MUKONO — At about 6 am on Saturday, the sound of drums went through Bamutakudde Village in Kyampisi Sub-county, Mukono District.
It was not a call to war. It was a call to work.
By morning, residents had gathered to sweep roads, collect rubbish, clear their surroundings and, this time, plant trees.
For LC1 Chairman Solomon Serwanjja, the exercise was more than another National Cleaning Day activity. It was a glimpse of the village he says he wants to build over the next five years: cleaner, greener, better organised and capable of solving some of its problems through collective action.
“We believe that in the next five years, this place is going to be a model village where people will come and learn from us about managing our villages,” Serwanjja said. “It is going to be a place where we are all happy as a community to live and coexist.”
That ambition is being tested first through something deceptively simple: cleaning.
While the government’s National Cleaning Day brings communities together on the last Saturday of every month, Serwanjja says Bamutakudde has decided not to wait for the calendar.
“We clean every Saturday. We wake up, open roads, sweep, collect rubbish and do community work.”
The village has also introduced its own rules to discourage littering. Residents who throw rubbish on the road and refuse to pick it up can be required to sweep the road.
The leadership is also preparing to install separate dustbins for recyclable and decomposable waste, with at least two bins planned for every road and additional ones along the Bamutakudde Highway.
Tree-lined roads
But Serwanjja’s vision goes beyond cleanliness. He wants the roads that residents are sweeping today to become tree-lined roads in the years ahead.
On Saturday, the community planted seedlings along village roads, with support from the Good Forests Foundation Uganda, which donated 2,000 seedlings. The package included 1,000 fruit trees and 1,000 indigenous tree species.
“This Saturday is special because we committed ourselves to planting trees,” Serwanjja said. “The community came together, dug the pits, planted the trees and watered them.”
Some of the trees will provide fruit; others are intended to provide shade and improve the appearance of the village.
Serwanjja said he specifically requested cherry blossom trees, similar to those seen in Kampala, because he wants the Bamutakudde Highway eventually to become visually distinctive.
Simon Jacob Ssekkajja, a farmer training facilitator at Good Forests Foundation Uganda, said the organisation supported Serwanjja’s request because of the potential to combine environmental restoration with household nutrition.
“Our vision is that a good forest can be a climate solution,” Ssekkajja said. “We hope that by the time the chairman’s term comes to an end, his community will be cooler and have more shade trees for his community.”
The foundation also distributed fruit seedlings, including oranges and avocados, to enrich the nutrition and improve the health of the community.
Ssekkajja believes the Bamutakudde initiative could offer a lesson to other local leaders.
He argued that the national impact could be significant if individual villages adopted modest targets.
“I think that, at a small scale, if every village can plant about 300 trees, by the time we have it at the country level, we would have increased the forest cover of the whole country at large,” he said.
Gertrude Namyalo, 67, the first resident to receive the trees, vowed to embrace environmental conservation by digging pits, planting trees, and preparing dried goat manure to nourish her new seedlings. “We have a water tank to irrigate the trees.”
Bulungi Bwansi
For Serwanjja, however, the most significant part of the exercise is the willingness of residents to work together.
He says Bamutakudde has revived an old idea that once held communities together: bulungi bwansi — collective community work.
“I think these are policies that we had before in the times of our forefathers, and I want to argue that it’s time for us to go back to those norms and principles that we had,” he said.
But there is an unusual feature to Bamutakudde’s version of communal work. After cleaning, residents often eat together.
Someone brings cassava. Another brings matooke. Someone else brings beans or beef. Others bring tea.
“We usually have breakfast together every Saturday,” Serwanjja said. “These different things help us to be united. We talk about whatever is happening in the community, laugh about it, but at the end of the day, it is that unity that we have as a village.”
The larger plan
When he assumed the LC1 leadership, Serwanjja says he did not want to operate simply as a chairman who responded to problems as they appeared. The village developed a five-year strategic plan, followed by annual plans and budgets.
The approach has produced a list of priorities: clean water, household income, skills development, access to government programmes and stronger community institutions.
Serwanjja’s model village, however, is not supposed to be defined only by trees and clean roads.
He wants a village where residents have access to clean water, children can attend school nearby, young people can acquire practical skills, and households can generate income.
He also wants to establish a nursery school, develop community businesses and create opportunities for young people in areas such as electrical wiring and catering services for the women.
“We don’t have a single school or sports ground in this village. I’m appealing to well-wishers for support so we can have our facilities and be able to support needy students with school fees and scholastic materials.”
Checks and balances
But beneath all these plans lies a more difficult question: who owns the village?
Serwanjja argues that the answer cannot simply be the chairman.
He has established a five-member Council of Elders to scrutinise the work of the LC1 leadership.
“We believe that structure helps to limit the power of the chairman,” he said. “Sometimes chairmen think they are the alpha and omega. We believe that with this structure, we will be kept in check by the Council of Elders.”
The village has also conducted a household census, collecting information about residents, livelihoods, children and school attendance.
He believes this data will help the leadership understand the community and plan its interventions. “People don’t like laying foundations because they disturb. But once these foundations are laid, we’ll be able to build a strong village that we’re all proud of, a day at a time.”
And that may be the real experiment underway in Bamutakudde.
A brighter and more secure village
Serwanjja also has a plan to install solar-powered security lights in Bamutakudde trading centre and along the roads to ensure safety for the residents.
“We also plan to work with police to increase monitoring and security. We are also dividing the village into cells with a leader for each cell armed with a loudspeaker that can alert others in case of attacks or theft.”
Can a village turn ordinary local leadership into something more ambitious: a laboratory for community governance, environmental restoration and collective responsibility?
Serwanjja is willing to test the idea.
“We want Bamutakudde to be the test,” he said.
“I know people outside Bamutakudde are saying, ‘You’re bringing a lot of English. You’re saying a lot of these things.’ Okay, let us be the first village where this English is going to be tested, whether it works or not.”
For now, the evidence is still young.
The roads have been cleaned. The rubbish has been collected. The seedlings are in the ground.
The drums will sound again next Saturday.
And the real test begins then.
