The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Why contested redevelopment of Kampala’s critical drainage could lead to a not-smart city
COVER STORY | RONALD MUSOKE | On the morning of Monday, Aug. 18, the smartphones of many Ugandans lit up with a novel architectural design of Nakivubo Channel, one of Kampala’s most important rivers. In what appeared like an orchestrated social media blitz, Ugandans were shown via TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, and YouTube an unlikely vision: a clean, green Nakivubo Channel.
For decades, Nakivubo has been a scar across Kampala’s central business district. Open, polluted, and foul-smelling, it has been the site of floods, a dumping ground for waste, and, at times, a death trap. But in the 68-second video that an invisible team of Hamis Kiggundu, the flamboyant property developer popularly known as Ham, shared online, it was reborn.
First, the video showed the Nakivubo Channel most Kampala residents know too well: a trench of brown water, plastic waste swirling, half-broken footbridges, and vendors working precariously close to the edge and plastic waste pickers scavenging inside the channel. A few seconds later, the image transformed.
AI-generated impressions revealed a covered channel, environmentally protected, lined with emerald-green walkways, public rest areas, garbage collection points, and underground infrastructure designed to control floods and filter waste.
“Kampala’s urban future is a clean, safe and smart city that works for its people,” the video stated at the end.
On his Instagram page, Kiggundu was even bolder: “Kampala’s Nakivubo Drainage Channel, once an open sewer filled with waste, floods, and danger, is set for a historic transformation. From saving lives to boosting business and preparing for AFCON 2027, this project is more than construction — it’s a symbol of Uganda’s path to progress and self-driven development.” It appears the slick online rollout was timed and deliberate.
A presidential blessing
If Kiggundu’s announcement seemed sudden, the foundations had been quietly laid weeks earlier. On Aug. 2, President Yoweri Museveni penned a letter to Prime Minister Robinah Nabbanja. In it, he described Ham’s proposal as “godly.”
“I have got a very good proposal from Ham Kiggundu dated the 25 July, 2025, regarding the Nakivubo Drainage Channel,” Museveni wrote. “Ham points out the fact that the channel is open, invites people to throw rubbish including plastics, faeces, etc, all of which disgust the people contiguous to the channel, lead to blockage of the channel and flooding. His proposal is imaginative and simple. Allow him to cover the channel after clearing it and strengthening it at his cost. What a really godly proposal? How will he recover his money? Simple. Allow him to build properties above it that will bring back the money. I approve of the plan. Help him execute.”
The letter was not just addressed to Nabbanja. Copies went to; Jessica Alupo, the Vice President, Minsa Kabanda, the Minister of Kampala, Matia Kasaija, the Minister of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, Janet Museveni, the Minister of Education and Sports, Kiryowa Kiwanuka, the Attorney General, Milly Babalanda, the Minister of Presidency — and to Kiggundu himself. The President’s approval gave Ham’s project political legitimacy. But it also triggered a storm.
Suspicion at City Hall
Kampala’s outspoken Lord Mayor, Erias Lukwago, took to Facebook with a fiery post. “So, Mr. Museveni is now an architect or planner who approves the city plans!!! Does this letter confer absolute ownership of Nakivubo Drainage Channel onto Mr. Kiggundu Hamis in perpetuity since he is being given a leeway to construct his own commercial structures thereon? How does one dole out a public asset by just a stroke of a pen? Ohhh Lord!!!”
Lukwago accused Kiggundu of having “no legal grounds” to develop Nakivubo. He reminded Ugandans that the channel was part of a public master plan dating back to 2016, which identified 18 major drainage channels requiring US$220 million to fix. The government, he argued, had failed to provide the funds — and now private developers were stepping in under questionable circumstances.
“Just because we have a messed-up city not every Tom, Dick and Harry should come wherever they are, grab our property in the name of development,” Lukwago said in a follow-up interview on NTV Uganda. “Ham came, grabbed (Nakivubo World War II Memorial Stadium), turned it into Ham Stadium, his own private property. Should we let land grabbers take whatever they want and they own it? I don’t understand Uganda.”
His words struck a chord. For some, the Nakivubo project represents progress. For others, it echoes a pattern of public land quietly shifting into private hands.
Environmental watchdogs step in
While politicians traded barbs, the country’s environmental watchdog, the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) tried to slow the pace. On August 21, Naome Karekaho, the head of communications at NEMA confirmed that the project was still only a “brief.” “It is going to be studied, and a decision will be made,” she told the Daily Monitor.
A day later, NEMA’s Executive Director, Dr. Barirega Akankwasah told The Independent that he had not yet received Ham’s full project brief, but under the law any such development would undergo a review, counter-review, and consultations with local government — a process that takes at least 60 days.
“People should be patient,” he told The Independent. Asked why then bulldozers had been spotted demolishing concrete footbridges around St. Balikuddembe Market, Akankwasah insisted this was not Ham’s project but routine desilting to ease drainage during the rainy season. When pressed on whether Ham’s redevelopment could become a “win-win,” Akankwasah was cautious. “We can only answer this question after the review process which is ongoing. Let’s be patient for now.”
onto St. Balikuddembe Market, popularly known as Owino, as workers of Hamis Kiggundu’s company
chat away. INDEPENDENT/RONALD MUSOKE.
The planner’s lens
Urban planners, too, have been weighing in. Charles Nampendho, the president of the Uganda Physical Planners Association, pointed to international examples. “In Japan, how they control their storm water, it is underground so that water goes in there, it has a treatment plant, it has a disposal, it has everything,” he told local broadcaster, NTV Uganda.
But he warned that Kampala’s problem wasn’t just engineering — it was maintenance. “Even if you construct this channel on world standard, but with lack of routine maintenance, nothing will change.”
Nampendho cautioned that without examining whether Nakivubo had historically over-flooded, and without proper treatment facilities, covering the channel could worsen the very problems it was meant to solve.
Nampendho appears to have a point.
According to the World Bank profile of Kampala done in 2015, as Uganda’s capital, Kampala is an important political, cultural, and economic centre, and will continue to draw new residents and new activity that will fuel the city’s continued growth as an important economic engine.
But as it continues to grow, its approach to development in the past decades can be characterised as a “build everywhere” approach. It has spread down the city’s hills to the lowlands and has encroached well into the city’s most important environmental assets, its wetlands. Development has proceeded with little awareness or sensitivity of the overall impacts on ecosystems. Along the way, it has reduced the urban forest and open landscape space, degraded the land and soil, and failed to provide essential infrastructure services that are essential to managing the impacts of urban development.
“It is not the urbanisation and growth of Kampala that is at issue; it is the nature of the urban development that is revealed in this study of the city’s environmental assets that is of concern.”
“The city has not made a serious attempt to integrate the protection or enhancement of critical natural asset systems within physical development. Development has not been guided by a strategic planning framework such as a “grand bargain” – a planning mechanism that identifies the critical natural assets and prioritises them – so that a structure could balance development and mitigate the loss of assets, or to preserve or even enhance them.”
The study points to inadequate and ineffective planning that has been a key obstacle to providing the management required to protect the city’s environmental assets. For decades, the city has lacked an effective physical development plan to guide growth and development. As a result, the city lacks detailed urban planning and urban design concepts to guide development.
“There is little guidance or tools available to offer specific direction to the city agencies as they consider the city, holistically, as districts, or on a project-by-project basis. A first generation of strategic level planning documents has been generated in the past several years, but they remain high-level and lack both baseline data and analytics.”
iron sheets by Hamis Kiggundu’s company. The cordoning off of the channel happened without the
approval of both KCCA and NEMA. INDEPENDENT/RONALD MUSOKE.
The wetland debate
Perhaps the strongest resistance is coming from environmentalists who view Nakivubo not simply as infrastructure, but as part of a living ecosystem.
According to a profile of Kampala’s urban environment done by the World Bank in 2015, Uganda’s capital has often relied on its wetlands throughout the settlement’s history to provide numerous ecological services that support the city. The wetlands have, for instance, served as the city’s primary infrastructure for physically and biologically cleansing water, filtering out sediments and nutrients that enable the raw drinking water to be cost-effectively treated for human consumption.
The wetland system has also served as the city’s primary sponge for absorbing stormwaters, slowly releasing and cleansing waters by discharging into Lake Victoria or recharging groundwater flows. These wetlands have provided the city’s predominant human waste processing function by receiving raw sewage and mechanically treated waste water, processing nutrient loads, and releasing waste water downstream with a higher degree of treatment.
However, the steady decrease in wetland area has driven overall wetland system decline. By 2012, spatial analysis based on satellite imagery showed a once a large and vital ecosystem had reduced to just 9% of the city’s surface area thanks to rapid urbanisation; encroachment; indiscriminate disposal of wastewater from the settlements, industries, and commercial establishments; and the illegal dumping of solid waste.
Richard Kimbowa, the Programme Manager at the Uganda Coalition for Sustainable Development told The Independent that Nakivubo is a key drainage artery linking multiple tributaries to the Nakivubo wetland before they flow into Lake Victoria. With 90% of Kampala residents lacking piped sewerage, the channel carries the equivalent of raw sewage from nearly 500,000 people.
To Kimbowa, redeveloping the channel as a closed, engineered system risks dismantling its natural filtering role. “This is not just a water conduit — it is part of the Nakivubo wetland system,” he argues. “Converting it into a closed structure undermines its ecological role. In a world turning to nature-based solutions, this is a step backward.”
He instead urges investment in restoring wetlands, reducing waste disposal, and engaging communities in sustainable management. Anything less, he warns, would contradict Uganda’s commitments under global biodiversity and disaster risk frameworks.
“As a minimum, any redevelopment of Nakivubo channel/ river should consider public review of the current design plans and the Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) for the Nakivubo redevelopment to better engage in the policy discourse, he said, adding that: “Having in place alternatives, such as eco-engineering or wetland restoration, instead of full redevelopment ensure local community participation as part of a nature-based, sustainable management plan.”
The governance deficit
But, it appears, beyond the technical and ecological debates lay a deeper issue: governance. Onesmus Mugyenyi, the Deputy Executive Director of the Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment (ACODE), a Kampala-based policy tank, does not mince words.
Nakivubo, he says is no longer just a drainage trench. It is a sewage channel carrying both rainwater and household waste, a reflection of Kampala’s chaotic urban growth where plots are paved with concrete and few homes are linked to the national sewer system.
Covering the channel, he says, could solve problems of stench, crime, and aesthetics. But unless the underlying waste management issues are addressed, it will only create new risks. “If you close it without addressing the clogging, the siltation, and the rest of it, definitely you will have a challenge,” Mugyenyi said. Climate change, with its unpredictable rains, adds further uncertainty.
According to the World Bank study, while there is limited modeling and few weather stations, the analysis indicates an increase in intensity of rainfall and greater likelihood of extreme weather effects that can cause harm to human and natural systems are likely to happen in future.
Kampala’s Carbon Disclosure Report (CDP) 2013 Report also notes that changes in the seasonality of rainfall are already a serious risk, affecting the predictability of planting and harvesting and increasing already-chronic flooding. Low-lying areas of informal settlements will continue to be the most vulnerable as they are already located in hazard prone areas and are subject to flooding and or high storm runoff from the adjacent hills.
Most damningly, Mugyenyi sees the project as another symptom of a broken system. “I don’t think that really for Hamis to do this construction, he needs to go to the president. It’s not the president who permits construction of channels. That in itself tells you how the system has collapsed.”
According to Mugyenyi, once the President has declared his support, regulators like NEMA and KCCA are effectively compromised. “Everybody is going to work backwards to make sure the project is cleared because everybody has been beaten into line.”
Indeed, despite NEMA’s Akankwasah saying there is no construction for the new project currently going on, when The Independent visited the channel on the evening of Aug.21, excavators were dismantling concrete footbridges under the guard of the Uganda Police Force.
Between hope and fear
As the arguments rage on in government offices, courtrooms of public opinion, and expert panels, one reality remains unchanged: Nakivubo Channel still runs through Kampala, carrying with it sewage, plastic, and the frustrations of a city struggling to grow.
For supporters, Ham’s proposal offers a chance at transformation — cleaner streets, safer neighborhoods, modern infrastructure, and a symbolic leap toward a “smart city.” For critics, it is another chapter in the story of contested land, environmental degradation, and the concentration of public assets in private hands.
The bulldozers, at least for now, are only desilting. The flashy AI images remain just that: images. The project awaits its environmental and legal approvals. But the debate it has unleashed has already exposed Kampala’s deepest divides — between development and conservation, between public ownership and private profit, between presidential power and institutional process.
What Nakivubo becomes may well shape not only Kampala’s skyline but Uganda’s model of urban development. Will it be a “godly” transformation into a world-class drainage system, as Museveni has already declared? Or will it be, as Lukwago has warned, another instance of public land slipping into private hands? Somewhere between the stench of the present and the glossy dreams of the future lies the truth of Kampala’s most contested channel.
