Flying toilets

In Chinua Achebe’s book, Things Fall Apart, during one harvest, Okonkwo asked for seedlings from Nwakibie, a great man of the village. Although he had turned down similar requests from other young men, Nwakibie granted Okonkwo his wish, through a proverb: “Eneke, the bird, says since men have learned to shoot without missing, he has learned to fly without perching."

Residents of most of Kampala’s slums seem to have picked a leaf from Eneke, the bird, to fly without perching. When they fail to access latrines, they turn to plastic bags, (flying toilets) which are later thrown out at night. As GERALD TENYWA writes, this vice has been detrimental to both the residents and Lake Victoria

He hurriedly crawls towards his mother. The entrance to a makeshift house is where the mother is sitting on a mat, as she waves a whisk to chase away flies from his nose. Not far away is sewage flowing into Nakivubo Channel, which empties into Lake Victoria.

Amina Namale, a resident of Kanyogoga-Namuwongo, one of Kampala’s largest slums, lives in a one-room house in the crowded settlement.Namuwongo is a low-lying area, where water from different parts of Kampala collects before entering Lake Victoria.

The area sometimes floods when Nakivubo Channel gets blocked. Apart from floods, Kanyogoga is also plagued by a high water table, which has made it difficult to construct deep pit-latrines. When Namale wants to answer nature’s call, she goes to a public latrine used by more than 100 people.

For every visit to the latrine, she parts with sh200.So, what happens in cases where the residents cannot afford the user fee? According to Ronald Ddumba, a community worker, people who cannot pay sh200, resort to plastic bags, popularly known as flying toilets.

Emmanuel Masengere, the LC1 chairperson, says when darkness falls, some residents throw the plastic bags into the drains or onto the roofs of their neighbours’ homes. Others drop them in the narrow dark corridors between the crammed houses. If they are lucky, the storm carries away some of the plastic bags and their contents into the nearby Nakivubo Channel.

However, sometimes the buveera block the drains, pushing the filth back to the settlement. Masengere says Kanyogoga needs about eight public latrines, yet there are only four.

“There are no caretakers at night. So when people find it closed, they resort to kaveera.” David Mukama, the sanitation coordinator in the Ministry of Water and Environment, says the residents are exposed to environmental and health risks.

Given that one gram of faeces contains 10 million viruses, one million bacteria,1,000 cysts and 100 worm eggs, every person who discards human waste (on average each person releases 500 grams a day), exposes people in the slum to a big risk. In addition, the flying toilets contaminate drinking water from the roofs.

Most times, the runoff goes into the Nakivubo Channel, which ends up contaminating Lake Victoria. Mukama attributes the frequent cases of dysentery and cholera in Kanyogoga to poor sanitation. “After defecating in the kaveera, people throw it on roofs, from where some people harvest rain water,” says Mukama.

Because of the high water table in Kanyogoga, most latrines are shallow

CHOLERA OUTBREAKS IN KANYOGOGA
Kanyogoga is littered with drug shops, which Masengere says typifies the high cases of water-borne diseases such as dysentery and cholera. In 1995, 10 people died of the disease in the area.Another outbreak occurred in 2004. The latest, which happened last year, left one child dead, according to Masengere.

HOUSES WITHOUT TOILETS
“Most of the landlords do not own houses in the slums. They live in high-end areas and only return to collect rent,” says Mukama. May be that is the reason why they construct houses without latrines. He says people rent houses without toilets because they cannot afford better ones.

Kampala Capital City Authority spokesperson Peter Kaujju says they are working with donors (KFW, a German Bank and the Africa Development Bank) to ensure slum residents access safe water. In the arrangement, Kaujju says every 20 litres of water will go for sh25. He says the Ministry of Works and Housing has also initiated a programme to upgrade all slums in Kampala.