As the Chief Executive of the government agency responsible for monitoring, coordinating, supervising and regulating the natural environment of Uganda, what has been your greatest achievement since you took office 9-years ago?
We have been able to mobilize local governments to take their responsibility as provided in the law and also to argue for budget increase. On the aspect of coordination, we have been able to establish and operationalize a lead agency coordination unit. We have developed a lead agency coordination strategy that has helped us to access resources and manage the activities undertaken by those institutions.
We have engaged civil societies and the private sector and encouraged them to be active participants and not just critics in environmental and natural resource management. There is now a lot of active civil society in the Albertine graben, and this helps to keep us on our toes. We have also seen a lot of active civil society involvement in the environmental education sector; and this is a success in terms of coordination.
We have been very successful in regulating industry in Uganda. No new industry operates outside the regulations. Industries have now realized that by conforming to standards that we prescribe, including permits and licenses; they become more profitable. Typical examples include the cement, beer, beverage, food processing, and sugar industries. All these have adopted environmentally friendly technologies because of NEMA’s interventions and are more profitable while fulfilling environmental compliance requirements.
On the Green environment, we have regulated non-metallic minerals that had no regulatory framework. We are now able to regulate sand mining and encourage miners to restore areas that have been mined.
In the brown environment, we have some projects that were intended to benefit the people but with the objective of enhancing the functionality of the systems. An example is the Kidepo Valley Project where we worked to support the communities by providing technologies and information on how to efficiently extract oil from the shea nut tree and demonstrating that they can get more money from the oil other than cutting the trees for charcoal. The price of shea nut has gone up and the people can sell the oil at better prices. The environment has been saved while the economy of the people has been improved.
Finally, we are a fundamental actor in the oil and gas sector. The government decided to extract oil from an environmentally sensitive area; this means that NEMA is tasked to ensure that oil activities do not compromise the environment and ecosystems in those areas. We have licensed oil companies and monitored their activities on a daily basis and closely monitored their compliance. Throughout the exploration phase, there was no incident of oil contamination of the ecosystem. We have prepared and trained staff for the production phase. We licensed the refinery, pipeline, and drilling sites for the oil.
What environmental policies has NEMA developed during your regime?
We revised the National Environment Act and several regulations that are tenant to it to conform to the new demands of the moment. These new demands/issues include oil and gas, chemicals, electronic waste, plastics e.t.c. These issues were not factored in by the time the National Environment Act of 1995 was made. We have revised several regulations and by the end of the year, all the new regulations and the revised ones will all be in place so that the regulatory framework of the environment is in place.
As a regulator what has been your biggest challenge so far?
Regulating the environment requires real-time and data, frequent monitoring, technology, and personnel. We have had the challenge of getting adequate personnel to meet the demand.
The investment climate in Uganda has been very good and that explains the high number of investments that have been increasing phenomenally. According to figures from UIA, we register about 1,000 new investments every year in addition to the already existing ones. This means that we must grow the personnel and technology to match the growth of the industry to regulate these new investments. Although the government attempted to increase our staff capacity by 50%, we still need more and the associated budget to carry out monitoring activities.
In the industry sector, there are few cases of non-compliance that have popped up, but we managed to regulate them through our vigorous monitoring exercise undertaken by our inspectors and we compelled them to improve. We have a program of compliance assistance to industries to help them understand the positivity and benefit of adopting environmentally friendly technologies.
With the increasing number of people encroaching on wetlands, what is NEMA doing about this in the immediate and long term?
When I joined NEMA, my predecessor told me that Wetlands is the Waterloo issue of NEMA. In the structure of Government, NEMA comes in to only regulate activities that happen in wetlands. There is a fully-fledged department of government- the Wetlands Management Department at the Ministry of Water and environment, that is meant to deal with the day to day issues of management, encroachers on wetlands. However, many Ugandans assume that it is NEMA’s work to manage wetlands, but we come in to support the department nevertheless.
From 1994 to date we have lost about 62% of the wetlands cover in Uganda. Kyoga alone has lost about 80.5% of its wetland cover. Wetlands are a common good and therefore the Government protects them for the good of all Ugandans. However, the people view wetlands as a free resource and therefore there is enormous pressure on wetlands for agriculture is dominant in the rural areas. The population has increased but the land surface has not changed and therefore wetlands become a target. NEMA as an institution alone cannot stop the degradation of wetlands until the fundamental drivers of wetland encroachment are addressed holistically.
We have encouraged people to apply for permits so that wetlands can be used in a guided manner. The President recently issued a directive for people to be removed from wetlands and this already being done systematically.
However, from my experience when we remove people we must be ready with alternatives for them. Especially those people upcountry who are interested in farming rice. We encourage people to apply for permits; even the rural farmers can form associations and jointly apply for a permit for rice growing, where a water source can be secured for them in a regulated manner.
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We have the Environment Impact Assessment Regulations and Standards, The Water Quality Standards, and the Petroleum Waste Regulation Standards. We also have regulations on Ozone, and Uganda is the first among developing countries to remove Ozone-depleting substances because of NEMA. Generally all the standards and regulations are very important to specific activities related to the environment. The Environment Impact Assessment Regulations and Standards may stand out because they are applied daily because of the number of investments happening in the country.
You will be marking your ninth year at the helm of NEMA this month, what are you particularly proud of during this period?
One we have introduced electronic methods of operation. EIA documents are now submitted and reviewed online; the financial and accounting function is now digitized, the human resource function is also digitized and permit issuance is also digitized. This has also proved to be handy when the COVID-19 pandemic struck.
Secondly, we have managed to bring all big industries that were previously major causes of pollution, to compliance. This was through the introduction of the Compliance Assistance Strategy. New industries are now coming by themselves for assistance.
I have also grown the human resource of the organization by almost 70%. I have grown the National Environment Fund from an average of about UGX2bn per year when I joined to the current UGX12 bn – UGX15bn annually.
How can your line Ministry of Water and Environment be more supportive in ensuring that you do your work much more effectively?
The ministry can support us by increasing our budgets and secondly they can support the functionality of the organization entirely.
How has Covid-19 affected your operations as a government agency?
Initially, NEMA was not listed as a priority agency, but we found ourselves being required to work to ensure that the businesses were going on. We worked throughout the lockdown with about 40% of the staff. Incidentally, during this time, if we are to go by the EIA data submitted, it shows that there was a very slow decline in investment flows. This slow decline shows that the investment climate in the country is still good and we just need to deal with the other parameters such as the gradual opening up of the economy if possible.
Otherwise, we have also developed guidelines for handling COVID-19 waste such as masks. Our guidelines give directions on how masks should finally be disposed of after they have been discarded by the users, without creating a risk of reinfection and other public health risks.
I see people that have been displaced by the floods on Lakes Victoria and Kyoga want the government to resettle them. What is your take on this issue?
There are two groups of people here. There is a category that settled in an area where it is known that if flooding occurred, they would be affected. That’s why in the Law we have a 200-meter boundary mark within which we did not expect settlement or activities. Right now those within the 200-meter buffer are affected the most by the floods and have to leave. We have been informing them about this from way back and they are aware that they were in the wrong place. Then some are not within the 200-meter buffer zone but have also been affected by the rising water levels. For these, the Ministry of Disaster Preparedness has been informed and is working towards providing relief to support this second category of people.
Last but not least, politics and the environment seem to walk a parallel path. Now that we are going into elections- how does politics affect your work?
The greatest political interference to our work takes place at the lower levels. The LCs especially do not have the guts to say no to any developer or encroacher, because they fear that they will be sidelined during elections. So they do not enforce what they are supposed to and even support bad environment practices because they want political support. Nevertheless, we have gone through such political times before and we shall not flinch and we shall continue enforcing the law. I only wish people could realize that they would get more votes by promoting a good environment. Some MPs have stayed in parliament by standing for the environment. It is just an illusion that during political times our work is interfered with, but that is not true.
Any last words to our readers and what are your future plans for NEMA going forward?
My constant reminder to everybody is that the environment starts with you. We, humans, are the managers, destroyers, beneficiaries, and drivers of change in the environment. The first component of the environment is the human being. My appeal is to all Ugandans to take responsibility of where we live so that we relate well with what supports us; such as the forests, wetlands, water, hills, the air we breathe e.t.c. We need to understand that all our actions on the environment have consequences. Humans are the first part of the environment and need to be responsible.
