Kasenyi is a fish landing site on Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest fresh water lake that is shared by the three East African countries of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.
Besides being a fish landing site, Kasenyi is a terminal for boats and canoes transporting passengers and merchandise to various islands on Lake Victoria.
The major economic activity is fishing, but there are other businesses such as fresh food vending, restaurants, bars, shops and financial services including Mobile Money transactions among others.
It’s a sleepless landing site. People work all day and night with entertainment and alcohol consumption the lead businesses after sunset. Such a business hub generates a lot of waste which requires proper and effective disposal. Kasenyi lacks this. The landing site has less than six toilets for disposal of human waste of a population of 100,000
The lakeshore town is not connected to the central sewer system. They are connected to individual septic pits which fill up quite quickly. When they fill up, cesspool emptier trucks come and drain the pits. Due to the high urban population the pits fill up very fast and the drainage has to be repeated quite frequently.
But there is the worst side of this poor human waste disposal. Many structures majority of which are makeshift ramshackle shacks roofed with rusty old iron sheets or papyrus, don’t have toilets. The few available pit latrines are not enough for the big population. One toilet is shared by more than 300 people. Being at the lakeshore, the water table is shallow and the toilets are hardly 10 feet deep, which makes them fill up very fast. These clumsy pit latrines are not drained by sewage emptying trucks. To avoid spillage to the ground, the residents create a vent which discharges the faecal waste into the lake, thus polluting the water that people use for cooking, laundry, bathing, drinking and their livestock.
The absence of a proper sewage and solid waste disposal system has become an environmental danger to the lake and a health hazard to human beings.
Dirty and, often times, smelly liquid waste from restaurants, dwellings, bars, eateries, shops, market stalls and other structures flow on open ground into the lake.
There is no garbage skip or pit in sight. Solid waste such as empty plastic bottles, polythene bags (buveera), banana and potato peels and all sorts of garbage are littered around and when it rains, the runoff carries all this waste into the lake.
The situation is not any different at other landing sites such as Gelenge and Ggaba, east of Kasenyi along the same Lake Victoria shoreline.
The fish caught in the lake is sold to factories which process it for export. The rest of the fish is sold to the local people as part of household diet or for consumption in restaurants, hotels and other eateries. Fish is a major part of diet in many Ugandan homesteads especially in urban places and areas around water bodies such as lakes and rivers.
When Ugnature visited Gerenge fish landing site, the situation appeared graver than at Kasenyi. There is one pit toilet which has nearly filled up. When it rains, the runoff fills up the toilet and washes away the human waste into the lake, which people depend on for household needs such as cooking, laundry and drinking.
A local council leader who declined to identify himself for fear of reprisal from authorities said they have appealed to government for intervention but have received quietness in response. Motorists and residents wash their clothes and motorcycles in the shallow waters of the shoreline, thus pouring polluted waste water into the lake. Due to lack of proper garbage disposal mechanism, both liquid and solid waste from the makeshift restaurants, bars, food market s and other businesses is poured out in open space to flow into the lake.
It was a similar situation at Ggaba fish landing site on the Lake Victoria shoreline, northeast of Gerenge.
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