The ‘roads’ to a rich Uganda in 2030 are there – right here

The world is running out of (or has run out of) fish. By last year, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), was estimating that 70 per cent of fish populations were fully used, overused, or in crisis as a result of overfishing and warmer waters.
Meanwhile, it is feared that Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, will run out of water by 2035. That, however, is a best-case forecast. The worst-case scenario has it running out of water by 2025.

This should be, surprise, surprise, President Yoweri Museveni’s problem – or opportunity, because it could actually be a grand solution to a potentially existential crisis he is facing – what do with among the most unemployed youth in the world in a country that is not at war. It is a problem made worse by the fact that Uganda has the world’s youngest population, with more than 78 per cent of its people below the age of 30.
The thing is that after Tanzania, Uganda has the second largest chunk of Lake Victoria, and the world’s second largest fresh water lake, after Lake Superior, which is shared by the US and Canada. Lake Victoria, however, is being polluted at an alarming rate. But that is a problem that can be easily sorted.
The feared Nairobi water crisis, hands Kisumu an opportunity to grow potentially as Kenya’s main city into the middle of the century, because it would have the cheapest and most accessible fresh water in the country.

The Kenyan daily newspaper, The Standard, last year had a story about Kisumu’s real estate growth, driven in part by the airport and the infrastructure boom in Kenya of the last 10 years, and there was an eye-popping detail. Rental prices in the upmarket areas of the city were as high as those in Nairobi.
If you look at a basic map of the Lake Victoria region, you will see three key towns marked on it: Entebbe, Kisumu, and Mwanza in Tanzania. Few Ugandans have been to Mwanza.

I was totally wowed the last time I was there. It was, at that point, the only town in East Africa with a chief economist! Partly a university town, it was crisp and neat, looking like a cousin of Rwanda’s capital Kigali. Now, Kisumu has also pimped up rather dramatically, and is easily Kenya’s neatest city.
A Uganda-Kenya-Tanzania joint investment in cleaning up Lake Victoria would of itself create thousands of jobs, but if it was combined with bolstering its fish supply, it could become Africa’s leading supplier of fish. The wealth and jobs that would be created in the Lake Victoria rim would be mind-boggling.

Right now, quietly, Uganda has become a far out leader in cage fishing on the shores of Lake Victoria in East Africa. How can this be turbo-charged?
Apart from cleaning the lake up, it needs to be made into a transport hub. In a recent reform that seeks to cut costs, one of the agencies that have been slated to be reabsorbed into the Ministry of Works is the Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA).

However, the proposed merger is classic cost reduction. It does nothing to expand the pie, which is the problem Museveni is dealing with. Therefore, another way to look at reform would be to task UNRA to bring more bacon home.
It is important to note that Tanzania’s President John Magufuli, in his bulldozer way, is finally getting the government to move to the political capital Dodoma. There are far reaching economic implications for Mwanza and western Uganda.

It is time to re-establish shipping between the Kisumu-Mwanza-Entebbe-Majanji axis over the lake. That is the stuff UNRA should be tasked to do – and to find ways of funding it that do not depend on the taxpayer.
In the short-term, there is the possibility of a public-private partnership (PPP), or an infrastructure bond, to fund a shipping enterprise around the Lake Victoria Basin. Domestically, one way of kickstarting would be to build a bridge from Luzira across to the east side of the lake in Mukono.

That would change not just Kampala, the housing sector, the whole economy of Mukono, but also the dynamics around the lake. But it would be a paid bridge. Even to ride a bicycle on it, you would have to fork out a fee.
And if I were UNRA, I would also go to Pallisa and slap a PPP bridge across Lake Kyoga into Teso, and tie it into developing a large fishing industry to bolster the Lake Victoria effort and turn Uganda into the region’s “protein capital”.

Since Museveni clearly has no plans of departure even after 32 years, if these things are done, he will have a very different issue with the “bazukulu” in a few years. They would just not be around to insult him on social media or listen to him hold forth on TV for hours.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is the publisher of Africa.
data visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3