Rich landlords in the slums!!!

By Hellen Nyamweru: As the old adage goes."the poor will always be the walking sticks of the rich".A true revelation of this is being witnessed by the numbering and enumeration teams in Mbale slums during the on going enumeration and mapping activities.In Nkoma ward where there are very large expanse of slums,enumerators in the numbering teams discovered the painful truth of absent landlords who own very many stuctures lacking even the basic services i.e toilets and wash areas.In Uganda government regulations on housing are an abused subject,nobody takes note of this,not even the tenants who live in these dilapidated structures they call homes because they have no choice,places not suitable for human habitation.The local authorities and public health officials have a duty to ensure that landlords comply with standards on building and sanitation as stipulated by the Ugandan laws.These laws such as the public health act and local authority building codes are however are not observed in slum and settlements to the detriment of slum dwellers.This is worsened by the fact that private investors are not willing to invest in such areas.The poor in the slums are left to  fend for themselves,to negotiate how to live in very inhuman conditions!!.Ignorance is yet another characteristic of people living in the slums,they are not aware of their rights and therefore do not fight when things are not in order for instance on building regulations

In Nkoma,a large slum in Mbale city,a certain landlord owns more than 27 structures which do not really look like places human beings should be living.These houses lack toilets and bathrooms,structures they may wish to call toilets/bathrooms are made of tree branches,sacks and old plastics with open tops.I tried to enquire  on how often the landlord seeks to improve the status of the tenants especially concerning toilets and bathrooms but this is what I learnt from a tenant who has been here for seven years,"he comes to pick/demand  his money every end of month or sends some of his sons to do so,he has never tried to improve on the sanitation in this place, in fact if you do not have the rent,he sends you off but not after getting his rent either in cash or kind".

The deprivation of these services especially toilets and bathrooms hits women really hard because they require more privacy than men such as washrooms.It is the responsibility of landlords to ensure that tenants in the slums have access to toilets and wash areas as well as emptying pit latrines so that they do not overflow and become a health risk.This is however neglected in this area where landlords appear to be interested in renting as many structures as possible instead of taking care of sanitary needs of their tenants.

The toilet cum bathroom in the area in question,Nkoma ward, Nambozo cell was in very bad condition,almost full and yet the landlord who happens to be an absent landlord is most likely to do nothing about this.This calls for more sensitization on slum dwellers to realize that they have rights guarding against such inhuman conditions in these slums and it is hoped that the results of this enumeration exercise will help to inform many on this issues.