In recent years, Kampala has experienced recurring floods that have destroyed property and, in extreme situations, cost lives. It is something that continues to baffle downtown city dwellers, city planners and technocrats. In spite of this enigma, Eng DAVID SSALI LUYIMBAZI, the former KCCA deputy executive director, reasons that the floods are not primarily a problem of nature; they are a problem of human decisions made over decades. He took David Lumu through what he has seen from the inside and offered solutions to the problem. According to Luyimbazi, Kampala was built across hills and valleys, with wetlands that acted like natural sponges. “Those wetlands were the city’s original flood management infrastructure, provided free by nature. Over the past six decades, we have systematically filled them in, built on them, and blocked them. When you remove that natural capacity and replace it with concrete and structures, the water does not disappear. It finds the next lowest point, and that lowest point is increasingly someone’s home, someone’s shop, or a road we just spent billions constructing,” he says. He further reasons that much of Kampala’s formal drainage system was designed decades ago for a much smaller city and a less intense climate. “The pipes and channels were sized using old rainfall data and controlled land use. Today, we receive heavier, more concentrated rainfall over shorter periods; what engineers call higher- intensity events with rapid urbanization or land that is more intensely built over. A drain designed for the rains of 1980 cannot handle the rains of 2025. From this perspective, floods are preventable because when one walks along any primary drainage channel in Kampala after a flood, you will find it blocked, not by mud and sediment alone, but by plastic bottles, polythene bags, market waste and household rubbish. To Luyimbazi, the hard truth is that the ministry of Works or KCCA cannot solve this problem alone. “No government institution can. This is a community problem that requires a community solution. The people who live and trade alongside drainage channels are the ones whose behaviour determines whether those channels work. When a trader throws a plastic bag into a drain, they are making a decision that will flood someone’s home three kilometres away. When a community blocks a mitre drain alongside a road because it is inconvenient, they are destroying infrastructure that cost millions of shillings to build,” he says. “We spend billions building drainage infrastructure, then communities unknowingly destroy it. The missing investment is not concrete, it is understanding. You cannot separate drainage performance from community behaviour.” According to Luyimbazi, matters are not helped by the fact that illegal developments continue to emerge on drainage lines and floodplains while at the same time there is a fragmented institutional responsibility. “Drainage in Kampala falls between KCCA, the ministry of Water and Environment and local divisions. No single authority has end-to-end accountability for the entire stormwater system from the hilltop catchment to the lake outfall. When something goes wrong, everyone can point at someone else. That fragmentation is a governance failure, and it has real consequences for ordinary people,” he says. Eng David LuyimbaziAmidst all this, Luyimbazi, having worked with institutions such as the ministry of Works and the defunct Uganda National Roads Authority (Unra), says Uganda’s current drainage and road infrastructure in handling extreme weather and rapid urbanisation is a two-pronged challenge. “Yes, government investment in drainage and road infrastructure has not kept pace with need, but the second part is the damage being done by the public is outpacing government’s investment capacity by a wide margin,” he reasons. “Therefore, I want to say something that government officials rarely say publicly, because it is politically uncomfortable; the flooding crisis in Uganda is at least as much a crisis of public behaviour as it is a crisis of government investment. Government can be fairly criticised for not providing sufficient budgets over the years to adequately protect wetlands, enforce drainage reserves, and build the solid waste infrastructure this country needs. That criticism is valid. But the damage that the public has inflicted, and continues to inflict through illegal developments, encroachment on wetlands and drainage corridors, uncontrolled solid waste disposal, and the removal of vegetation cover, is worse and more costly than any government budget shortfall. And here is the critical difference; a budget shortfall can be corrected when more resources are available. Indiscipline cannot be corrected by any amount of money. You cannot build your way out of a problem that people are actively recreating faster than you can fix it.” NATIONAL LEVEL MALAISE Beyond Kampala, Luyimbazi reasons that the picture at national level is equally alarming. He says the indiscriminate removal of vegetation cover to open up agricultural land has altered how rainfall behaves across entire catchments. “Trees and ground cover slow down rainfall, allow it to soak into the soil gradually, and reduce the speed and volume of water reaching rivers and drainage channels. When that cover is removed, rainfall hits bare earth and runs off rapidly, carrying soil with it, filling rivers faster than they can absorb the flow, and causing floods in communities that may be far from where the clearing happened,” he says. “The misuse of wetlands for clay extraction and smallholder farming compounds this further. Wetlands are not simply areas of standing water, they are hydrological systems that regulate water flow, store floodwater during peak rainfall, and release it gradually during dry periods. When a wetland is excavated for clay bricks or cultivated for food crops, its capacity to perform these functions is permanently reduced or destroyed.” The bottom line To him, Uganda does need to invest more in drainage infrastructure. Government does need to provide better budgets. “But the critical point I want every Ugandan to understand is this; the problem we face today is not simply the result of government not building enough drains. A very large and growing portion of it is the result of citizens destroying the natural and built systems that manage water. Wetland encroachment, vegetation clearance, illegal development on drainage lines, non-compliance with plot coverage standards, solid waste disposal into drainage channels; each of these is an own goal,” he says. “Each one creates costs and flood damage that would have been entirely avoidable. And the sum of all these own goals now exceeds what any realistic government budget can correct. The conversation about flooding in Uganda must therefore be as much about public responsibility and compliance as it is about government investment. Both are required. Neither alone is sufficient.”The post Expert: Kampala floods a result of human decisions, not nature appeared first on The Observer.