Butaleja in 22 year wait for tarmac

The Promise
During campaigns ahead of the 1996 presidential elections President Museveni held a rally in Bunyole County, now Butaleja District, where he promised to tarmac two main major roads, the Lwangoli-Butaleja-Namutumba and the Nagongera-Busolwe roads if the people of the county voted him into power.

Back then Bunyole County was a part of Tororo District.
“We are going to work on Budumba Bridge and tarmac the Lwangoli-Butaleja-Namutumba road and the Nagongera-Busolwe road. I request you to support NRM. NRM brought development, peace,” Mr Museveni is quoted to have said.

The Lwangoli-Butaleja-Namutumba road starts from Nabumali junction (Lwangoli) in Mbale District to Butaleja, a distance of about 96km. It is the main road linking the districts of Mbale, Butaleja and Namutumba.
The road also connects the towns and districts of Budaka and Tororo via Kachonga and Mazimasa sub-counties.
On the other hand the Nagongera Busolwe road, a distance of about 34km, connects Tororo and Butaleja districts.

According one of the elders who attended the 1996 rally, Mr Moses Matenga, President Museveni made the promise at the prompting of the then LCIV chairperson of Bunyole County, the late Abubaker Habanga, who said the people of Bunyole wanted roads in the county tarmacked and Budumba bridge reconstructed in return for their support.

Prior to the rally, the elders had convened a meeting and tasked Habanga, who was also the chairperson of the President’s campaign task force, to present a memorandum, but it was a memorandum that only had two issues – tarmac and the bridge.
Mr Mutenga told Daily Monitor that the President assured the people at his rally that work on the roads and Budumba bridge would commence in the financial year 1997/1998, which was actually a few months away, but nothing happened back then.

Mr Museveni, who has been in power for 32 years, started promising tarmac in Butaleja in 1996 when the district was still a county in Tororo District called Bunyole. He made the first pledge at the county headquarter where he asked people to vote for him.

Five years later when he returned to campaign ahead of the 2001 general elections the road had not been worked on and the memorandum and list of demands from the people had increased to include a demand for district status. Mr Museveni promised to have the county elevated to district status and repeated the promise to work on the roads and bridges.

However, while Bunyole County was carved out of Tororo District and elevated to district status, becoming operational on July 1, 2005, work on the roads and bridges were not attended to in the period between 2001 and 2006. By the time he returned to the county to campaign ahead of the 2006 general elections, the demand for attention to be channeled in that direction was very much alive, but Mr Museveni wriggled himself out, telling them that now that he had delivered on the demand for district status the road would be coming next.

No work was undertaken in the period between 2006 and 2011 making it yet again a major talking point in the area ahead of the 2011 general election.
The NRM obviously did not take it so lightly. It moved to calm tempers by including one of the two roads, the Namutumba-Butaleja-Lwangoli, among the 17 new roads that the NRM in its 2011-2016 campaign manifesto listed as the ones that were to be upgraded from gravel to tarmac.

Mr Museveni was to repeat the promise to fix the roads in Butaleja during campaign rallies that he held in Bunghanga Village and Nampologoma Playground ahead of the 2011 general elections.
Mr Museveni was to repeat the promise in December 2012 when he met a delegation of elders, opinion and civic leaders led by former Butaleja District LC5 chairperson Joseph Muyonjo and Uganda’s High Commissioner to Tanzania, Ms Dorothy Hyuha, who visited him in his country home in Rwakitura, Kiruhura District.

Again in February 2013 while campaigning for Ms Florence Andiru Nebanda, who was the NRM’s candidate in the by-elections for the Butaleja Woman MP, which had been called following the death of Ms Cerinah Nebanda, Mr Museveni while speaking at rallies in Busolwe Town Council and Nampologoma, reiterated the NRM’s commitment to fix the roads.
Hopes were raised when the same road appeared in the budget for the financial year 2014/2015, but that never translated into any work on the ground which compelled Mr Museveni to repeat the promise to resolve that matter in the period between 2016 and 2021.

However several months since he repeated the promise nothing seems to have been done to resolve it.
Public anger and impatience seem to be on the rise as it increasingly looks like the wait for tarmac will be extended by a few more years.

Impact
Failure to fulfill the promises means that Butaleja District remains the only part of Uganda without a single kilometre of tarmac.
At the same time farmers in the district where agriculture is the mainstay accounting for about 88.7 per cent of the income generated, can hardly access markets and fetch good prices for their agricultural products.
While millet, maize, cassava, cotton, sorghum and beans are produced in big proportions, rice is the biggest food and cash crop coming out of the district.

Figures from the district agriculture office indicate that Butaleja produces more than 20 million kilogrammes of rice annually, but this has not translated into a reduction in poverty.
The Ugandan National Household Survey 2016/17, which was conducted by the Ugandan Bureau of Statistics (UBOS), points to an increase in poverty among subsistence farmer communities. The survey indicates that the percentage of the poor in that segment increased from 20.3 per cent in 2012/2013 to 38.2 per cent in 2016/2017.

During the same period poverty increased from 23 per cent to 36 per cent among societies which said they derived the bulk of their incomes from crop farming and subsistence farming. Butaleja is captured in there, but in this case lack of a proper road network is part of the problem.

While rice does have markets in Tororo, Mbale or even in Kampala, accessing them is difficult because of the bad roads which are often made worse or completely impassable during the rainy seasons as they are prone to floods such as was seen on April 16 when Leresi bridge was destroyed, paralysing all activity and rendering the district inaccessible.

Yet even when the rains are not coming down, very few people involved in the transport business are willing to deploy their vehicles to offer transport services here because of the huge toll that the roads would take on vehicles.
Those who deploy them there charge an arm and a leg in order to be able to shoulder the high cost of maintenance.
This makes the cost of doing business in the area high.

OFFICIAL POSITION
During a meeting held at Kangalaba Secondary School in Himutu Sub-county in the run up to the 2016 general elections, the former Bunyole East MP, Mr Emmanuel Dombo, told angry NRM supporters who were threatening to vote the Opposition because of their disappointment with government over its handling of the roads’ issue that the road was at design stage: “As I talk now the Engineers have started their work of road designing. After the road will be automatically tarmacked.”

On Monday, Mr Allan Ssempebwa Kyobe, the media relations manager in the office of the executive director of the Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA), Ms Allen Kagina, told Daily Monitor that UNRA had indeed done some designs for roads in eastern Uganda, but had by press time not confirmed whether the roads in Butaleja were some of those whose designs were complete.

Mr Kyobe said Ms Kagina, the Minister of Works, Transport and Communication, Ms Monica Azuba Ntege and members of the Parliamentary Committee on Physical Infrastructure had conducted a four-day tour of districts in eastern Uganda between Monday April 23 and April 26 to assess the state of the roads there and that Butaleja had been one of them.
The assessment was to, among other things, establish how best to maintain some of them pending upgrade to tarmac.

MONITOR'S POSITION
One of the effects of delays in delivering on promises that people consider crucial to their welfare is a loss of confidence in government and public officials.

One of the people who talked to Daily Monitor about the Butaleja roads issue is an elder, Mr Joseph Hasahya, who seems to have lost faith in government’s ability to come good on this.
“I can’t believe that Butaleja will get tarmac until it is reflected in the work plan, Budget Framework Paper and Budget for the coming financial year,” he said.

Such levels of mistrust can only lead to public cynicism, which undermines social and national cohesion and in the process undermines development.
Government needs to move fast to address this matter.

At the same time, infrastructural projects have been proved to serve to spur growth and development in areas where they are undertaken.
The country has seen this with the Vurra-Arua-Koboko-Oraba, Ntungamo-Mirama, and Nyakahita-Ibanda-Kamwengye-Fort Portal roads. An investment of a similar nature in Butaleja will not only serve to help farmers there gain easy access to markets, but will certainly trigger off growth in multiple sectors of the local economy and that of huge parts of eastern Uganda.