By Willy Chowoo.
Gulu City lies within the Albert Nile and Aswa Catchments of the Upper Nile Water Management Zone. The city has two big wetlands, Pece and Oyitino streams.
The two wetland systems drain water into Victoria and Albert Nile respectively. They play significant roles in conserving biodiversity and providing water for both domestic use and agriculture for most of the residents in the city.
Pece wetland is the biggest wetland in Gulu City covering 55.9% (1027 ha) of the total surface 1836.4 ha of wetland areas of the City. It transverses the parishes/wards of Tegwana, Labwoc, Acoyo, Lagara, Lapainat-West, Ibakara, Pece prison, and Vanguard.
This wetland is both permanent and seasonally dominated by swamp forest, papyrus, and open water. It is well endowered with rich varieties of fauna such as fish species like mudfish, existing mammals such as water bucks, and bird species –the weaver birds.
Pece stream provides natural sponges that trap and slowly release water, and reduce flood heights and erosion within the city centre while Oyitino stream is the main source of water in Gulu City.
Oyitino wetland lies southwest of Gulu City and it is a small wetland of about 272 ha. It is a secondary wetland hydrologically draining into Unyama wetland system and eventually into the Albert Nile.
It is a permanent wetland which is dominated by open water and ecologically characterized by a mixed community of papyrus, spear grass, palms, water Algae, Lagada, Laurel, water Oak, strawberry bush, and Opaka.
The wetland has indigenous trees such as Lucoro, Olwedo, Opobo and Ongono with waterbuck as the fauna and weaver birds as the main bird of the area.
Oyitino wetland acts as a main source of water for domestic and animal use, fisheries, livestock grazing and crop production. Like any other wetlands, Oyitino does water purification, flood control, and microclimate modification.
National Water and Sewerage Corporation gets water from Oyitino Dam to supply the population in Gulu City. The daily demand for water in Gulu City is over 10 million litres. Between 2015 and 2017, Gulu experienced sporadic water outages when Oyitino dried up forcing the city into a serious water crisis.
The prolonged dry spells made the supply of water to the city drop from 10 million litres per day to only 7 million litres. Prolonged drought and high temperatures normally reduce the water level at Oyitino Dam. This is mainly due to the continued human activities on the wetlands.
At the moment, all eyes are on the ongoing construction of a water treatment plant at Karuma-River Nile with a production capacity of 30 million litres per day to serve 341,000 people in Gulu City and the nearby community.
The two beautiful wetlands in the city are being affected by emerging permanent structures, crop cultivation, improper waste disposal and non-adherence to wetland resource harvesting guidelines. This presents a big threat to the conservation and protection of the two wetlands in the city. However, most of these structures have land titles and permits acquired illegally.
WHAT IS NOT WORKING WELL??
Powerful investors have continued to set up permanent structures in terms of the construction of industries and settlements on wetlands in most areas of Uganda including Gulu City. The permanent structures are within the town centres.
One of the examples is Pece stream which is on the lower side of the Channel next to Cynibel Supermarket in Gulu City.
In November 2023, the environment activists in Gulu City prevented an Investor, Lawrence Okello working with Oil Energy Uganda who wanted to forcefully set up a petrol Station within the National Environment Management Authority NEMA gazetted wetland in the city- NEMA is a semi-autonomous institution, established in May 1995 as the principal agency in Uganda, charged with the responsibility of coordinating, monitoring, regulating and supervising environmental management in the country.
Mr Okello claims that the city council had authorised his building plan however the Building Control Committee of the city on September,2nd, 2021 in a letter signed by the Deputy Town Clerk, Mr Obwana Haxvier Morris deferred his application based on the reason that there was no evidence of geotechnical soil investigation report to define the geotechnical stratigraphy and structure of the soil, and the plot size in the title does not correspond with the pot size on the ground.
The Building Control Committee also argued that there was lack of structural design drawings done by a competent and registered Engineer and the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) provided was not for commercial building but the EIA attached was for a petrol station which conflicts with the user close of the leased land.
The City Authority also stated that the draft Physical development plan indicates that the land in question is environmentally sensitive and part of it was demarcated by NEMA as a wetland.
Sources alleged that the marked stone indicating the wetland was removed in 2023 by the same investor when he was doing a bush-clearing exercise for this project.
On Friday 22nd, 2024, Mr Okello returned with bulldozers and his team started the construction of the petrol station without an authentic approved building plan.
This sparked a serious second wave of protest from the environmental pressure group, ‘Our Trees, we and Answers’ and a number of city residents. The city council authority including members of Parliament in the Acholi subregion joined the protest.
The community united and chased him away from the site in the name of saving the biggest wetland in the city.
Gulu City Environment Officer, Aryemo Joyce Latigo says the encroachment into the wetlands has made the status of wetlands in Gulu City destructive to green cover.
“We have a lot of challenges, just imagine the investor who came in the middle of the centre of the city to put up a petrol station in a wetland not even a dry land”, Latigo adds.
Gulu City Deputy Mayor, Christine Olok during the celebration of the National Wetlands Day held in Gulu City on February 2nd 2024, said they have successfully managed to block the investor from building his petrol station on the biggest wetland in the city.
In 2017 World Embrace– a non-profit organization that is working alongside the unified local church to see community transformation in Gulu was given EIA certificate to set up a recreation centre at the western side of Pece Stream, covering almost the entire wetland.
The City Environment Officer, Latigo says the World Embrace construction plan was sitting in the whole wetland-the source of Pece Stream, “with World Embrace, we cancelled their certificate (EIA), and they listened to us, and they are not there, they had to shift to another area”.
In the financial year 2018/2019, the former Laroo Division council resolved to reclaim more than 2 acres of swampland and build a recreation centre by clearing the site to plant grass and ecologically friendly trees for shade and build two monumental fish ponds. The move was protested by the city residents.
The Division had secured UGX 350 million shillings under the Northern Uganda Social Action Fund – NUSAF III to beautify the areas, but they were stopped by the National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA) when it was discovered their activity in the wetland was not eco-friendly to the environment citing that the project did not take into consideration of EIA
The then Laroo Division had wanted to develop wetlands to be the leisure ground as a public resting space and expand the division’s tax base.
The bad news is the city has lost 37, 3 % (685.2 ha) of its wetlands in terms of degradation of the total wetlands coverage of 1836.4 ha over the past years as seen from the satellite images.
The satellite image shows that most of the gazetted wetland areas along Pece Stream have been encroached into as shown in the image below.
The major reasons for the continued encroachment into the wetlands in Gulu City and other parts of the country resonate around some of these factors.
According to the latest data collected in 2015 by Wetland Management Department /Ministry of Water and Environment, WMD in collaboration with the National Forestry Authority (NFA), wetland coverage countrywide fell from 37,346.3 sq. km in 1994 (15.5% of the total national land cover) to 31,411.4 sq. km in 2015 (13%), representing a permanent loss of 5,934.9 sq. km of wetlands – equivalent to 2.5% of the total national land cover23.
Illegal Issuance of permits and land titles in wetlands:
The number of individuals and institutions that have land titles on the wetlands is not clear, but The Elephant can exclusively establish that 10 people have illegally acquired titles on the wetlands in Gulu City as of 2022.
Human activities are common along Pece stream from the site of Kaunda grounds up to around behind Pece Prison. As one moves along the green belt, there are a number of washing Bays, permanent structures, and vegetable farming taking place along the stream.
The big pressure on the wetlands of Gulu City is due to population pressure and urbanization as people turned it into farming and settlement ground. This has led to degradation of the wetlands. 37.3 % (685.2 ha) of the total wetlands coverage of 1836.4 ha that has been degraded leaving only 1151.2% intact according to the latest statistic from the Gulu City authority.
According to the 1995 Constitution, no activity is permitted in a wetland without a Wetland User Permit from the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) and this same constitution forbids issuing land titles in wetlands.
In 2018, NEMA issued 239 user permits; some developers who had been issued permits abandoned the sites without restoring them. This violates permit conditions and costs government restoration fees.
NEMA attributed the challenges in enforcing compliance with permit conditions to inadequate specialized professionals to monitor compliance with permit conditions. The Institution had only 4 aquatics and wetlands staff in 2018 who were supposed to follow up on the 239 permits, besides performing other duties e.g. review of permits and EIA applications, among others.
The City Authority is incapacitated to effectively enforce the available laws on wetlands Management in the City, which gives the local government mandate to hold in trust for the people and protect wetlands for the common good of the citizens of Uganda. Section 36(1) of the National Environment Act Cap 153 (NEA) restricts the use of wetlands and prohibits activities that may degrade them.
The Local Government Act (1997) and the NEA also decentralize the management of wetlands to District Environment Committees, with oversight being provided by NEMA and WMD. And, the Land Act Cap 227 prohibits the leasing of wetlands by either the Central or Local government.
The challenge to enforce these laws by the city Authority ranges right from funding up to human resources. They heavily rely on the availability of the Uganda Police Environment Unit to enforce arrest and eviction.
The City Authority operates on a budget of sh1.5 million ($420) annually to manage the environment in the city. This has made the city unable to maintain and beautify the green belt which become the source of insecurity by harbouring the criminal gangs in the city.
Funding to the Wetlands Management Department (WMD) under the Ministry of Water and Environment by the government has been little, according to the OAG report 2018 on funding for wetlands management between 2014/2015-2016/2016, only UGX 8,476,170,818 billion was approved for the department, UGX 8,190,111,261 billion was released and UGX 8,129,623,958 billion was spent.
This has greatly affected the department’s goal of increasing the wetland coverage from 8.9% in 2015 to 12% in 2020 with UGX 2.5 billion annual releases by the Ministry of Finance Planning and Economic Development (MoFPED) to the Department. Even in 2024, the current wetland coverage still stands at 9.3%
According to the latest data collected in 2015 by WMD in collaboration with the National Forestry Authority (NFA), wetland coverage countrywide fell from 37,346.3 sq. km in 1994 (15.5% of the total national land cover) to 31,411.4 sq. km in 2015 (13%), representing a permanent loss of 5,934.9 sq. km of wetlands – equivalent to 2.5% of the total national land cover23.
The data reveals that since 1995, land titles have been issued for 782 plots in wetlands in the districts of Kampala, Mukono, and Wakiso.
Ministry of Land, Housing and Urban Development (MoLHUD) attributed the issuance of land titles in wetlands to resource constraints which crippled the ability of their staff to conduct due diligence on all applications before issuing titles and low-resolution base maps to process land titles since production of updated base maps was not yet complete.
The Ministry of Water and Environment said during a pilot holistic revocation of land titles undertaken for the Kinawataka wetland system, they were able to cancel 302 titles and many others pending the legal processes.
The minister of State for Environment, Beatrice Anywar said during the celebration of the National Wetlands Day held in Gulu City in early February that the biggest challenge in undertaking cancellation titles issued on wetlands because most wetlands were not yet gazetted in The Uganda Gazette.
However, during the celebration, Minister Justine Kasule Lumumba, minister in charge of General Duties in the Office of Prime Minister commissioned the first ‘ The Uganda Gazette’ containing all the lists of wetlands in Uganda (primary, secondary, tertiary and quarterly) covering an area of 33,762.6km².
Minister Kasule thanked the Ministry of Water and Environment for Gazetting all the wetlands in Uganda, “People are claiming different wetlands being owned by clans or families, forgetting that are owned by all Ugandans, I request the Ministry of Water and Environment to supply the copies to the districts and the sub countries”.
Minister of State for Water, Aisha Sekindi represented Beatrice Anywar, the Minister of State for Environment during the International Wetland Day celebration in Gulu, Minister Aisha read Anywar’s statement saying the gazettement of all wetlands in Uganda is a clear signal that the government is committed to recovering degraded wetlands by a way of restoring them.
Audio File One. Minister Aisha Sekindi Reading a statement on behalf of Minister Anywar Beatrice.
Practising Farming and washing Bays in wetlands:
The biggest challenges facing the Ministry of Water and Environment in the management of wetlands in Uganda are encroachment for agricultural purposes and the construction of industries and settlements.
The ministry has made progress in the restoration of wetlands from 8.9% (2020) to 9.3%, but the efforts are spoiled re-encroachment.
The permanent secretary Ministry of Water and Environment. Alfred Okidi Okot says since the start of NDPIII, they have been able to restore 35000 hectares m (252 sq. km) and demarcated 2100kms of wetlands boundaries in the country.
Ministry of Water and Environment Permanent Secretary, Okidi Alfred in a statement attributed the rise in the encroachment into the wetlands to the challenge of sustaining population from the explosion and urbanization
In Gulu City, it is not exceptional, the streams and the green belts have become the centre for Agricultural farmlands in the City. The urban farmers are producing vegetables such as cabbages, onions, Green and Red Dodo, and cowpeas plants to supply the urban market.
The health experts are worried that these crops are not healthy as they may contain heavy metals such as mercury and lead that are indissoluble.
Health facilities and families channel their waste to the wetlands yet it runs to the water sources which are tapped by the National Water and Sewage Corporation.
Gulu City Environment Officer, Aryemo Joyce Latigo notes that this presents a big pressure on the wetlands especially the section starting right away from Unifat Primary School up to Pece prison which is highly degraded.
“If you see where the pressure is, there is a lot of destruction within the city centre, most of the people are going to grow their vegetables there, fetch papyrus, pick clay soil, people want to build up to the wetlands, people have fenced part of the wetlands such that other people cannot get resources from the wetlands”, She adds.
Saving Uganda Wetlands:
Wetlands are Earth’s most threatened ecosystem and are disappearing three times faster than forests. In just 50, years, 35% of the world’s wetlands have been lost, with annual rates of loss accelerating from 2000.
During the commemoration to mark World Wetlands Day, at the national function held in Gulu City, the Ministry of Water and Environment announced that Uganda has registered tremendous achievements in reversing degradation to ensure that wetlands continue serving Ugandans with various functions and values.
It says the wetlands coverage increased from 8.9% in 2015 to the current 9.3% with efforts in demarcation of wetland boundaries, cancellation of land titles in wetlands, restoration of degraded wetlands, enforcement of community-based management planning and mass sensitizations up to grass levels. It leaves a deficit of 6.3% to return wetlands in Uganda to the original coverage which was first mapped in 1994.
The demand to conserve and protect over 8000 wetlands needs more than what is currently being done. The country’s National Development Plan III (NDPIII) targets to raise the percentage coverage of wetlands to 10% by 2025 and the Ministry of Water and Environment expects the country shall be able to achieve only 0.7% target by that year due to a number of challenges.
We divulge into the efforts being undertaken by the ministry to save wetlands in the country.
Re-demarcating wetlands Boundaries:
As of 2024, the cumulative wetlands area restored now stands at 59,407 ha surpassing the 55,906 ha target as in the Nationally Determined Contribution implementation plan. Uganda has 8613 gazetted wetlands in the country.
Minister of State for Environment, Beatrice Anywar notes that the government efforts over the last ten years have been to reclaim degraded wetlands through wetlands restoration, demarcation initiatives, massive public awareness campaigns and creation of environment Protection Police.
The ministry says they engaged over 500, 000 stakeholders from 13 districts in Uganda over the past 4 years to sensitize them on smooth wetlands demarcation and restorations. This made them demarcate 609.1km of wetlands in the 13 districts. The cumulative wetlands length demarcated in Uganda is 2,096.4 km out of the targeted 5,000km by 2025.
Gulu City Authority is to undertake initiative to re-demarcate and open boundaries of the two major wetlands in the city. A move to reclaim old wetland boundaries that have been encroached into by community and stops further encroachment.
The Gulu City Environment Officer says they are currently involved in assessing the magnitude of the encroachment but will re-plant mark stones along the two streams of Pece and Oyitino.
During the celebration of National Wetlands Day in Gulu City, Minister, Justine Kasule Lumumba launched re-demarcation exercise in the city by planning some mark stones along Pece stream.
“We are putting back our markstones to demarcate where the wetland stops, to help in protecting our streams, we have both the Oyitino and the Pece stream”, Aryemo adds.
Restoration of wetlands:
To save the wetlands, the city authority is also coming up with strategic plan to conduct massive eviction campaigns basing on the presidential directives on wetlands ordering people to leave wetlands voluntarily. “Don’t think we are sleeping, initially we did not have the protection unit active, but now we have environment protection team that is based here in Gulu City, Latigo, the city environments officer adds.
The number of those who have encroached into the wetlands in Gulu City is not clear, but it is estimated that there are more than 100 families farming on the wetlands a few of them have erected structures within the same area.
However, the city authority says they are not able to enforce restoration expeditiously because they are financially constrained to facilitate the process.
“We need partners to help us restore our wetlands, like planting back the trees even papyrus, we can plant them back and that is what we are looking forward to see us revamp Pece Stream and Oyitino wetland”, Joyce notes.
In places where wetlands have been re-demarcated, there are cases of re-encroachment, and this is attributed to low funding to the Local Governments.
In 2018, a district on average received UGX 3 million shillings as ENR- Conditional Grant which is inadequate for the Local Government Officers to ensure compliance after restoration.
The Auditor General Report 2018 recommended for an increment of the ENR Conditional Grant to a basic minimum of UGX 15 million per year to ensure compliance and districts’ participation in the restoration and demarcation of wetlands.
However, the permanent secretary Ministry of Water and Environment Alfred Okidi Okot reiterated the government’s commitment in financing wetlands management in the country.
Okidi adds that this has helped them moved towards achieving the restoration of degraded wetlands, demarcation and gazetting of all wetlands in Uganda.
Despite the City Authority failure to enforce and implement the existing laws on Wetlands Management in the country. Gulu City Council in January 2024 tabled a by-law on Washing Bays and waste management in the City.
“We are going to come out with bylaws, we are going to do that massively in the next three months, washing Bays are too many, still again, we are not sitting”, Joyce adds.
Acholi Ker Kwaro plans to come out with an environmental policy document that would also regulate the management of the environment in the sub-region.
Tony Olanya Olenge the designated Minister of Natural Resources at the cultural institution is in the final phase to come out with a policy to protect the natural resources in the sub-region.
“We are at the final step to come out with a policy document, Acholi Environment Policy, we think such an initiative of developing a policy document will push different stakeholders including the different Councils of Acholi so that the issues of environment are put priority”, Olanya adds.
Olanya says the institution has received support from the Green Logic Agency to give 10 million tree seedlings to the institution in a move to plant trees across Acholi.
Christine Olok, the Deputy Mayor of Gulu City Council says as a council they have been working to ensure they conserve and protect the wetlands in the city as she calls for teamwork to stop the abuse.
“The council is doing its work, but we know that we are managing people, people are very difficult to manage, but we are doing our best, let us join hands and fight this bad habit as a team”, Olok adds.
Below is the list of gazetted wetlands in Uganda
Environment and Infrastructure Court:
The environmentalists see hope in the country having an Environment and Infrastructure Court to fight the increasing cases of environment crimes such deforestation , encroachment into wetlands , and illegal sand mining.
Uganda currently does not have a special court to try the perpetrators of environmental crimes in the country. They heavily rely on other courts when suspects are apprehended and presented to the court.
The Water and Environment Ministry says the creation of such a special court will help them to handle the increasing environmental crimes in the country because the available court has been slow in pursuing such people.
The ministry believes that this court shall address the backlog of environmental cases in court today.
Mr Alfred Okidi Okot, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Water and Environment says their cases always take longer to be heard in the current courts some lasting for over years which has greatly affected efforts to provide justice to the environment,
“We have been having cases, but our cases have been taking long to be attended to, this time we are saying, we need a court to help us attend to those criminal offences which come from the backyards of practitioners of people who enter into the wetlands”. Okidi said.
The Ministry currently has a well-established Environment Protection Unit under the Uganda Police Force which helps to enforce the arrest of the perpetrators of the environment. But Gulu City Resident City Commissioner Okili Jane Frances says there has been a segregative arrest of those who have violated environmental laws.
Okili proposes that some of the wetlands encroachers need to be cained by sticks on their buttocks to understand in the African way.
Audio File Two: Gulu City RCC Okili talking about the Restoration of Wetlands.
The Environment Protection Unit of the Ministry has been facing a lot of challenges to tackle environment injustices rather than lack of special court. The unit does not have enough human resources, finances and operation vehicles. The Environment Police rely heavily on the support by the local government to go for field operations.
In Aswa River region (West Aswa and East Aswa), there is no single vehicle attached to the unit and there is only one grounded motorcycle to enforce operation and arrest of the environment perpetrators in the entire Acholi sub region. This has made the team to be easily compromised and it has jeopardized the effort to save dwindling environment in the sub region.
Minister of State for environment, Beatrice Anywar says her ministry is currently reviewing the National Wetlands Policy of 1994 to match with the current global trend and emerging issues, in turn, the ministry was due to present before parliament wetlands Bill .
She reiterated her ministry’s commitment to ensure that president’s directive on wetlands is fully implemented since it is a serious offence to degrade wetlands in the country.
