Africa-Press – Uganda. It is that time of the year when water’s destructive capacities get to dominate the news bill. Last week, a four-year-old girl in Najjera, Kira Municipality, Wakiso District, tragically lost balance thanks in no small part to a slippery path. Shanitah Nabagala fell into the swells of a trench and such was the sheer force of its turbulent waters that her remains have not been retrieved to date. A few days ago, some residents of Kasese District saw Mother Nature thread through their homesteads with unintended sinister repercussions. It tore the lid off their tin-roofed shacks, leaving many with no clear remedy to their predicament.
Elsewhere, initial police reports attributed the death of Martin Bukose—a UPDF corporal—in a ghastly September 5 road crash on the Old Entebbe Road in Katabi Town Council, Wakiso District, to an early morning downpour. It is thought that Bukose was not adhering to Uganda’s unwritten wet-weather highway speed limit.
With further wet weather predicted, a fresh set of natural disasters in a rainy season not expected to relent until December or thereabouts cannot be ruled out. Are mitigation measures being considered to reduce the damage extreme weather events inflict on people and their property? What, for instance, are the flash flooding prevention measures, if any?
These perennially unanswered questions coupled with junior Disaster Preparedness minister Davinia Esther Anyakun’s recent equation of Prophet Mbonye with an early warning system are sure to leave a nauseating taste in the mouth. It is indeed deeply unsettling that the existing framework of flood protection and resilience continues to be handled tenuously.
We insist on flood schemes and priorities around flood defences being treated as matters of intense and consistent focus amongst state actors. Also of the essence, we reckon, are laws that frown upon building along flood plains. The poor-quality construction rife at such hotspots has historically had tragic consequences. To compound matters, lessons are rarely learned. This is rather unfortunate.
The thinking around land and river management ought to be judicious in a bid to lessen the impacts of when the heavy showers pound the country. But this always appears to be a long shot, leaving vast swathes of the country teetering on the edge of danger whenever there are unrelenting massive downpours. This has to change. While Ugandan meteorological authorities should be commended for their early warning systems, Ms Anyakun’s best efforts to bungle this notwithstanding, the evidence is clear: the disaster mortality and economic losses are still unacceptably high.
If anything, what we have witnessed over the years is substantial enough to compel us to come to the conclusion that disaster risk knowledge and management are hardly in lockstep. The dissemination and communication of risk information, so it reaches all those who need it, has, for one, got to significantly improve. As does the preparedness and response to the disaster risks that all continue to be recipients of lip service.
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