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Gulu leads the race, Jinja, Mbale and Mbarara in line

In 2008, during the last funeral rites of former Foreign Affairs minister James Wapakhabulo, President Yoweri Museveni said Mbale was worth elevating to city status. Despite its dirtiness (overflowing and stinking garbage), he said the municipality had developed and expanded its infrastructure.

The clamour for elevating major regional towns to city status is sweeping across the country. First it was Jinja, then Mbale and Mbarara, now the most recent came from one army officer, Lt. Col. Benon Biraro. For him, every region ought to have a city. According to his view, Gulu Municipality would become a city in northern Uganda.  The fresh demand for regional cities coincides with the philanthropic granting of counties district status. Hoima and Mukono town councils have already been approved as municipalities and Kasese town council is expected to follow suit.

According to officials in the Ministry of Local Government, it will not take long to have cities in a country where Kampala has been the only city for the last 40 years. This implies the number of MPs will increase as each municipality and division in the city automatically becomes a constituency. Analysts are speculating that this maybe done for political marketing ahead of the 2011 general elections.

In Uganda, a trading centre which mainly springs up along a main road or intersection is the smallest urban area. It develops into a town board, then to a town council, then to a municipality and later a city.

But what does it take for a municipality to be granted city status? Although the definition of a city varies among countries, the things that generally characterise a city include a large population size, social service delivery, administrative offices, a road, rail and air transport network, clean water supply, electricity, hospitals, education institutions, industries, trade, and the ability to collect revenue to provide the above services. Cities around the world ought to have advanced systems for sanitation, utilities, planned land use, housing, and transportation, all of which greatly facilitate interaction between people and businesses.

Until 1889, granting city status in the United Kingdom was based on having a cathedral. Birmingham altered this thinking (in 1889) by basing its claim for city status on grounds of population and its history in good local governance. This precedent was followed by Leeds and Sheffield which became cities in 1893. In 1907, the UK Home Office and King Edward VII agreed on a criterion that for any area to be granted city status it had to have: a minimum population of 300,000, a “local metropolitan character” and a good record of local governance. In 1927, the UK Home Office drafted procedures of granting city status to a given area that included the town’s population, size and importance, planned housing, transport and communication systems, and having a distinctive character and identity of their own. These criteria are being used today.

Physical planning experts say a city should have all the necessary facilities that make life comfortable; these include land use in zone areas for leisure, recreation, residence, commerce, education, health, and industries. Charles Kyamanywa, the acting chief town planner, Kampala City Council (KCC), says the lifeblood of a city is having viable communication corridors such as roads and road reserves along which utility lines like water, electricity, telephone, drainage, movement of commodities and people as well as sewage are tied.

The Local Governments Act 2000 says a municipality should have a population of over 100,000, while a city should have over 500,000 people. The Act also requires municipalities to have the capacity to meet their cost of delivering services, have offices and a plan for land usage.  

Issa Gumonye, principal urban officer in the Ministry of Local Government, says a municipality is granted city status based on people’s wishes. The procedure includes a memorandum written by the municipality which is then sent to the council to pass before being sent to the district council. Then the ministry of local government verifies if the demand for city status tallies with population size, its ability to deliver services manifested in qualified personnel, infrastructure and social services like health, education, roads, markets, source of revenue, all of which must be adequate and viable. It ought to have room for expansion. After this, the ministry commissions a technical study to assess the above conditions. If the study recommends for elevation to city status, a cabinet paper is written and presented to Parliament that approves or disapproves it.

Gumonye said a technical study is ongoing in the municipalities of Mbarara, Jinja and Mbale and their results will be known soon.

“Once the study proves these areas meet the standards, then people’s wishes for city status will be respected,” he said.

State minister for Local Government, Pereza Godfrey Ahabwe, confirmed that the proposal for regional cities is before cabinet. He says it is high time new cities were created in the country to extend services nearer to the people.

There have been suggestions of adopting the Nigerian model where the capital city was shifted to Lagos from Abuja or in Tanzania where the capital was changed from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma. That’s how the argument of making Nakasongola the capital city to decongest Kampala comes in. Nakasongola is considered to be at the centre of Uganda and thus people from the north, east and west would perceive it as more central than Kampala.

The minister says these are frameworks which can be discussed. “The argument would be to complement what is happening in Kampala by extending these services and functions to other locations. I have no quarrel with the proposal that Mbarara, Mbale, Gulu and Jinja become cities. For example, with the return of peace, Gulu is very lively and has modern structures being erected. The population is very vibrant and with these  markets in Southern Sudan and DR Congo I have completely no doubt that if this place attained city status there would be a difference in Uganda.  Mbarara, Mbale and Jinja are equally vibrant,” minister Ahabwe told The Independent.

Experts in physical and urban planning we talked to say that planning for land use is very important in creating an organised city. They agree that Kampala scores poorly as a city in land use management compared to cities in the region like Nairobi, Kisumu and Dar es Salaam.

Revocatus Twinomuhangi, a lecturer of Urban Planning programme at Makerere University says the problem in Uganda is people come first before planning instead of making planning the priority. He says this makes it hard to have services in specific areas. “Our planning for urban areas is reactionary. That’s why roads are narrow because people were already there.”

A well planned city is supposed to have ring roads for easy traffic management. “If I wanted to go to Bugolobi from Makerere, I don’t have to pass through the city centre,” says Twinomuhangi. “I have to use the ring road that connects to my destination. This would ease the traffic congestion on particular roads. In fact, those bypasses are supposed to work as ring roads but they are not.” Move around Kampala, Kitante, Nakasero, and Kololo areas and you get a good picture of Kampala as a city but when juxtaposed with Kisenyi, Katanga and Bwaise the picture becomes scary. He says population pulls the services as people demand them.  Education, health, trade, transport and communication will accrue to and grow with population and these will be used to decide if a town fits to be a city.

However, Kyamanywa notes that planning is constrained by financial and personnel resources. He said KCC is especially not doing well on land control issues. Jinja and Mbale municipalities, he says, score well on well planned and wide streets which can enable them to handle traffic congestion more efficiently unlike Kampala where the widest street is Kampala Road measuring 30 metres wide. But again because there are no parking lots in the city, people park their vehicles on the side of the already narrow road leaving a narrower carriage way. An ideal street is supposed to be at least 40 metres wide.

Most towns clamouring for city status only use population size as the basis for their application thereby ignoring other essential conditions. Last year the former minister of Local Government, Kahinda Otafiire turned down Mbale Municipality’s request for city status citing reasons of sanitation.  In a bid to increase its current 84,100 people, the municipality has opted to incorporate seven neighbouring sub-counties to help it raise the required city population of 500,000 people. 

Many of these towns have less than 200,000 people and thus do not meet the required minimum population. Jinja, for example, according to Uganda Bureau of Statistics, has 128, 052 people while 97,500 people were estimated to be living in Mbarara Municipality. Gulu municipality had an estimate of 211,578 people by the end of 2008. This, in spite of the 20 year LRA war, is a 10 per cent annual increase since the 2002 census had put its population at 119,430 making Gulu, a gateway to Southern Sudan, the second-largest populous town in the country after Kampala.

Infrastructural development in these towns is at various levels. For example, Gulu has three major hospitals (Gulu Referral hospital, St. Mary’s Lacor Hospital and Gulu Independent Hospital), an airfield, a university, railway line connection, and a few tarmac roads in the streets linking to the Kampala–Gulu highway. But like other Ugandan towns, Gulu faces a poor sanitation problem.

Mbarara and Mbale municipalities each have a regional referral hospital, and a university. According to Mbarara Municipality MP Arimpa Kigyagi, the municipality has average roads, street lights, an airstrip, 80% access to piped water, three milk processing industries in addition to a Coca-Cola bottling plant and a number of cottage industries; a football stadium, hotels, a day population of 202,000 and a night population of 160,000 , which together justify elevating it to city status. He adds that the request was made and it is before cabinet which has instituted a technical study committee to assess the request.

The ability to collect sufficient revenue for the smooth running of the city is yet another question these areas have to think about. The central government finances over 80 per cent of the budgets of all these municipalities. Kigyagi says Mbarara’s budget is Shs 6 billion of which the municipality manages to collect Shs 1.5 billion and the remainder is topped up by the central government. Despite being the second largest urban centre in the country, Jinja operates on a budget of less than Shs 4 billion of which Shs1.18 billion was raised locally and government chipped in Shs 2.27 billion in the last financial year.

In contrast, KCC collected Shs 29 billion locally out of the 2008/09 total budget of Shs 62 billion but still faces the challenge of providing services to the people, especially clearing the city’s garbage. KCC’s 2009/10 budget is Shs73 billion.

Mbale Municipality’s 2009/10 budget proposal is Shs 13.6 billion yet less than a quarter of the budget is collected locally.  Overflowing garbage and dilapidated infrastructure are the main problems the town has to address if it is to boost its capacity to better deliver services to the people.

The local media recently quoted Mbale municipal finance secretary, Rogers Kamaswa, lamenting how dilapidated buildings and unmanageable garbage has frozen Mbale’s chances of becoming a city. But Issa M says to declare a town a city takes more than sanitation, and the revenue collected should help bring and maintain services to the people. For example, Mbarara had only two garbage collection trucks for three divisions compared to Kampala that had 40 trucks for 4 divisions by end of 2008. But Kigyagi says today each municipal division has two garbage trucks.

Jinja municipality, on the other hand, as one of the major towns in eastern Uganda is famous for its industries. Until the early 1980s Jinja was Uganda’s industrial area but the industries have since closed shop or relocated to Kampala. Nile Breweries Limited, Uganda Pharmaceuticals Limited and Kakira Sugar Works are among the surviving industries in Jinja.

Jinja also boasts of a myriad of banking institutions, tarmac roads and railway network, a port, airfields, key tourist sites in the country like the source of the Nile, educational institutions up to university. This entire infrastructure would make the town qualify for city status. Jinja used to be Uganda’s industrial town like Kisumu is in Kenya. Kisumu is now a city.

In planned cities land use management is reflected in specific residential, commercial, administrative, industrial, services and recreational areas. This is not seen in many Ugandan towns. Here people build in their own style. It is, thus, common in Kampala to see posh buildings rising in slums and land use management is not well defined.

“Because each person wants to have a house in the city, we have a city spreading outwards which makes provision of services expensive and difficult,” said Twinomuhangi. “You need more kilometers to extend electricity, water, and health services and hence there will be poor service delivery. We need to have compact cities expanding vertically such that a floor of a building can be used for office and another for residence. This will avoid having a dead city at night.”

Kyamanywa says increasing resources and teaming up with development partners will help in solving the challenges urban areas face. He adds that people’s attitude about cities have to change and there is a need to revise the land tenure system as land owners tend to interfere with urban designs and the planning authority should be empowered to avoid political interference.

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