As residents blame authorities for Kampala’s recurring floods, a viral meme forces the city to confront an uncomfortable truth: the problem may also lie in our everyday habits.
It often begins with something small – a plastic bottle tossed from a car window. A takeaway wrapper dropped onto the pavement. A quick flick of the wrist as someone empties a drink and moves on. In the moment, it feels insignificant, just another piece of rubbish disappearing into Kampala’s gutters.
But when the rains come, and the drains choke, that small act returns with consequences. Streets turn into rivers, businesses shut down, cars stall in murky water, and the same city that threw the garbage begins to curse the floods.
It is precisely this uncomfortable cycle that a viral meme circulating on Ugandan social media, particularly on X, captures with brutal simplicity.
The image sequence depicts a hand casually throwing a plastic wrapper onto a street, followed by a close-up of a drainage grate choked with garbage, plastic bottles, cups, and bags, before ending with a panoramic view of flooded streets where buses and cars struggle through the water like reluctant boats.
The overlaid text drives the point home:
WHAT YOU DO
WHAT YOU CAUSE
AND WHAT YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT
The meme lands like satire with a sting. It delivers a sharp critique of collective hypocrisy and resonates deeply amidst the chaos of Kampala’s latest flooding episode.
In the wake of these recent floods, which once again submerged roads, disrupted businesses, damaged property and turned low-lying neighbourhoods into temporary lakes, many residents and commentators have been quick to point fingers at the government and the Kampala Capital City Authority, citing poor urban planning and climate change as major culprits.
These criticisms are valid. Decades of outdated infrastructure, rapid and largely unplanned urbanisation, encroachment on wetlands and inadequate drainage upgrades have undoubtedly left the city vulnerable. Urban master plans dating back to the 1970s have long been overtaken by population growth and unchecked development, turning natural water channels into constricted concrete traps.
However, the meme refuses to let the narrative end there.
It challenges us to look closer at the individual behaviours that compound into catastrophe.
Every tossed plastic bottle, every ignored waste bin, every casual “quick drop” of rubbish into a gutter feed directly into the blocked drains that turn heavy rain into disaster. Poor waste management is therefore not only a systemic failure; it is also sustained by millions of small, everyday acts of indifference.
Floods do not begin in the sky. They begin on the street.
Plastics and debris clog the very channels meant to carry water away, transforming streets into rivers and amplifying the impact of even moderate downpours.
This brings us to a timeless Biblical principle that cuts through the blame game with striking clarity. In the Gospel of Matthew 7:3–5, Jesus teaches:
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your brother’s eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
In context, the “plank” (or “log,” in some translations) represents our own glaring faults, while the “speck” symbolises the smaller failings we so readily identify in others. Applied to Kampala’s floods, the plank is our casual littering habits, our disregard for proper waste disposal and our contribution to the mountains of garbage that choke the city’s drains. The speck might be governmental shortcomings or planning oversights.
In essence, lamenting the “specks” while continuing to throw rubbish onto the streets is the height of hypocrisy. We complain about the floods even as we help engineer them.
True accountability must begin at home. If every resident stopped littering today, practised proper waste disposal and demanded the same responsibility from neighbours, the drains would arguably clear, water would flow more freely and the city’s resilience would improve dramatically. Until then, the meme stands as a mirror: before we blame the authorities for the “log” of poor planning, we must first remove the plank of our own contributory negligence.
Kampala’s floods are not only acts of nature or failures of leadership; they are also the cumulative result of everyday choices. They reflect what we do, what we cause and what we later complain about.
Before we curse the floods, we should perhaps ask a simpler question: what did we throw into the drain?
