NEMA suspends activities at NYTIL over River Nile contamination

The National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) has suspended activities at a textile company, Southern Range Nyanza Limited also known as Nytil, for allegedly discharging hazardous water waste into River Nile.

The suspension follows an inspection of the facility in Jinja following public outcry especially on social media where many expressed concerns over the way the facility was pouring the waste into the river.

Following public outcry, NEMA team on Wednesday, January 5, inspected the facility and discovered that there was a blockage at the facility’s Effluent Treatment Plant that caused industrial waste water to overflow into a storm water drainage channel and subsequently into River Nile.

The team picked samples from the river for laboratory analysis to inform the way forward.

On Thursday, NEMA said in a statement that they had come into a decision to halt all activities at NYTIL that generate waste water, a move the body said is aimed at preventing further contamination of the river.

“In order to prevent further pollution of the river, all activities at NYTIL that generate industrial waste water have been suspended by NEMA until an effective Effluent Treatment Plant has been designed and operationalized, to handle all the effluent generated at the facility, to the satisfaction of NEMA,” NEMA noted.

NEMA added that the move is in line with the provisions of the National Environment Act No. 5, 2019 and the National Environment (Standards for Discharge of Effluent into Water or Land) Regulations, 2020.

“Unregulated discharge of industrial waste water is a public health hazard and has deleterious impacts on the environment including; loss of aquatic biodiversity, contamination of food chains, compromising the quality of usable water especially for downstream users.”

NEMA thanked the public for being vigilant and urged citizens to continue reporting environmental breaches and incidents within their communities.

The development comes a day after Nytil’s management admitted the overflow but promised to rectify the problem.

“It has since been established that the effluent treatment infrastructure suffered a breakdown resulting in the accidental overflow of effluent into the river. Fortunately, the engineering team is already on ground to fix the problem and resolve it with finality,” Nytil General Manager, Viny Kumar said in a statement.