Government pledges to complete northern bypass in 2021
Inspection. (Left to right) Unra executive director Allen Kagina, EU Head of Delegation Attilio Pacifici, the Northern Bypass project manager Ian Baziika, and minister of Works and Transport Katumba Wamala during a joint site inspection in Kampala yesterday. PHOTO BY DAVID LUBOWA.
What you need to know:
- He added: “The physical progress as at end of February was at 70 per cent and the contractor is fully mobilised towards completion.”
- Mr Pacifici said the delays also arose from the need to construct interchanges which was not in the original plan.
The minister of Works and Transport, Gen Katumba Wamala, yesterday said the long- awaited Kampala Northern Bypass project has stalled because of land acquisition challenges and road design improvements.
Gen Katumba, while conducting an on-site road inspection of the project with the Uganda National Roads Authority (Unra) executive director, Ms Allen Kagina, and the Head of Delegation of the European Union in Uganda, Mr Attilio Pacifici, said:
“The challenges that delayed timely land acquisition arose from disputed compensation amounts by project affected persons (PAPs), family disputes over land ownership, absentee landlords and design improvements. The contractor was granted 100 per cent access to site in August 2019, leading to significant progress of works at all the six interchanges.”
He added: “The physical progress as at end of February was at 70 per cent and the contractor is fully mobilised towards completion.”
Mr Pacifici said the delays also arose from the need to construct interchanges which was not in the original plan.
“It is also important to put these delays in the context of significant change about the specifications and objective of this project. We started with something that [was] certainly in line with the traffic of few yew years ago,” Mr Pacifici said.
He added: “So we went for a dramatic upgrading of these infrastructures by building these interchanges we have visited [and] that has a cost. So when people are talking about the huge cost of this project, they have to understand that we are not building what we wanted to many years ago.”
Mr Pacifici also said the project had attracted more costs due to heavy traffic in Kampala.
“We are building something which is much more important [and] and much more suitable to the traffic that Kampala is facing right now and will face in next years,” he explained.
Resolving land issues
The head of land acquisition at Unra, Mr William Matovu, said it was through negotiations that the authority managed to settle the land disputes.
“We put in place an informative stakeholder engagement plan which had a very clear grievance management redress. We had a special team of lawyers we worked with to engage the disputed PAPS. We helped those that were in court where we instituted inter pleader sessions. We agreed through MoUs to allow the contractor to work as court processes were going on,” Mr Matovu said.
