By Peter Kahindi

KAMPALA CAPITAL City Authority (KCCA) has surprised its residents over the last two weeks by doing something they should have been doing since the organisation was first created – cleaning up.

It should be annoying that we found this to be ironic but we all know how we got here. Now we should just hope that cleaning up becomes business as usual – especially on the audacious scale that KCCA has adopted, with the boss herself, Nankulu Executive Director Sharifah Buzeki, supervising personally.

For people like me who have many homes – all legit – it is even more exciting that other cities have followed suit – Mbarara and Mbale, to wit.

These initiatives are part of a liberation drive in which the city has been taken back from roadside vendors who had taken control of city highways and other public areas we should have been using as normal.

Before the cleanup many of us had no idea what these roads and pavements really were. The brief section between the Mityana road and Busega roundabouts was totally unrecognizable to me when I saw it last week clear of all those market vendors. 

Seemingly out of the blue, there are now two wide lanes for us to use through a clean, odorless environment. 

To effect the cleanup, the vendors were somehow ‘persuaded’ to relocate into a well-built, contemporary market structure less than fifty meters from the road – which had been waiting for them for years!

Their refusal to occupy the organised market stands was backed squarely by their customers, who comfortably continued purchasing food and other items from them in dirty, disorganised conditions.

We enabled it all.

The city cleanups are more than just keeping and maintaining smart cities, clean environs, managing waste, keeping order and giving traders who decided to take up places in licensed and regulated shops or built up markets a chance; it goes as far as ridding us of what I refer to as the ‘Rubbish Mindset’.

That’s the mindset that makes it alright for us to park our cars carelessly by the roadside to shop in dirty environments. It’s the ‘Rubbish Mindset’ that makes it alright for the average Ugandan to toss an empty plastic bottle into a drainage trench or throw actual garbage through the window of their vehicle while driving up a highway.

That ‘Rubbish Mindset’ makes us believe that being orderly is inconvenient and that instead of driving around with a little trash in our vehicles till we get to a proper disposal point, it makes more sense to throw it out through the window.

And that same ‘Rubbish Mindset’ stops us recognising that it is wrong to display merchandise in the middle of a pavement rather than taking up rent in a building or a stall in a properly constructed and licensed market. 

The ‘Rubbish Mindset’ is at the heart of every lawless society.

The more it is tolerated, the worse it becomes, and the more blatantly people will behave in the wrong way.

The ‘Rubbish Mindset’ creates disregard for any sort of order. 

The people who set up shop in the middle of the road are not different from the Boda Boda riders who ride against oncoming traffic on a one-way street and then go ahead to hurl insults at anyone who tries to call them out. 

Those same Boda operators are the loudest protestors against any move to regulate their industry. From there, they will get bolder and then start recording Tik Tok videos as they assault civilians. And those civilians? They are riding the bodas without a single complaint – ‘Rubbish Mindset’.

There is a formula for that kind of disorder and if left unchecked, it is potentially cancerous. The cleanup is a long overdue, much-needed breath of fresh air – for our cities and for our minds.

The one result we should all hope for with this cleanup approach to Kampala, Mbarara and Mbale is that we will also clean up our minds as residents and users of these cities and what they have to offer.

Once we get rid of our ‘Rubbish Mindset’ these cleanups will be business as usual and we will live cleaner, healthier and more orderly lives for generations to come.

The author is an Advocate and a Public Policy Analyst