By Mutabazi Sam Stewart
Roads are an integral part of the transport system. A country’s road network should be efficient in order to maximize economic and social benefits. They play a significant role in achieving national development and contributing to the overall performance and social functioning of the community. It is acknowledged that roads enhance mobility, taking people out of isolation and therefore poverty. In China for instance, the government has popularized this belief by emphasizing that for any economy to develop, transport must start off first which will later stimulate other sectors to develop in an orderly fashion.
Apart from health and education, the next important sector any country should invest the largest chunk of her resources is that of transport. But even within the transport sector government should put more resources in roads because they are the most critical in terms of internal and cross boarder trade and human movement. In contributing to community’s broad economic, social and environmental goals, the principal role of the road system is to facilitate interaction between people and the exchange of goods and services by providing effective equitable land-based accessibility to a wide range of places and by enabling safe reliable mobility of people and transport of goods with efficiency required to compete in the global economy. Road transport remains the most commonly used not to mention cheapest and convenient means of transporting goods and services from one place to another. In addition well, designed and planned roads especially in cities and towns add splendor, beauty and orderliness of the metropolis.
Uganda’s urban development and expansion has consistently been growing at a steadfast rate but without a corresponding rate of growth of roads. As a result, the sprawling urbanization is not easily discernable because of incoherent road infrastructure development. A first time visitor to Kampala may think that Uganda has the worst road infrastructure in both urban and rural areas. But to the contrary, poor roads in Uganda are mainly in urban areas. Rural roads especially those categorized as national roads are not so much in a sorry state as the ones in towns and trading centres. In fact, Uganda’s rural roads are in most cases better than those of our neighbours in the region.
The poor urban road infrastructure in Uganda has been endemic because of lack of consistent and harmonized urban planning and transportation policy. The continuous urban expansion of Kampala city into surrounding areas without regard to road infrastructure enhancement has led to a poor road network characterized by, congestion, narrowness, poor maintenance and road reserve encroachment. The unrelenting rural-urban migration has also put a strain on the already limited road network in Kampala. Kampala in fact, arguably has the worst roads of a capital city in the whole world. It is also one of the filthiest towns at the same time. Some people have jokingly referred to Kampala as the world’s capital (headquarters) of potholes
Infrastructure development including road asset acquisition is not a cheap process. Developed countries have had to dedicate quite a lot of resources to the transport sector to reach where they are. They spend a lot of time planning how they want their towns to look like. They follow these plans with the strictness that is required. They have well defined laws and policies that guide their development. Their citizens do not put up structures without approval from city authorities and in accordance with the larger development plan. There is coordination amongst different stakeholders in the development of cities. For instance the water supply and treatment agency would not dig up a road to lay pipes without due consultation with the city authorities and the agency in charge of roads. The ducts for water, telephone lines, electricity and other services are all provided for during the initial construction stages of the road. There is constant consultation on how the city is supposed to be developed which creates thorough engagement that determines the trend of development of an area in a specified period of time. This is what has been largely lacking in the case of Uganda and in other countries in Africa. The commitment in terms of resource allocation and policy support for our roads has not been forthcoming. The public has always come out to talk about the poor state of roads but this discussion has for a long time failed to generate the required momentum for policy makers to act.
The last three years or so, have however shown an accelerated interest in road infrastructure development than had previously been witnessed in the country. The creation of a government agency, Uganda National Road Authority (UNRA) and Uganda Road Fund (URF) with clear mandate to oversee the transformation of roads in Uganda has heightened the public interest with animated expectations that Uganda’s roads can only be made better. Government, development partners and other players are all showing unrelenting zeal in road development and maintenance with considerable budget allocations that are required to fulfill the need for sustainable financing to enable continuous investment in roads. Civil society which had hitherto showed limited interest in infrastructure development in Uganda has joined the fray, an act that is likely to enrich monitoring, supervision and policy enhancement for this sector. The commitment and dedication already shown by UNRA for instance in its less than three years of existence signifies an important policy shift in favour of road development in Uganda.
Uganda’s current road network comprises of 20,000 km of national roads (managed by UNRA), 13,000Km as district roads, and 30,000 km of community roads. Of these only 4,500 is paved (tarmac). It is estimated that government has been constructing approximately between 100-120 km of new paved roads in the last ten years. This has been due to limiting factors such as lack of capacity on the side of both government and contractors. It is however now envisaged that this capacity is likely to increase given the resoluteness that government’s designated agencies have already exhibited in just a few years of their operation. We may thus see the current low rate of new road construction doubling or even tripling in the coming years. If Uganda national Roads Authority (UNRA) were to target to make up to 800Km of new roads every year, we would have the entire country networked by paved roads within a period of less than ten years. I want to believe that a new dawn has come for our roads to become better because the voices are stronger and the dedication is unwavering both from state and non state actors.
Mutabazi is the Executive Director of Uganda Road Sector Support Initiative (URSSI)
Email: mutasamste@yahoo.com
Tel: 0772-882547
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
WHY UGANDA SHOULD BRACE FOR HIGH PRICES OF FOOD FOR A LONG TIME
By Mutabazi Sam Stewart
The global recession is about to be brought to a successful end thanks to good macro economic policies by the new administration in the United States of America. Economists in developing countries including Uganda waited with abated breath wondering how the credit crunch would affect their fragile economies. Some argued that it would only be a matter of time before the depression would spread to our country while others reasoned that given the fact that a country like Uganda is not yet a highly monetized economy, the impact of the crunch would not have the same shock it had on well developed economies in the Western World. Today we can state with certainty that the credit crunch is waning having had a slight brunt on Uganda’s economy.
Economies world wide react to depressions differently. The world has witnessed various economic slumps during the last one hundred years although the most pronounced have been that of 1920’s and the current one that peaked in 2008. In between these periods however there were intermittent shocks and distresses with varying magnitudes. Some have been handled by technocrats without allowing the world to get to know about their extent.
Although Uganda did not experience the true recession as some people had anticipated, no body in government should claim that the crunch did not happen here because of any preconditioned policies and programmes that shielded us from the depression spank. It is true that the crunch did not affect our financial institutions because very few are engaged in mortgages. It did not affect our industries because most of them do not directly rely on inputs from the developed countries which were experiencing the real chomp.
The direct effect however came in the form of increased prices of food throughout the country brought about by the hike in international oil prices. Analysts are already predicting that the price of food in Uganda may never normalize to the former cost that most of us had been accustomed to for a very long time. Prior to 2008, Uganda perhaps, was one of the few countries in the world with the lowest prices of food. All this has been altered and is likely to remain so for quite a long time. As readers may recall, during peak harvest period, one would buy a bunch of Matooke at as little as 1000 shilling or less especially in villages. As of today, you can not get the same bunch at twice this amount even in the most remote part of western Uganda, the leading Matooke producing area in the country.
This state of affairs is explained by largely two factors; namely the credit crunch and secondly by a general decrease in production of food in the entire country. The former is not as strong a factor as the latter. It is critical that policy makers in government take careful procedures to address the problem of food shortage in Uganda before it gets out of hand. What has happened is that, of late, there is an unprecedented movement of persons from rural areas into towns and cities by young energetic persons. Majority of them are engaged in petty business but mainly in boda boda business. In effect this means that the people who would have provided the much needed labour to produce the food, have instead migrated in search of other jobs which are considered “superior” to farming using the traditional hand hoe.
The little food that is being produced by the few, (moreover old and weak) farmers that remain in the villages can not satisfy the demand from the ever increasing numbers of people in towns. This in itself would not be a problem if there was a premeditated plan by government to encourage people to start large scale mechanized farming that is capable of meeting the food needs of the country both during and out of season. Large scale farming in Uganda is very difficult to implement because of continued land fragmentation that makes it almost impossible to get one whole piece of land that favors such type of agriculture. Indeed, it is hard today to get free land, say of 1000 acres, in the western and central parts of Uganda without human settlement. Therefore, if our agriculture sector no longer has small holder farmers because of rural-urban migration, and at the same time our land tenure system does not support large scale farming, the obvious, which unfortunately has already happened will continue to ensue until the same people who flocked into towns go back to where the came from or government implements a not-so-popular maneuver of pushing people off the land enmass to release it for large scale agriculture and farming. In the meantime, while the credit crunch shall be history in a few months or years to come in the countries like USA, Uganda shall have its share of a serious depression that may last longer and is difficult to deal with because of no other reason than not acting in good time.
The global recession is about to be brought to a successful end thanks to good macro economic policies by the new administration in the United States of America. Economists in developing countries including Uganda waited with abated breath wondering how the credit crunch would affect their fragile economies. Some argued that it would only be a matter of time before the depression would spread to our country while others reasoned that given the fact that a country like Uganda is not yet a highly monetized economy, the impact of the crunch would not have the same shock it had on well developed economies in the Western World. Today we can state with certainty that the credit crunch is waning having had a slight brunt on Uganda’s economy.
Economies world wide react to depressions differently. The world has witnessed various economic slumps during the last one hundred years although the most pronounced have been that of 1920’s and the current one that peaked in 2008. In between these periods however there were intermittent shocks and distresses with varying magnitudes. Some have been handled by technocrats without allowing the world to get to know about their extent.
Although Uganda did not experience the true recession as some people had anticipated, no body in government should claim that the crunch did not happen here because of any preconditioned policies and programmes that shielded us from the depression spank. It is true that the crunch did not affect our financial institutions because very few are engaged in mortgages. It did not affect our industries because most of them do not directly rely on inputs from the developed countries which were experiencing the real chomp.
The direct effect however came in the form of increased prices of food throughout the country brought about by the hike in international oil prices. Analysts are already predicting that the price of food in Uganda may never normalize to the former cost that most of us had been accustomed to for a very long time. Prior to 2008, Uganda perhaps, was one of the few countries in the world with the lowest prices of food. All this has been altered and is likely to remain so for quite a long time. As readers may recall, during peak harvest period, one would buy a bunch of Matooke at as little as 1000 shilling or less especially in villages. As of today, you can not get the same bunch at twice this amount even in the most remote part of western Uganda, the leading Matooke producing area in the country.
This state of affairs is explained by largely two factors; namely the credit crunch and secondly by a general decrease in production of food in the entire country. The former is not as strong a factor as the latter. It is critical that policy makers in government take careful procedures to address the problem of food shortage in Uganda before it gets out of hand. What has happened is that, of late, there is an unprecedented movement of persons from rural areas into towns and cities by young energetic persons. Majority of them are engaged in petty business but mainly in boda boda business. In effect this means that the people who would have provided the much needed labour to produce the food, have instead migrated in search of other jobs which are considered “superior” to farming using the traditional hand hoe.
The little food that is being produced by the few, (moreover old and weak) farmers that remain in the villages can not satisfy the demand from the ever increasing numbers of people in towns. This in itself would not be a problem if there was a premeditated plan by government to encourage people to start large scale mechanized farming that is capable of meeting the food needs of the country both during and out of season. Large scale farming in Uganda is very difficult to implement because of continued land fragmentation that makes it almost impossible to get one whole piece of land that favors such type of agriculture. Indeed, it is hard today to get free land, say of 1000 acres, in the western and central parts of Uganda without human settlement. Therefore, if our agriculture sector no longer has small holder farmers because of rural-urban migration, and at the same time our land tenure system does not support large scale farming, the obvious, which unfortunately has already happened will continue to ensue until the same people who flocked into towns go back to where the came from or government implements a not-so-popular maneuver of pushing people off the land enmass to release it for large scale agriculture and farming. In the meantime, while the credit crunch shall be history in a few months or years to come in the countries like USA, Uganda shall have its share of a serious depression that may last longer and is difficult to deal with because of no other reason than not acting in good time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)