fish |
The wear and tear
is evident, but the road has since been reduced to a bushy footpath
laden with black jack and a combination of thorny grasses.
Had it not been for
the gate and buildings in the distance, it would have been difficult to
imagine that this road leads up to the Shs2.8 billion fish handling
facility at Bugoto Fish Landing Site in Mayuge District. President
Museveni laid the foundation stone for the facility in 2008.
The landing site lies abandoned. Hundreds of bats are startled into flight as we approach the buildings.
Locals say the bats
have been the bonafide occupants of the premises since 2012 when the
contractors handed over the centre to the then Minister of State for
Fisheries, Ms Ruth Nankabirwa.
The fish handling
facility has, however, been lying idle because the fishing communities
which were supposed to use it rejected it, accusing the contractors of
having deviated from the initial architectural designs.
The chairman of the
Beach Management Unit in Bugoto, Mr Benson Kiiza, accuses the
contractors and officials of the Ministry of Agriculture of colluding to
alter the initial designs.
Mr Kiiza will not
say whether he has seen copies of the "original" designs nor the altered
ones. He also will not reveal his sources of information, but insists
that the facility was meant to have a fish store, boat building
structures, a filling station, an ice plant and a one kilometre tarmac
road. But all, he says, were never put in place.
Petition
Dissatisfied with
what they perceived as a raw deal, in June 2013, the community
petitioned both the Inspectorate of Government (IGG) and the Office of
the President to investigate the matter.
"We are filing a
complaint about the nonfunctioning fish handling facility at Bugoto
Landing Site. Work was done in a shoddy way and major equipment, which
would enable the facility function, were lacking," read a June 6, 2013
letter that the fishermen wrote to the IGG.
Fifty-one months
after they filed the petitions, the two offices are yet to respond, but
the situation is not peculiar to Bugoto. It has been replicated in
almost all other facilities that were constructed under the $31.46
million African Development Bank (AfDB)-funded Fisheries Development
Project (FDP).
The Nakasongola
facility has been the subject of a dispute between the district
officials and those of the ministry of Agriculture.
While officials
attached to the Fisheries department in the ministry of Agriculture
claim that an ice block plant, which was meant to provide ice blocks to
help with the preservation of fish at five landing sites had been fully
installed, district officials insist that it was defective.
"When we tried to
use the ice plant in 2016, it broke down in less than a year. The
contractor informed us that the time for the liability period had
expired before government handed over the plant to the district. We got
stranded," Nakasongola District Fisheries Officer David Nsamba recently
told the media.
Like the ones in
Nakasongola and Mayuge, the facility at Majanji in Busia is also lying
idle despite having been commissioned in 2012 by the then Fisheries
minister Nankiabirwa.
What could have gone wrong? Was it a wrong diagnosis or timing?
The AfDB funded
project was mooted at a time when fish had not only emerged as the
world's most highly traded food commodity, but also when the fear of the
possibility of registering an all-time decline in fish production had
become a clear and present danger.
Demand for fish had
been on the rise since the late 1990s and Uganda, which on account of
availability of a cheap labour force and highly prized varieties,
Tilapia and Nile Perch, was cashing in on the comparative advantage it
had over other fresh water fish producing countries.
In 1991, government banned export of unprocessed fish.
This led to growth of the establishment of fish processing units in Jinja, Kampala and Entebbe.
The industry was
once again boosted in 1998 when the European Union (EU) listed Uganda
among 12 least developed countries (LDCs), including among others
Senegal, Tanzania and Yemen, that could export fish products to the EU.
A 2010 World Bank
report indicates that besides helping in the fight against unemployment
and poverty, as well as directly and indirectly contributing to food
security, capture fish contributed 3 per cent to Uganda's Gross Domestic
Product (GDP). Post-harvest saw the contribution rise to 12 per cent.
Data from the Food
and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) indicates that income from fish
exports grew from about $1million in 1990 to within the region of $100
million in 2000.
Production oscillated between 200,000 and 250,000 tonnes between 1990 and the mid-2000s.
Though Uganda has
an array of water bodies which contribute to the national fisheries
sector, fish production data from other water bodies and swamps is
largely unavailable. What is available pertains to production in the
bigger water bodies like Lakes Victoria, Albert, Edward, Kyoga and River
Nile.
According to
figures from FAO, Nile Perch catches from Lake Victoria were way above
the 100,000 tonnes per year mark during the period between 1980 and
1990. They had peaked at 130,000 tonnes in 1992, but dropped to between
80,000 and 90,000 tonnes between 1995 and 1997.
The drop in catches
was attributed to among other things, over fishing and pollution of the
water bodies, which had an adverse effect on exports.
The bans
At the same time,
Uganda and the rest of the East African region were recovering from the
effects of two bans that the EU had slapped on their fish exports.
The first ban was
in 1997, which was imposed amid concerns over the safety of the
products. At the time, parts of the country, especially fishing
communities, had suffered an outbreak of cholera that claimed some
lives.
The second ban,
which cut across the East African region, was slapped in March 1999
after it emerged that some fishermen had resorted to the use of poison
to boost their catches. Though the bans were lifted in the middle of
2000, the fishing industry had suffered losses that it has never
recovered from.
The five-year
Fisheries Development Project, which was meant to commence in July 2002,
was therefore partially aimed at addressing both the issues of growth
and sustainability of the industry and the quality and food safety
issues that had precipitated the bans.
Designed for
implementation in fishing communities in western, central and eastern
regions, particularly around Lakes Victoria, Kyoga, Albert, Edward and
George, the target of the project was meant to directly benefit about
20,000 artisanal fishermen in capture fisheries and another 2,200 people
engaged in subsistence or commercial fish farming, and fish traders and
processors.
The project had
five different components, the first one being improvement of the
quality of fish and reduction of post-harvest losses.
It was under this
first component that the various facilities that are lying idle and are
at the centre of disputes between officials from Fisheries department in
the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries, fall.
Others were in the
area of aquaculture research and development, which aimed at enhancing
capacity for research and development of aquaculture production systems;
creation of a fisheries credit fund to provide credit to mostly female
fish farmers and processors; capacity building in the form of upping the
skills of staff and project participants; and the administration
component, which was aimed at ensuring that the project was implemented
in a timely manner.
The quality
assurance component entailed the development of 30 fish handling
centres, which were meant to be equipped with ice block making
facilities. It also entailed the upgrading of 21 fish markets,
establishment of fish quality laboratory and the improvement of
mechanisms for surveillance on the goings-on in the industry.
The surveillance part was boosted with the procurement and subsequent deployment of eight patrol boats and 31 motorcycles.
The Aquaculture
Research and Development component covers research into, among other
things, production of quality feeds and fish fry, and establishment of a
demonstration centre aimed at boosting production for especially fish
farmers.
However, the
project seems to have fallen short in so many aspects. The only bit of
success that seems to have been registered was in the area of research.
According to the
Director of the Jinja-based National Fisheries Resource Research
Institute (Nafirri), Dr Anthony Tabu Munyaho, facilities for a research
centre were established in Kajjansi, but they are not complete.
"A hostel to
accommodate trainees and a laboratory were constructed and completed.
They are in use, but the facility institute is not fully utilised
because it was meant to have come along with a fish hatchery and fish
pond, [which] were not completed. There were challenges with the
contractors.
Financial blow
The $2 million
Fisheries Credit Fund, which had been planned to provide fishermen and
others involved in the fisheries production and marketing processes with
loans to acquire modern fishing gear to boost production and
post-harvest management, was prematurely scrapped after local banks and
micro finance institutions declined to finance it.
"Micro-finance
institutions were reluctant to finance long-term loans, saying the risks
were high," the national coordinator of the project, Mr Edward Nsimbe
Bulega, told the media at the time the scheme was scrapped.
The story of
unrealised objectives, incomplete projects is, however, not confined to
only fish handling projects under the AfDB funded Fisheries Development
Project. It stretches to projects such as the Shs2 billion World Bank
funded fish handling project at Kagwara Landing Site in Serere District.
So what could have gone wrong?
The Director for
Fisheries, Dr Edward Rumanyika, insists that the projects were completed
well in time and to the required standards, but are only plagued by
mismanagement.
"Those units were
handed over to the local governments of each of the districts in which they are located and what we have there are management issues, which we
are trying to help them to address. We are trying to design a system
through which we can assist them so that they become fully operational,"
he says.
It is not clear
when such a system will be rolled out. What is clear is that Uganda is
stuck with shells of what was meant to be fish handling facilities.
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