A truck loaded with sugar cane at Victory sugar factory in Luwero/courtesy photo
The National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) has suspended the operations of Victoria Sugar factory in Luwero District over pollution.
The factory located at Ndibulungi village in Butuntumula Sub-County is one of the eminent brown sugar manufacturers, suppliers and exporters in Africa. However, the Environment Protection body faults the factory for operating without a wastewater treatment facility.
Instead, the factory which sits on 54 hectares of land was releasing wastewater into Lubenge Wetland, posing a risk to the communities in its neighbourhood. Now NEMA has directed that the operations of the factory be halted until a wastewater treatment facility is built.
Luwero District Councilor representing Butuntumula Sub-County Isaac Wampamba told our reporter that area leaders equally received complaints from their counterparts in Nakasongola about contaminated water that was flowing from the factory to Lubenge wetland.
However, their efforts to engage the administrators of the factory did not yield any fruit.
The administrators, according to Wampamba were only ready to listen to the Resident District Commissioner (RDC) and the ministry in charge of investments. It was against this background that they petitioned NEMA to intervene.
In May 2022, authorities in Luwero District ordered the administrators of the same sugar factory to demolish the perimeter wall they had started constructing after it reportedly blocked a 2-kilometre access road connecting to the Kampala-Gulu highway.
Its construction had left a number of households with difficulty in accessing their homes, farmlands and water sources especially boreholes according to the Ndibulungi village chairman John Wasswa. This development triggered protests from the aggrieved locals.
The Human Resource Officer at Victoria Sugar Company Esther Ayoko told journalists that the company had bought land from 11 residents and constructed the road for their trucks after the community denied them access to another community road. Ayoko added that the construction of the wall was meant to protect the children of the locals, from their trucks and also heighten security of the company from thieves.
Luwero District Chairman, Erasto Kibirango says that they had been forced to order the demolition of the wall because it was constructed in breach of the Physical Planning Act. He added that it was never authorized by the physical planning committee as the law stipulates.
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