getting scandalised by the direct clash between parliament and UPDF, who is there to tell the army’s different sides of the story?
Joachim Buwembo is an independent journalist based in Kampala. E-mail: [email protected]