FUEL SHORTAGES REMIND US OF OUR INADEQUACY

The recent fuel shortages that saw a liter of petrol going for as a high of sh12,000 is a reminder that when we fail to make hard decisions we make life hard for ourselves somewhere down the road.

The trigger for the shortages was the insistence by the health ministry that truck drivers must b not only be tested before they enter the country but must also pay for the tests. The truck drivers struck in protest of this measure, arguing that they are tested for free in Kenya and this was an additional cost they refused to carry.

First of all it must be the height of negligence that truck drivers acting on a whim can hold a whole country ransom. A country whose landlocked nature is not new and should dictate that we have numerous alternatives to ship in or ship out goods.

The truckers of course now represent a huge cross national interest group that will fight tooth and nail to sustain the status quo.

The status quo is that Uganda continues to rely on costly road transport for all bit a small part of our transport needs.

This is a result of the failure to resuscitate the old railway or get the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) off the ground. In light of the powerful interest groups that have coalesced over the years around road transport I am inclined to think the woes surrounding the railways are not a coincidence.

The truckers have forced our hand and we have suspended testing but our troubles with fuel will not be immediately lifted. Experts say it could take a month or longer before things are back to normal. Losses in lost business and tax revenues while we readjust will be in the billions.

But imagine an alternative scenario where all or most of our fuel comes by rail, even if you instituted a testing regime it would only be a handful of people to be tested. They say the SGR can haul as more than 100 containers. On the road this would be at least 200 drivers and turnboys to be tested.

So what has happened to our railway projects?

Uganda Railways Corporation (URC) is still reeling from a scandal surrounding the purchase of engines that are not fit for purpose. This after a concession with Egyptian based RVR came unstuck a few years ago affecting the flow of goods by rail, seeing businessmen shifting their cargo back on the road. Funding is being sort for the rehabilitation of the more than 100-year-old line but this can only be a stop gap measure as we seek to build the SGR.

"It takes years to build a few kilometers of road in this country now you can imagine what will happen with a railway...

It has been since 2008 when the SGR project was mooted. Today 14 years later not a single railway sleeper has been lined – not counting the ceremonial ones laid in Munyonyo more than five years ago. With compensation for the right of way we have only managed 130 km of the 230 km between Kampala and Tororo since 2016. And even then we have spent sh100b of the sh400b planned in compensation with treasury managing to trickle through about sh20b a year for this.

The history of development shows that Uganda not have meaningful industrialization without inexpensive mass transport – rail or water. It is not a mistake that the colonialists braved man eating lions, hostile tribes and the engineering demands of the rift valley to build a railway; and it is the reason we learnt about the Rhine Valley in Germany as a driver of industrialization there.

It costs almost double --$5200 to shift a 30 ton by road from Mombasa compared to $2800 by rail. The tradeoff currently is that you use road because it takes two weeks by rail today versus just under a week by road to shift cargo. But with a more efficient rail system that argument would not hold.

"To be a competitive economy we need to be able to shift huge volumes quickly and at the least possible cost. It would not be a stretch to think that the way we are treating our railways suggests talk of industrialization is just hot air....

So we can blame all the stoppages over the last two years on the Covid-19 pandemic, but don’t worry if it is not Covid it will be something else.

The Kenyans have failed to move the SGR from Naivasha and onto Kisumu and Malaba. China is justifiably jittery to release money for our side when the Kenyan leg has stalled, probably, fatally.

That may be as it is but cargo to and from Uganda now at 18m tons annually is set to rise to 21.5m tons a year, figures that are well above our old railways capacity regardless of the patchwork we do on it.

When UPE was launched 25 years ago, no one seems to have thought about how we will employ the jobseekers that would hit the market 15 to 20 years down the road and how to prepare for them. Now that the jobless ranks are swelling it has suddenly hit us.

Industrialisation would sponge up all the thousands hitting the job market annually. But to sustain an industrialization push you need huge amounts of raw material and the markets to absorb your output. At both ends of the value chain mass transport systems are needed....

Which makes you wonder about lackadaisical attitude towards developing our rail transport system.