Planning of towns II: Fire will cause Havoc

Poverty and possibly greed is one of the enemies of town planning. But the consequences of not planning or poor planning are dire. Our towns continue to grow as slums mainly because of lack of the big picture by our planners and local politicians who provide leadership to their local communities. Most towns in Uganda look alike, no proper roads and where exist they are murram, small and impassable. The towns are full of trash everywhere with plastic bottles and buvera a menace. Road side markets and small shops are everywhere including roads. The residential areas are huge slums without any order. It’s common for one to build a house today and on completion the neighbor will build a pit latrine in front of the existing house!

The consequences of these developments are chaos. It is not easy to provide any service to these types of construction. Roads themselves are a problem because the house owners are the first to take away part of the road reserve if any! They do so with the understanding of the local leaders. Many people who build houses, drain they storm water into roads!! This makes roads not only impassable but also eroded and have big channels that give vehicular traffic a problem. Of course this lowers the value of the neighborhood. It is not easy to collect garbage from these communities so it’s also dumped somewhere common or in the roads! Towns should have a central sewer system which lowers cost to those building houses and also facilitates disposal. In most of our towns there is no central sewer system. Each individual constructing a house has to construct a separate septic tank. That is if they have water bone toilets because there is no water supply in the town. Most homes have pit latrines. One of the challenges of pit latrines is that if the water table is high that is water is found near the surface the pit latrine will affect such water especially if pumped through bore holes!

Getting electricity supply to these residences is also a problem and risky. Getting electric poles through slums is not easy and can be dangerous to the local community. One of the nightmares that is yet to hit us if fire. In the developed countries they know fire is very dangerous it not only claims people's properties but also lives. This lack of planning creates alleys rather than roads. You cannot easily access people’s homes. In case of fire, we shall have tragedies on our hands. We not only do not have the fire equipment but even where we have, the equipment cannot reach the affected places. Look at a place like Kikuubo, Can a fire vehicle reach the different parts Are we waiting for a tragedy to happen?. Can our planners and of course local leaders wake up before this happens