Kampala’s road network continues to be under scrutiny due to a combination of several factors. factors.
As a former KCCA deputy executive director, I continue to receive various queries from people who are bewildered by the congestion and slow pace of road construction and rehabilitation in the city.
First, let’s make a comparison of our vascular congestion as compared to cities like we see the growth that we’ve seen in Nairobi and Kigali. In Kenya and Rwanda, their governments decided to invest substantially in the improvement of infrastructure in the cities to propel urban growth and urban well-being.
In Uganda, in contrast, we focus more on constructing the national roads so that we can be able to propel growth nationally. So, the investment focus is different and it reflects in the way the infrastructure looks.
If you move in Uganda’s countryside, the roads are good. You only find bad roads when you come into the cities. Ours is an export-led growth, trying to promote tourism, trying to improve agriculture, productivity and all. So, it is not that there is a lack of money, but the focus of investment is structured differently in the other countries compared to Uganda.
It begs the question then, what lessons can we leverage from the cities that have been mentioned within the region so that we can improve on our very own Kampala? Ideally, to improve the outlook of the city, government needs to invest substantially in improving the city’s old infrastructure.
In Kampala, most of the roads are aged over 30 years, except the ones where we are rehabilitating and building anew. A road life is supposed to be about 20 to 25 years with good maintenance.
That’s why you see the potholes, frequent breakages, which now results into the traffic jams you see, the long journey times and the congestion in the city, among others. Government has done its best to attract development partner financing. That’s where the World Bank, African Development Bank, and others come in.
But then, the money from the development partners is pointed. For example, the African Development Bank is investing about a trillion shillings in Kampala, but it’s targeting only about 70km of roads. Given that the length of roads in Kampala is about 2,100km, the 70km cannot substantially change the outlook of the condition of roads in the city.
So, government ought to pass up a package of funding to help KCCA be able to revamp at a big scale of about 300km at a go. That’s when you can see impact. One may wonder, in 2021, I was in office when KCCA did receive a $288 million loan spread over a five-year time frame for the roads rehabilitation project.
One may wonder what we did while in office at KCCA after receiving a $288 million loan in 2021 for the roads rehabilitation project. It was spread over a four-year time frame When you analyse it, that’s about Shs 250 billion every financial year. However, as I told you, the network of Kampala is 2,100km.
So, a 70km program will not substantially change the outlook of the city. KCCA needs a development budget of at least $400 billion every year for one to see a meaningful change in the conditions of the roads. At the moment, the government subdivision for development is not anything more than about Shs 80 billion every financial year.
So, the impact is not substantial. Then again, there is no guarantee that there will be a turnaround if government provides required funding. One of the biggest bottlenecks is that when we are procuring contractors for development, we normally procure the lowest-responsive bidder.
Now, many times these bidders bid very aggressively and you get abnormally low bids. Now, the pace of execution gets affected, because these contractors are ill-resourced.
They’re just trying to gamble to deliver a major infrastructure piece. A road that will have taken two- and-a-half to three years ends up taking five or six years. So, the city dwellers end up paying a high price for hiring a low-bid contractor.
These are the kind of challenges the city faces. For the $288m project, we hired five contractors but about three of them were not performing, and they were holding a big chunk of the network.
Amongst these are the Old Port Bell road, Salama road and key arteries in the industrial area, among ithers. It is not out of design that KCCA is not performing, but the procurement process often yields contractor who don’t perform.
The author is a private engineering consultant