Let me revisit a subject dear to me, about which I wrote  a decade ago. I first set foot in Kampala sixty years ago. My father and I stayed at a lodge across from the old Central Bus Park, one of those places above the Indian merchants’ shops, reached by a staircase that had no metal grill or gate to keep out mischief makers. None was needed. Kampala was a safe place, even for a naive traveller from the southwestern highlands.

The Kampala my father allowed me to see was a strikingly beautiful place. The Central Bus Park held what looked to me like endless rows of double-deck green and cream buses we called Kabandole, parked with a precision that today’s doctors might have diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive disorder. The park was neat. There was no chaos in it.

The city covered seven hills, a fact we were required to know in civics class. It had a very good public transport system, reliable water and sanitation, and constant electricity. The word loadshedding had not yet entered our national vocabulary. The public parks invited residents and visitors to rest, to exchange tender words with loved ones, or simply to sit in the sunshine without fear of gun-toting police, crime preventers or thieves. City Square was a communal space whose permanence was taken for granted by rulers and subjects alike. Nobody laid claim to it because everybody owned it.

There was something almost hallowed about New Mulago Hospital, the Parliament Buildings, Broadcasting House, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the Uganda Museum, the National Theatre, the Nommo Gallery, Mengo Lubiri and the Bulange, Namirembe and Rubaga Cathedrals, All Saints and Christ the King, Kibuli Mosque and the Baha’i House of Worship at Kikaya Hill. They were easy to reach. They had breathing room around them. Nothing yet crowded in on their beauty.

The Central Business District was neat and easy to navigate. Traffic was light enough for window shopping and for a rendezvous with friends from Gayaza High School and Mount Saint Mary’s Namagunga.

Then there was Makerere University, where clever people walked with furrowed faces and bowed heads, avoiding greetings and eye contact lest they lose their train of thought, forever solving problems and living in a world of their own. Or so we were led to believe.

The campus was immaculately clean. Its buildings sat in what was really a very large garden of flowers and trees and lawns like carpet, with tarmacked boulevards leading to well-appointed halls of residence and staff houses. The Main Hall towered over The Hill and commanded respect. It was the symbol of intellect and leadership.

From Makerere Hill one looked across Katanga Valley at the majestic buildings of New Mulago Hospital. Nothing interrupted that view. The slums and the trash and the corrugated iron fences were thirty years in the future.

Hidden over the hill, though, was the Mulago slum, a sprawling mass of small houses with poor sanitation and few services. Like Kisenyi, Namuwongo and Kivulu, it was the kind of neighbourhood that public health experts expected to shrink and give way to something better. They did not imagine that the slum would become the future of large parts of the city and of the greenbelt around it.

The city had been planned on an apartheid basis, with distinct areas for Europeans, Asians and Europeanised Africans. I do not defend that. But there was a purposeful method to the madness, and for the most part the Kampala of sixty years ago was livable, healthy and orderly.

This did not happen by accident. Kampala was made a township in 1902 and received its first formal plan in 1912, which laid out the central business district. Two further exercises, in 1919 and 1930, settled a layout that has hardly changed in a hundred years.

The most thorough of them was the 1930 report of A. E. Mirams, a planning consultant and land valuer who had spent fifteen years as a town planner in India. Mirams assumed steady growth and designed services for a city of about sixty thousand people. Kampala had other plans.

There were 24,000 people in the municipality in 1948. Then, in 1968, after the abolition of the kingdoms, Kampala swallowed Mengo municipality along with Kawempe, Nakawa and the other townships around it. The kibuga beside which the colonial town had been built was now inside it. The first census after that expansion, in 1969, counted 330,700 people. The numbers have never looked back. There were 458,503 in 1980, 774,241 in 1991, 1,189,142 in 2002, 1,507,080 in 2014 and 1,797,722 in 2024. Very little was added to the basic infrastructure along the way.

Even those figures flatter us. Kampala is now wrapped inside the sprawling district of Wakiso, whose 3,411,177 people either work in the city or come to it for health care and other services. The beautiful city on seven planned hills that welcomed me in 1966 now covers dozens of unplanned hills, valleys and wetlands, converted into a concrete jungle that I find hard to bear. For practical purposes Kampala now runs from beyond Nansana in the north to Nsangi in the west, to Entebbe in the south and Mukono in the east.

There have been visible improvements in the official Kampala since the creation of the Kampala Capital City Authority. But the damage done by unplanned building and settlement in the surrounding areas is probably beyond repair.

The tragedy is not that Kampala became an urban jungle. The tragedy is that other towns have not learnt from it. Ten years ago I wrote in this column that Mburara was in the advanced stages of Kampalitis. I can report that Mburara now has the disease in its fully established form. It is Kabaare that shows the early signs.

The random placement of buildings of every size, shape and purpose has become as Ugandan as matoke and meat stew. I toured every corner of Kabaare early this year. The unplanned neighbourhoods were not merely an eyesore. They were a health and safety hazard, and a faithful copy of Kampala. No roads. No sidewalks. Poor water services. No public sewerage. Poor drainage for rainwater. No local schools, health facilities or places to play.

The disease is not confined to the big towns. Small towns and trading centres are miniature replicas of the Kampala story, and some are worse, because they have neither public washrooms nor water. I saw places serving cooked food to customers without water for handwashing and without a toilet of any kind.

We need an enforceable law that requires serious, scientific planning of every Ugandan community, rural and urban, whatever its size and wherever it sits. We need officials who will apply it to the powerful as readily as to the poor.

The colonial officials who planned Kampala did not love us. They planned anyway, and we have lived off their foresight for a hundred years. We say we love our country. Let us plan it.