MPs question move to evict vendors without adequate markets

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Lawmakers have criticised city authorities for evicting street vendors without allocating them alternative adequate marketplaces.

Early this week, the Kampala City Council Authority (KCCA), in collaboration with the Police, started evicting street vendors from the Central Business District (CBD) in a move to decongest and have cleaner streets. The vendors were advised to relocate to Government-owned and private markets. However, some of them had previously declined for various reasons.

The concern was raised on Wednesday, February 25, 2026, during a meeting between the Public Accounts Committee (Central) under the stewardship of Mawogola South MP Goretth Namugga and officials from the Ministry of Kampala Capital City and Metropolitan Affairs, who were led by the undersecretary Monica Edemachu Ejua.

The engagement was anchored on the Auditor General’s report on the entity for the 2024/25 financial year.

Backlash followed Ejua’s submission, in which she admitted to this lacuna.

“On issues of vendors, honourable chair, it is true. One of the challenges that we have realised in metropolitan areas is the issue of inadequate workspaces for the unemployed youth, women and the economic clusters. We are creating workspaces, and one of the areas that has been focused on is Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA),” she said.

Adding that the ministry is close to completing designs for Ggaba and USAFI markets, noting that the process involved consultations with vendors.

“Already we have contracted three markets in the metropolitan area; Kawuku, Wakiso and Mpigi central market, and soon we are going to advertise for construction works for the USAFI market and Ggaba as earlier stated. We are still designing more markets, and one of them is the Entebbe fish market. These are all intended to ensure that we accommodate these unemployed people who go on the streets,” Ejua explained.

Concluding, she hypothesised that in two or three years, the situation should have improved.

Putting the cart before the horse

However, to a section of legislators, including Mubende District Woman MP Hope Grania Nakazibwe (NRM), chasing vendors from the streets before putting in place concrete solutions amounted to putting the cart before the horse.

“We very much appreciate the effort to put the city to sanity and moving the hawkers away from the streets. But the way you are doing it seems not to be coordinated. You have already chased them away, but you are planning and designing the market of USAFI,” Nakazibwe observed.

“Yet in that temporary structure of the USAFI market, and I believe that was also done by your ministry of Kampala and metropolitan, you sank in over shillings 30 billion. As if you didn’t have it planned that at a certain time, you would develop this market into a structure that is going to be permanent. Do we have a strategic plan for the city and the metropolitan area?” she wondered.

PAC vice chairperson Goretth Namugga reiterated the point.

“It is very absurd that you chase people away from the city and then you start planning for where they will go in the next three years. You are telling us that in the next three years, they will be able to occupy those spaces,” she pointed out.

Enforcement regime

Also, Namugga, alongside Elijah Okupa (Kasilo county, Indep), put it to Ejua that while citizens deserve to work in a conducive atmosphere, the behaviour of the enforcement teams is wanting.

“I also want the Ministry of Kampala Capital City and Metropolitan Affairs to also put a human face as we look for how decent these people can be shifted from Kampala to some other places. We have a feel of this, because the way you like your job is the same way the tomato seller wants to sell. Yes, we should look for the right place where those people should be, but not just waking up and destroying the stalls where they have been,” she argued.

“I am just coming from KCCA right now. Because one of my voters operates a restaurant in an arcade. So, yesterday, she had walked out in an apron to where she had taken some food. As she was coming out, she met the enforcement people. They grabbed her; she slept inside [the cells]. Now she is going to appear in a court, and she may end up in Luzira,” Okupa said.