urchison Bay is home to water treatment plants that supply Kampala city and neighboring towns. Uganda s National Water & Sewerage Corporation (NWSC) is experiencing rising treatment costs because lake water is dirtier and increasingly expensive to treat to potable quality. Ironically, the single largest polluter of Lake Victoria is NWSC s Sewage Treatment Plant at Bugolobi, which discharges 15,000 mВі /day of inadequately treated sewage into Murchison Bay.
3) Kenya s side is not a good situation too. Towns of Kakamega and Kisumu discharge inadequately treated sewage in rivers draining into Lake Victoria because of deficient treatment plants. Kisumu s sewage plant at Kisat with a design capacity of 9000 cubic meters now receives 15000 cubic meters of effluent, much of which flows into Lake Victoria without treatment. In Kakamega, sewage lagoons at Nabongo have been neglected for more than 3 years and are grossly inefficient.
4) Also, Tanzania s town of Mwanza located near Lake Victoria discharges large quantities of untreated waste into the lake. Waste from:
fish processing factories
oil processing plants
textile facilities and tanneriesdischarged into the lake without pre-treatment. Studies by Tanzania s University of Dar es Salaam on lakeshore sediments to investigate their heavy metal content revealed high concentrations of Zinc, Copper and Lead metals. Another study by Makerere University in Uganda identified alarming levels of lead in yams cultivated in Nakivubo wetland through which Kampala city s effluent flows before discharging into Lake Victoria. In both studies, the metals were attributed to industrial sources., More than anything else, it is discharge of untreated effluent and the lack of enforcement of discharge standards that are killing Lake Victoria.
5) Sources of heavy metal pollution of Lake Victoria is of interest due to its economic and domestic implication in East Africa. Sediments from the shore of Lake Victoria and from some streams flowing into the lake have been analyzed for their heavy metal content using Energy Dispersive X-Ray Fluorescence (EDXRF) analysis. The samples were collected from seventeen different locations around the Municipality of Mwanza divided into three zones according to their activities. The results show that sediments from Mwanza North, which is least in anthropogenic activities, contains Cr and Co ...
