Dar es Salaam produces 1,320 tonnes of waste a day. 792 tonnes reach the dump.
On 4th September the Baraza la Madiwani of Dar es Salaam City Council met in special session and agreed to bring in the private sector, under a PPP, to run the Pugu Kinyamwezi dumpsite. The meeting was chaired by the Mayor, Nurdin Bilal, with the City Director, Elihuruma Mabelya, as secretary. It was called to act on President Samia Suluhu Hassan's instruction to deal with the state of the city, after she said plainly what most residents already knew, and after the Speaker made the same point in Bunge.
The numbers presented in that meeting are the part worth reading twice. The City Council area generates about 1,320 tonnes of waste a day. Of that, 792 tonnes reach Pugu. Across all the councils in the region, generation runs at 2,500 to 3,000 tonnes a day. The city's own strategy targeted 80 percent of waste reaching the dump, and the Director told the council directly that the strategy has failed. The Ilala District Commissioner added that the machinery at the site is dead and that there is waste spread across 400 acres before you even reach the dump gate.
I want to be clear that I think the council did the right thing on 4th September, and that saying the strategy failed in an open meeting is more useful than another year of not saying it. But I run a waste business, and I read those numbers differently from the way they were presented.
The gap is the story
Roughly 530 tonnes a day are unaccounted for in the City Council area alone. Region-wide, the gap is a great deal larger. That material does not evaporate. It goes into the drains, the riverbanks, the road verges and the open plots, or it gets burned in a yard behind someone's house. A study published this year mapping waste across Dar found accumulation in waterways running up to three times higher than in the surrounding built-up areas. That is not a mystery to anyone living in Jangwani or Keko. It is simply the arithmetic of 530 tonnes a day, made visible.
On 21st September the Ilala District Commissioner, Edward Mpogolo, announced that anyone caught dumping waste illegally in Dar es Salaam will face a fine of TSh 300,000 to 1,000,000, or 12 to 24 months in prison. The city also plans to recruit young people who have completed national service training to enforce it.
Enforcement has its place, and the Commissioner was clear that the aim is discipline rather than punishment. But a fine only works where there is a lawful alternative. If 530 tonnes a day are not being collected, much of that dumping is not a choice. It is what happens when the truck does not come. Fining the household at the end of that chain treats the symptom, and the same tonnage still has to go somewhere.
Which brings us to October
On 18th August, the Tanzania Meteorological Authority forecast that the short rains will be substantially shaped by a very strong El Niño. Heavy rainfall across the northern coast including Dar es Salaam, the north-eastern highlands including Arusha and Kilimanjaro, and the Lake zone. Rain intensifies in November and continues into January. Tanzania's previous strong El Niño years were 1982/83, 1997/98 and 2015/16, and nobody who lived through those needs the implications explained.
Put the two documents side by side. One says the drains are carrying several hundred tonnes a day of material that was meant to go somewhere else. The other says the heaviest rain in years arrives in about eight weeks.
Blocked drainage plus sustained rain produces floods, and floods in a city with this sanitation profile produce cholera. That much is routine. The less routine risk is the dump itself. Pugu is described by the council's own officials as overwhelmed, with dead machinery and unmanaged tipping across hundreds of acres. Every major dumpsite collapse in Africa in the last decade, Koshe in Addis Ababa, Kiteezi in Kampala, Conakry in Guinea three weeks ago, happened at an over-capacity site after prolonged heavy rain. It fails the same way every time.
What a PPP for Pugu does and does not fix
A contractor at Pugu can fix real things. Working machinery, controlled tipping, compaction, cover, a weighbridge that produces numbers you can trust, and a site that is managed rather than merely occupied. Those are worth having and the city should get on with procuring them.
But a PPP for a dumpsite is a procurement of disposal. It answers the question of who operates the pile. It does not answer the question of what arrives at it, and the whole problem in those figures is what arrives. There is a specific risk in how these contracts get written. If the contractor is paid on tonnage delivered to Pugu, then the city has created a commercial interest in the pile growing. Everyone will then work hard, in good faith, to close the gap between 792 and 1,320 by dumping more, and in five years Dar es Salaam will need somewhere to put a dump that is now receiving 1,320 tonnes a day instead of 792. That is not a solution. That is the same problem with better paperwork and a longer contract.
The alternative is not complicated. Pay for diversion and recovery as well as disposal. Most of what is in that stream is organic, and with the right innovations, organic waste is an agricultural input, not a liability. A small percentage of the recyclable fraction already has a market and is already being pulled out of the pile by people working at Pugu without contracts, protection or recognition. A PPP that recognizes those people, incentivizes holistic waste management and pays for increased recycling rates is a different instrument from one that pays for buried tonnage, and it costs the city less over time rather than more.
We are not writing this from a distance
Okota sorts and processes waste in Arusha, and turns it into value. Arusha is under the same forecast, with rain due from the first weeks of October.
We do not think the answer is asking households to separate their waste. We have tried. Our source separation projects failed, and they cost us time and money on the way. The best results came in primary schools, and even there the children would sort correctly into two bins and the cleaner would tip both into the same pile at the end of the day. Separation at source holds only if every link in the chain holds, from the household to the bin to the collector to the truck to the facility. One bottle in the organic stream means the entire load has to be sorted anyway.
So we build for the waste that actually arrives, which is mixed. That is what a material recovery facility is. Conveyors and sorting lines designed on the assumption that nothing upstream was separated, staffed by people who are good at the work, pulling a mixed stream apart into dozens of categories that can be sold or processed. The organic fraction, which is the majority of it, goes to black soldier fly and comes back out as animal feed and fertiliser.
That is the capability Dar es Salaam is missing, and it is not the same capability as a dumpsite contract. A contractor at Pugu is procured to receive waste and bury it properly. Nobody is currently being procured to take mixed waste off the trucks and pull it apart before it gets there. Those are two different jobs. Burying waste costs money, and the cost goes up every year as the city grows. Recovering waste earns money, and every tonne recovered is a tonne nobody has to bury.
Four things before the rains
The PPP process will take months. The rain will not wait for it, so a few things are worth doing in parallel.
Clear the drainage hotspots now, in September, rather than responding to them in November. The mapping to prioritize this already exists.
Repair or replace the equipment at Pugu before the site is taking on water. An unmanaged waste slope in a very strong El Niño is not a housekeeping problem.
Publish the tonnage weekly by ward. The region already collects a Friday report on generation, collection and delivery to Pugu. Making it public would do more for accountability than any additional directive.
Write diversion and recovery into the contract. If the PPP is measured only on what reaches the dump, the city will have procured a faster route to the same place. The measure that matters is how much material leaves the waste stream, not how much arrives at Pugu.
The point
The President was right to say it out loud, and the council was right to act on it within days. The risk now is that the response is judged on whether the streets look better in December. The honest test is different. If this works, the tonnage collected goes up and the tonnage buried at Pugu goes down at the same time. Any other combination means the city has simply paid someone to move the problem to Kinyamwezi more efficiently, and it will be back in front of the council within a few years, with the same 400 acres and a worse forecast.
We would rather be part of building the first version. If you are working on the Pugu process, on ward-level collection, or on the same question in any other Tanzanian city, we are happy to talk.
Comments