A four storeyed building under construction in Kisenyi zone Muzaana Parish in downtown collapsed Sunday leaving unaccounted people dead.
By midnight, Police had retrieved 6 dead bodies and two children who were found alive and rushed to Mulago hospital for urgent medical attention.
Unconfirmed number of people remain trapped in the rubble.
A big number of people who are feared dead, are the builders mostly men and a few women that took care of them.
Among those confirmed dead are five males and one female.
The Police fire and rescue team with the help of Red cross continue to navigate below the rubble in a search for the missing people.
The collapse comes hardly a month after another structure in Rubaga division caved in killing the builders.
It emerged that the owner of this building Haji Abdul Kawiya defied KCCA directives to cease construction as he lacked permit.
Shocking Details on Kisenyi Building
This website has established that the collapsed mega structure belongs to a wealthy businessman Haruna Ssentongo, a brother to popular tycoon Hamis Kiggundu.
The building, at a time it collapsed was not supervised by Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) since the building inspector in charge of Kampala Central Division, Benjamin Ntege had resigned about three weeks ago.
The authority had not replaced him despite the need for a building inspector in a such busy division.
Our investigation reveals that Mr Ntege was prompted to quit his job after learning that his superiors were engaged in ambiguous processes while awarding construction permits to city landlords to erect skyscrapers which don’t meet the required minimum standards.
“Ntege was very bitter and he included all his grievances in a letter he sent to his bosses explaining his resignation,” said an official at City Hall.
“His resignation means that no one was responsible for any construction that has been happening in the last three weeks,” a separate source added.
We contacted Mr Ntege to corroborate the information we received, he couldn’t pick our repeated calls. A source said he could have been avoiding calls especially at a time when the building collapsed in ‘his’ area.
A building inspector is qualified to inspect both domestic and commercial structures.
A building inspection can be carried out prior, during and after a structure has been built and is sometimes done at random to ensure builders are complying with the correct standards.
In the absence of the building inspector, the building control officer should be available to monitor the progress of such mega structure and reports to the director physical planning and director engineering.
This website has learnt that these had not stepped at the site in Kisenyi after the resignation of Ntege.
Shockingly the KCCA Director Engineering Justus Akankwansa and Director Physical planning Richard Irumba are all in acting capacity.
A source says that because the two have been in acting positions for a long time, there is a way that status affects their work performance. “Working when you are not sure whether you will retain the job or not results into job insecurity.”
A source raised an example of Andrew Kitata, who served as the KCCA Director of Engineering and Technical Services from 2011 and in 2018 he was appointed acting KCCA ED but was dropped 18 months later by the President. It aroused a lot of disenchantment in the authority.
Further, our investigation revealed that Richard Irumba is a surveyor who heads a Directorate of Physical Planning when he is less qualified for such a huge office that requires wide knowledge and expertise.
The Building control officers are two; Bernadette Sanyu and Peter Paul Wanyama. These were nowhere in the absence of Ntege.
By law, these officers must routinely visit the construction site to check if the contractors are complying with the directives to avoid mishaps like what happened in Kisenyi yesterday.
This website also understands that there are no proper procedures in KCCA in relation to the new building control Act that replaced building operations.
Our investigation reveals that up to now KCCA has never come up with proper workflow processes to manage this new law.
Contacted for a comment, the KCCA publicist Daniel Nuweabine said he was not aware of Ntege’s resignation, “I don’t know if it’s true but we shall establish that.”
