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South Koreans learnt how to build their own roads, so why can’t we also ‘did’ it?
Here is an intriguing story I heard at lunch the other day. In 1968 South Korea, then just as poor as Uganda, if not poorer, decided to build a highway between its capital, Seoul, and its second city, Busan.
The Koreans, of course, did not have the money, so they went to the World Bank. They were laughed out of the lobby and told it was too early to think of such a project when they could barely feed themselves. Come back when you’ve learnt to blow your noses, they were told.
But the Koreans were adamant. Roads would open up the country. The alternative was to borrow from a richer ‘development partner’, say Japan. This would mean a Japanese company coming in, doing the road over five years, going away with most of the money and leaving the Koreans behind to pay off the loan over the next 30 years.
Sounds familiar, right? Well, the Koreans went down a different path altogether. First, they brought together their local engineers and planners, locked them away with a few external consultants and wrote the feasibility studies for the project. Then they borrowed some money from the Japanese and imported road-building equipment that wasn’t locally available.
In February 1968, work started on the Seoul-Suwon section of the Gyeongbu national expressway project. With the project taking up more than a tenth of the national budget, the Koreans were betting the house and, understandably, had a large team watching and learning, from cabinet ministers to captains of industry, scholars and so on.
The Korean engineers soaked in everything they saw, took notes and asked questions. When the first 50 kilometres were complete, the Koreans said they’d take it on from there. The next 50 kilometres were, as expected, not as well done as the first, but kilometre by kilometre, they plodded on. The project was completed in 1971 over budget, but ahead of schedule.
In the few years that followed, the Koreans were the butt of many jokes in the region about their unevenly paved highway, but something fundamental had changed in the country and in the psyche of their people. First, there was the obvious use of locally available materials and the tidy sums of money that had gone into local pockets.
Then there was the fact that, despite being a military dictatorship under president Park Chunghee, the project hadn’t been discussed and signed off at midnight in a smoke-filled room somewhere in State House Seoul; it had drawn on the energy, industry and brains of Korea’s best and brightest, however unwilling some of them might have been – and there was a lot of opposition to the project over its cost.
But most importantly, and as a result of the point above, it meant that at the end of the project, Korea had tonnes of used, but usable road-making equipment lying around in yards across the country, and hundreds of local engineers, project designers, managers and accountants who knew how to design, cost, build and finance a highway.
It should by now be pretty obvious why this story is relevant to Uganda today. The country is in the middle of the most ambitious infrastructure development in its history yet most natives are little more than idle bystanders – bored crowds watching the fascinating back-and-forth choreography of diesel-slurping, Chinese-made and manned earthmoving equipment.
The right noises are now being made about ‘local content’. This, in case you are wondering, is a polite term for getting the natives involved beyond working as flag-wielding temps to warn speeding motorists of roadworks ahead while looking for opportunities to siphon fuel.
But ‘local content’ must encompass broader ambitions.
How do we go from Roofings Limited supplying some steel to a road project, to Abubaker Technical Services building the whole damn road? Over the years, we have learnt how to choose between Sietco, Dott or SBI, but the real strategic shift is in going from Marubeni to Zzimwe or Mukalazi Technical Services.
As we argued last week and as financing examples from the region will show next week, our current fiscal crisis cannot be solved by merely applying new taxes on the same people, or doing the same things and expecting different outcomes.
The chickens always come home to roost!
By the way, the Koreans eventually kinda got good at the whole building stuff; today they build not just electric cars, but also highways that charge the cars as they drive along. The Koreans did it; why can’t we also ‘did’ it?
Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and a poor man’s
freedom fighter. [email protected]
Twitter: @Kalinaki.
