Mbarara’s grotesque cow, and a baby boom in Bugisu

One of them, with a malaria-struck baby, bade us stop a few km up the road for her to collect money. We stopped and she went to a group of men sitting under a mango tree drinking. It was 9.15am.

Here is a State of the Nation report from an itinerant observer, written on the go after four weeks criss-crossing the country. My verdict is that Uganda is in rude health, the working words being ‘health’ and ‘rude’.

The highways are generally good, most freshly paved. Masaka-Mbarara, Kabale-Kisoro, Soroti-Lira, Karuma-Pakwach-Arua, Matugga-Kapeeka-Semuto, Kawempe-Kafu, and Jinja-Bugiri are excellent. Work is going on on Mbale-Soroti, Mbarara-Kabale and Gulu-Atiak-Nimule.

You would not want your pregnant sister travelling the Tororo-Mbale or Soroti-Katakwi roads for anything, so horrible are they and, as it happens, eastern Uganda presently has the highest fertility of an already runaway national birth rate. Anecdotally, your columnist was astounded by a busy hive of activity at an antenatal and postnatal clinic in Mbale, all babies and mothers, at the foot of Elgon.

The bigger shock, though, was Mbarara’s cow – the old iconic sculpture of an Ankole breed at the town gate is now a grotesque figure, more like a buffalo with bad genes. What’s happening, Mr Mayor? Mbarara is vibrant commercially and socially, but also on the verge of the boda boda madness of Kampala.
Progress seems to have by-passed Masaka, Mubende, and also Tororo, which just won’t cash in on the 720 trucks of cargo cleared daily at nearby Malaba border post. Down the road from Masaka is Kyotera which, for a town with hardly any tarmac, is remarkably neat. The same cannot be said of Kabale, which today is an unbelievable mix of dust and mist. Rakai town is a bowl that looks depressed – probably a reflection of its past as a centre for HIV/Aids.

Gulu is pulling itself up by the bootstraps, and its efforts should be paying off with a population boom and new money. Pakwach and Masindi will benefit from oil investment, Atiak from Sudan trade, but nearby Kigumba remains a little flyblown place. Lira and Soroti are shocking for the garbage strewn all over town – what are the mayors doing? Fort Portal’s smartness and freshness is breath-taking, rivalled a little by Kasese, even for bad English.

Jinja has semblance of traffic jams in the evening, and is collecting parking fees (as is Mbale and Mbarara), but up the road, Iganga still struggles between past, present and future – it just won’t shed its Asian ‘dukawala’ heritage while sitting astride a highway carrying a considerable volume of our GDP. Most trading centres are obsessed with old Indian architecture, even the new buildings. There is simply no authentic Ugandan style.

There is a near-total absence of public transport in places – it was depressing not to offer lifts to requesting hitchhikers on the Kabale-Bwindi mountain route. We did, though, take a mother and child in Kasese, and two on the Soroti-Katakwi road.

One of them, with a malaria-struck baby, bade us stop a few km up the road for her to collect money. We stopped and she went to a group of men sitting under a mango tree drinking. It was 9.15am.

It all culminates in Kampala – high rises, streetlights and dust. The construction industry is alive and kicking, with new residential neighbourhoods opening out. But fantastic new private houses are shamed by lack of access – most suburbs will have narrow roads where neighbours have to squeeze vehicles past each other, highlighting the huge gap between private personal investment and public spending.

School kids, especially in North and East, are barefooted, but is the glass half-full or half-empty, given that at least they go to school? Homes in Buganda, most of West and parts of East are no longer grass-thatched, being of ‘mabati’ roof, but the pity is that they don’t harvest rainwater. Small holder land tenure will make it hard to mechanise farming.

Countrywide the numbers of idle people is rather alarming. A discordant urbanisation takes youthful hordes to pool tables and makeshift sports clubs. The most ubiquitous signs of change are supermarkets, telecom masts, FM radio stations, and satellite TV dishes – you will get a phone signal even in Bwindi’s forests, Murchison Falls Park jungles and Teso’s scrublands. Cows basically still graze in urban centres; most towns have decent hotels, courtesy of private capital and the building boom. Construction though is complimented by boda boda terrorism.

At the odd roadblock, shillings exchange hands between truck or bus drivers and security officers, otherwise roads are pretty free and security is good.

Development is still (too?) focussed on Buganda – agglomeration as economists put it. There are two conurbations developing: the industrial belt of Kampala-Mukono-Jinja, and Kampala-Entebbe which is municipal-residential and catering to the education and leisure industries.

Like a dog’s breakfast, Uganda is coming together, chaotically but progressively.
dsseppuuya@yahoo.com