Road maintenance units can save Kampala’s road network

One of the hardest tasks for KCCA is to prove that they are working for the best interests of the public when it comes to the roads.

During dry spells, city dwellers, especially those from the fast-developing areas of Najjeera, Buwaate, Bulindo and the like, complain about the dust.

Matters get worse during the rainy season because it come with a number of structural and drainage challenges that portray KCCA as doing nothing. Most times, KCCA finds itself in a constant fire-fighting situation to prove that the billions collected in form of revenue and grants from developing partners are put to good use.

Around this time last year, Dr Jim Spire Ssentongo led a social media campaign dubbed ‘Kampala pothole exhibition’ that exposed Kampala’s poor road maintenance works. This forced my good friend Dorothy Kisaka, the KCCA executive director, to reveal that of the Shs 100 billion required annually to fix roads, the institution only gets Shs 26 billion. Even President Museveni chipped in with Shs 6bn to fix the potholes. Still, that was only a temporary mitigation measure.

In all this, KCCA sees itself as working for the people yet what the authority actually needs is to work with the people.

KCCA normally uses a top-to-bottom approach in roadworks, where a contractor is hired to repair a road. Oftentimes, the contractor finds the road in horrible shape and, in turn, asks for billions in reconstruction. However, my belief is not to wait for the situation to get worse before it is worked upon.

It is a known fact that roads mostly deteriorate due to poor drainage and traffic usage.

Therefore, engaging communities through creation of road maintenance units could change everything because they do the repairs at the earliest stage of damage.

Need to reconsider approach

Just consider this; back in 2021, KCCA and the African Development Bank (AfDB) signed a four-year $288m [Shs 1.1 trillion] road project to enhance transport efficiency.

In the deal is a component of $250,000 [roughly Shs 1bn that was set aside for the training and development of skills for women and youth in basic construction and entrepreneurship development.

Little as that figure may seem, KCCA can make the most of by creating road maintenance units from village level in Kampala’s five divisions.  Just take the 3km Naalya-Kyaliwajjala stretch whose heavy traffic jam is partly caused by the numerous potholes. Potholes don’t emerge overnight, they start as small cracks. So, it would be cheaper and convenient to have cracks on this road maintained by a unit of 20 youths without waiting for high-level degradation in form of potholes. This way, there would be no need expensive heavy machinery every three months to pix the potholes.

Now, just imagine if all Kampala parishes had these road maintenance units, roads would not be deteriorating at the fast pace they currently do.

In fact, this would create employment to thousands of youth, who would in turn be ambassadors for government.

These community units of youths and women can operate mostly at night when there is less traffic, using basic equipment such as wheelbarrows, spades, pickaxes, pedestal rollers, and plate compactors. Their works include pothole patching, edge repairs, shoulder recharging, and drainage repairs for paved roads and grading, spot-gravelling, and drainage repair for gravel roads.

For one who is wondering where funding for such a large group would come from, KCCA only needs to persuade government to channel part of the Parish Development Model (PDM) and Emyooga to such a just cause. It’s a win-win situation for everyone.

This is not rocket science at all because this model of using road maintenance units has already proved to be a success in countries such as China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Brazil.