UGANDA NEEDS TO STOP PRETENDING ITS DEVELOPING

When Kenyan President William Ruto observed recently that Kenya’s paved road network exceeds the combined total of its regional neighbours. That stung.

Not because Uganda has no roads. We do.

But because the remark exposed an uncomfortable truth. For all the money we have poured into infrastructure over the last two decades, we are still playing catch-up.

"Uganda’s paved road network, at just over 6,100km, is not small because we lack ambition. It is small because too many good plans are suffocated by delayed implementation, procurement games, bureaucratic inertia and land acquisition disputes. In the public eye, all euphemisms for corruption...

In infrastructure, lost time is lost wealth.

Which is why the recent arraignment of Works ministry officials, as part of the probe into the delayed completion of the Busega–Mpigi Expressway, should concern us beyond whether the accused are guilty or innocent.

That is for the courts.

The larger issue is economic.

How many development dreams have we postponed, inflated or quietly killed because we cannot implement projects on time and on budget?

The Busega–Mpigi Expressway was not a bad idea. In fact, it is exactly the kind of project Uganda needs. It was conceived as a strategic road link out of Kampala towards Masaka, western Uganda, Rwanda, DR Congo and Tanzania. It was meant to decongest the Kampala–Masaka corridor, one of the most important trade and passenger routes in the country.

Depending on the section being discussed, the project has been described as a 23.7km to 27.3km four-lane expressway from Busega to Mpigi, with interchanges, bridges, drainage works, service lanes, tolling facilities and links into the wider road network.

Construction started in 2020. The promise was simple enough: cut travel time between Busega and Mpigi from as much as two hours to under 45 minutes.

That is not a small saving.

Multiply that by thousands of vehicles, traders, workers, buses, trucks and farm produce movements over a year and you begin to see why infrastructure matters.

"This is a point Shillings & Cents has made before. The heavy spending on roads, rail and energy is not the problem. In fact, it is the right thing to do. No country has transformed itself by balancing neat little budgets while its people sit in traffic, its farmers cannot reach markets, and its factories cannot get reliable power.

Infrastructure is not consumption. It is economic oxygen....

Roads reduce the cost of moving goods. Rail lowers freight costs. Power allows industry to run. Urban infrastructure saves working people from spending their lives in traffic jams. A tarmac road is not just a strip of bitumen. It is a market access tool.

The farmer in Masaka who gets pineapples to Kampala before they rot, the exporter who can predict delivery times, the manufacturer who can plan logistics, the bus operator who can do more trips in a day — these are the real beneficiaries of infrastructure.

So let us be clear. Uganda is right to bet big on infrastructure.

The problem is that big bets require big discipline.

The Busega–Mpigi Expressway has now become a case study in how good intentions are subverted. The cost has reportedly risen from the original hundreds of billions of shillings to more than a trillion shillings, while completion dates have kept shifting.

A project that began in 2020 and should by now be unlocking one of Uganda’s busiest corridors has instead become another reminder that we are very good at launching projects and much less good at finishing them.

This is not merely an administrative inconvenience.

It is an economic loss.

As Africans, we often behave as if time is elastic. A year lost here. Another year lost there. A project pushed from 2023 to 2026, then to 2027, maybe even beyond. We shrug and move on.

But time works whether we value it or not.

Interest accumulates. Costs rise. Contractors submit variation claims. Land values change. Equipment sits idle. Investors move on. Children grow older.

The lost savings are not theoretical. They are the money a trader never saves on transport. They are the expansion an entrepreneur postpones. They are the taxes government never collects because growth that should have happened did not happen.

And because taxes are not collected, one child — or thousands of children — does not get the classroom, textbook, desk or teacher that should have been provided as their right as Ugandans.

This is where the real scandal lies.

"A delayed road is not just a delayed road. It is delayed growth. Delayed taxes. Delayed services. Delayed dignity...

Infrastructure generates its return only when it is completed and put to work. A road earns its keep when vehicles move faster on it. A dam earns its keep when power reaches homes and factories. A railway earns its keep when cargo shifts from expensive road haulage to cheaper rail.

Until then, the country is carrying debt, paying interest and waiting for benefits that remain theoretical. For example we started repaying the Karuma dam debt long before it had produced a watt of electricity.

This is why project delays are so dangerous. They attack the economics of infrastructure from both sides. First, they raise the cost. Second, they postpone the benefit.

If a road is supposed to save transporters money for 20 years but is delivered seven years late, the country has lost seven years of savings. If the cost doubles along the way, the return on investment falls further. If corruption, poor supervision or needless redesigns are involved, then the public is robbed twice — once through inflated costs and again through delayed development.

The Busega–Mpigi case also points to a deeper institutional weakness.

We need fewer launch ceremonies and more project dashboards.

There must be penalties for contractors, consultants and officials who cause avoidable delays. Independent technical audits should precede major scope changes. Land acquisition should be substantially resolved before works begin.

Uganda cannot afford to abandon infrastructure spending. That would be foolish.

We are still far behind what our ambitions require. But infrastructure without execution discipline is a very expensive way of pretending to develop.