By Soita Khatondi Wepukhulu
For months after the disaster at Kiteezi, the death toll was disputed, with residents and local authorities reporting different numbers. KCCA public health director Dr. Sarah Zzalwango confirmed to Agora this August that the official records put the missing and the dead at 11 and 35 respectively.
These numbers remain highly contested by residents who spoke with Agora, with some accusing KCCA and the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) which handles disasters of threatening waste pickers from revealing the true death toll to the media.
But Joshua Ariho spoke out. He lost both his wife and child and when we met in late September last year, he was already one of the leading voices calling for accountability. But his resolve appeared shaken.
“I have no hope of the government recovering the bodies of my wife and child since it has been two months now,” he told us, “Even the bodies recovered two days later had no skin anymore. They were all white. Imagine what the heat from the waste does to a body two months later.”
Two weeks later, at a church service in their memory, he stood surrounded by friends, family, and other residents from Kiteezi. The congregation sang, prayed, and clung to words of comfort drawn from the biblical book of Ruth and the story of Lazarus.
“Your pain will birth something greater,” the pastor preached. “This pain and suffering will turn for good.”
The pastor extended his hands over the grieving man. “Turn the Kiteezi name which is now a bad name because of the landslide and loss of lives, into a name for good.”
The service was also a call to action. The church had already helped 25 displaced families with rent and distributed food to more than 1,500 people in partnership with Phaneroo Ministries. But the emotional needs were as great as the physical ones.
“I personally knew seven waste pickers who died that day,” another woman waste picker told us. Many of those lost women were mothers from distant upcountry villages, drawn to Kiteezi by the promise of a daily income without needing capital.
Compensation woes
Today, relatives of the dead and missing are still overwhelmed by grief. Some grieving family members who lost several people also told Agora of serious struggles with their mental health. A man who lost 3 family members had fallen physically and mentally ill as the one year anniversary approached. A mother who lost a daughter and grandchild has since struggled with chronic depression and psychosis. Yet, as if this was not enough trauma, in the months that followed the collapse, survivors had a second ordeal—- chasing financial compensation from the government for their loss. They battled this ordeal in endless queues, in government offices, and over handwritten compensation beneficiary lists that seemed to disappear as quickly as they were made.
Jack Otong, a Kiteezi resident, says on the day of the disaster, officials of KCCA called him asking for his land documents so he could be “added to the compensation list”. But by the time he followed up, his name had gone off the list.
Otong says his house had been deemed to be out of the danger when KCCA had marked out areas around Kiteezi for drainage expansion in June 2023, more than a year before the collapse. He says he was told the house was in the buffer zone.
In 2024, his house survived but, he says, since the disaster, whenever it rains, dirty water pools around the houses, smelling like chemicals. He says residents suspect the pungent chemicals are released in timing with the rain. Otong and others are desperately poor.
“I had to sell my door to get something to eat, and my children don’t have anything to eat,” Otong says.
In July 2025, he says some of his neighbours received payouts — Shs48 million for the lowest amounts, up to Shs180 million for others — but he remains uncompensated.
Douglas, Otong’s neighbour of nine years, has had the same experience. His house, partially destroyed to channel water from the garbage slide, has been listed for compensation “two or three times” but never when it counts.
“I don’t trust the government to compensate us. They’re trying to defraud us,” he says.
Layers of loss and complex land rights
According to Godfrey Balukku, a Kiteezi resident acting as liaison to KCCA and the Office of the Prime Minister, compensation has been split into three categories: Houses torn down by excavators following the disaster, bereaved families, and damaged or submerged houses.
Owners of houses torn down by excavators in the days and weeks following the disaster to make way for water from the landfill were to be compensated as ordered by OPM. However, the other two categories was more complicated.
The bereaved families to be compensated were eleven, according to KCCA. But the process of compensation has been challenged by the absence of dead bodies which the government says is essential for issuing death certificates, and consequently compensation. The president previously promised to pay Shs5 million for each life lost.
Meanwhile, KCCA listed 48 houses as damaged post-slide and set a compensation amount of Shs8.1 billion following completion of valuation reports for the houses by the Ministry of Works in April 2025.
Balukku says given the tangled ownership system of leaseholders, landlords, and bona fide tenants, a deliberate decision was made that payments and valuations be made for houses, not land. But to date, the Ministry of Finance has pledged but not yet delivered the funds for homes damaged by mud, floods, and waste.
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