Ronald Miilo is a shop owner in Kikooza. On June 12, he woke up at 6am and sat on the left side of the shop’s verandah. With a sack full of garbage on the extreme right, he waited patiently for the town council truck that passes through the village collecting waste.

Just like the previous day, the track didn’t turn up. Miilo gave up waiting.

In regards to rubbish, any mention of Mukono Town Council is met with criticism from the residents.

“I don’t have anything to say. The sack can speak volumes. It has been full for days now, the truck hasn’t come yet,” Miilo said.

A lady popularly known as Mukyala Mukasa, who owns a restaurant, has no kind words either for the council. A visit to her restaurant in Kame Valley Market is enough to explain why.

As you approach the front, dark blue flies welcome you, and their movement and sound is quite disturbing. A heap of decaying rubbish rests undisturbed, and it is more probable that the ash that Mukyala Mukasa sprinkles on top is for scaring buzzing flies off.

“This rubbish has been here for two weeks now. Today, the truck passed through but it was already full to the brim, with some rubbish spilling over. I don’t know what to do,” she said.

The citizens of Mukono Town Council did not start like this. There were 15 skips provided by the council to different wards and a total of 78 waste points were provided. With 50,000 inhabitants of Mukono Town Council, 2100 tons of rubbish were generated monthly. Two trucks, an 18-ton capacity Massey Ferguson tractor, acquired by the Town Council in 1986, and a 32-ton blue Jiefang Lorry truck bought in 1995, were used.

In 2006, the Town Council realised that this system was not working well. The following year, it was revised into a new system.

“We realised that the system was keeping us dirty all the time. We withdrew all the skips and introduced a new system,” David Mwebaze, the Town Health Inspector said.

The new system, dubbed “door to door garbage collection” was initiated. Under the new system, the household gathers all the rubbish in a sack or container and leaves it besides the house. All factors remaining constant, the Town Council is supposed to come and pick it up.

Started in 2007, the new system divided the entire town council into wards (parishes): one being Ntawo with four zones, Ggulu with 9 zones, Namumira with 8 zones, and Nsuube-Kauga with 4.

According to the plan, the truck would go through the town centre, highly populated residentials, and town roads. Educational institutions and big hotels were not under this programme. The institutions and big hotels were given skips that would be collected when full.

Here at Uganda Christian University, the garbage process is run by the estates department. The department has placed containers at every block. The estates workers pick this rubbish and take it to a centre above Nsibambi Hall, from where it is burnt.

Although the annual population growth of 6.8 per cent in Mukono Town Council would suggest an increase in the amount of rubbish collected, the number of vehicles for the service was not increased. Most shockingly, the obsolete tractor and lorry, which were used before, are still working. That is why all hell broke loose.

“We now take the rubbish to the council ourselves. They are supposed to be collecting it, but its now one and a half weeks, and we don’t see any trucks these days,” Rose, a restaurant worker in the town centre said.

When you walk around the town, you will see rubbish in small portions, gathered in all sorts of containers.

There was a plan to give rubbish bags to the residents. This plan has not been implemented yet. People still have to provide the containers. Mwebaze agrees that surely, something is wrong.

“If it wasn’t for the regular break down of these trucks, we would be able to follow the daily time table that we had set,” he said.

To keep the work going, the council has tried to hire trucks from individuals but, as Mwebaze explains, this also has its problems.

“There are moments when we try to hire trucks but most truck-owners don’t want their vehicles to collect rubbish,” he said.

One can conclude that the breakdown of trucks is the sole cause of the garbage loitering around people’s homes. What is interesting now is that when vehicles break down, there is no proper communication between the residents and the council about when the trucks will be available.

“There is a time we were affected by a break down for over a month. This is because we are using old trucks and they carry a lot of weight, despite their condition,” Mwebaze said.

The last time there was a similar incident, some people waited and when no truck turned up, they gave up . The vast majority don’t remember when the rubbish is supposed to be picked from their homes.

On an ordinary day, when all is well, the truck moves around the village once and then takes the rubbish to Katikolo dumping site, 7miles from Mukono town, where the council has plans to operate a landfill.

“We use spades and hoes to offload all that rubbish. This takes a lot of time and it would also mean that at most, in a day, I can only drive two rounds,” Abubaker Sennoga, the tractor driver said.

Besides that, Sennoga also notes that the attitude of the public is somehow lacking. Some people, according to him, are not cooperative at all.

“There are people who don’t want to touch the rubbish. They want us to pick it from their houses,” he said.

There is another category of people who work during day and complain that since they have to move away from home for work, there is no proper coordination between them and the whole programme. However, even Sennoga believes that things would be better if they had mechanically good vehicles.

“I have driven this tractor for 16 years. We need a new one that can match the day to day challenges. I don’t think it will endure the 7 miles for long,” he said.