A Costly Lesson from My Own Garden

JUST A FEW MONTHS into my return to backyard gardening as a fun, therapeutic and sensible hobby a short while ago, I found myself in a fresh spot of costly trouble.

Gardening is an expensive hobby for amateurs whichever way we go about it. 

That’s the reason we make up excuses and can explain very many things to our spouses, suppliers and even casual observers…but especially to spouses.

My new problem arose when I took up a hoe to fix a specific area by planting a series of flowers. 

See, I had clean forgotten the route along which some irrigation piping had been laid more than ten years ago.

The reminder came by way of the cracking sound made by my brand new hoe cutting through a brittle plastic underground pipe. 

I knew immediately that I was looking at a two million shilling bill right there, minimum – not just a cracked pipe surrounded by some soil.

Even though I am neither a professional nor an engineer, and I surely had a good reason for not being able to remember the exact spot along which an irrigation guy had laid piping a decade ago, I felt that warm shame of guilt.

The shame that makes it difficult to declare to my domestic public what I had done and how much it would likely cost.

Over a couple of months, I quietly saved up money to re-do the piping and only came clean after the fix was done. 

And then, like a sensibly educated person, I laid down a path of a specific type of plant along the route of the irrigation piping so that ten years from now I could tell where to swing my hoe without fear and extra costs.

When Roadworks Cut Off the Water

A few weeks later I was embroiled in a comedy of errors seasoned with some really dry (pun to be revealed) irony that was familiar in structure.

My good contacts in the National Water and Sewerage Corporation (NWSC) include our area managers who are so kind that they join our community WhatsApp groups as part of their customer service.

After my irrigation pipes had been fixed I got to show them off for three days and then…water was gone.

The first day the sprinklers failed to rise I even called a plumber and wasted transport money.

Two days later the problem had still not been fixed and our NWSC contact was forced to explain to the frustrated neighbourhood that: “Ongoing road grading by KCCA has damaged several of our main supply lines in the area.”

That was at 4:01pm on a Tuesday. 

The report was received with just a little grace but quite some irritation because of the dry heat we had been under for over a month. 

Nobody called for street riots as the message ended with: “Our technical teams are on site actively working on repairs to restore service as quickly as possible.”

The next morning, water trickled into our homes for a few minutes and messages of gratitude were sent out until 2:33pm when NWSC sent another message: “Unfortunately this morning more pipes were cut…team is on ground trying to work on the repairs.”

It was not unbelievable. But it was unbelievably stupid.

The Same Guesswork, Again

A few months before that we had been treated to the exact same flow of messages from the Uganda Electricity Distribution Company Limited (UEDCL) officials – about the road construction workers chopping up underground electricity cables.

So the other day as I was standing in my garden inspecting the plants lining the route my irrigation pipes follow it occurred to me that I should be advising the KCCA engineering team about how to go about road construction.

We amateurs sit back and assume that they are professionals at their work whereas, as clearly seen from the frequent hacking up of underground cabling of different sorts, they are operating on guesswork.

Kampala Needs Maps, Plans and Supervision

Our assumption is fair. 

If an amateur like me can Be Serious enough to make a plan involving plant outlines to avoid damaging ‘small small’ domestic infrastructure, surely the whole of KCCA can do much, much better.

They should have people in their engineering and construction departments who can open up maps of the city and its infrastructure before approving work plans.

After those work plans are approved you would expect them to deploy other people to supervise the work being done so that pipes and cables are not cut.

Which would all be put in a folder somewhere for future reference during maintenance and so on and so forth.

The alternative is a bit scary to consider – that the people who laid those cables and pipes underground did so “anyhowly” with no records at all, and their supervisors know no better.

Both options point to stupidity. Both options seem to be highly likely.