Africa’s urban development challenges

This week, we depart from the usual focus on the intrigue around political leaders and turn to a problem that is itself political.

We are talking about the state of today’s rapidly-growing and congested African cities.

Tens of thousands of us sit, frustrated or resigned, in slow-moving traffic jams on a daily basis in Kampala or the highways leading into and out of Kampala.

When it comes to road traffic in today’s cities, everyone is affected equally regardless of political affiliation, social class or economic means.

There is constant bickering between State House and the Kampala City administrative agency, KCCA.

There is, of course, unending lamentation by citizens about the congestion, garbage, flooding during a downpour, the squalid living conditions of the low-income groups, and the generally poor layout of the city.

I’ve been intrigued for years about what can be done about this mess. I needed to hear, not the familiar political arguments and citizens’ grumbling, but a professional, impartial view.

This I got to hear on Tuesday, October 17, in a BBC World Service documentary examining Africa’s urban future and the focus of this second part in the series was the Tanzanian coastal city of Dar es Salaam.

In case you’re wondering what the relevance of Dar es Salaam is in this article, it’s because it gives a glimpse into the future that awaits Kampala.

About 60 years ago at the time the-then Tanganyika got independence, there were about 300,000 people in Dar es Salaam.

Today,  six million people live in Dar es Salaam, a 40 percent increase in population in just the last decade.

Dar es Salaam is located along a large, natural harbour at the Indian Ocean, with a new Chinese-built harbour to the north of the city.

Most of the new infrastructure has been built in the last five years, coinciding with the involvement of East Asia -- China, Japan, and South Korea.

Many visitors to or travellers through Dar es Salaam have been struck by the rate of infrastructure construction and the interminable traffic jams.

The government moved its operations to Dodoma, located in central Tanzania, in 1996 easing some of the pressure on Dar es Salaam, but this has not changed Dar es Salaam’s position as the chief commercial and cultural centre of Uganda’s southern neighbour.

Unfortunately, with this rapid construction has come the inevitable contrast in images and inequality in income and standards of living.

Informal housing, wooden and tin-roof shacks can be seen all over Dar-es-Salaam.

The Tanzanian government soon realised that the mini-bus taxis common in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania were not sustainable in today’s congested cities.

Dar-es-Salaam introduced a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system in 2016. Dedicated two-lane bus routes were built to allow the buses to ply the city uninterrupted by other forms of transport.

Lessons for Uganda

What I learnt from the BBC World Service documentary was that Uganda needs to move past the political bickering and social media grumbling and start to engage professional urban planners.

The new infrastructure investment, especially the bridges and multi-lane in these cities is adding to the problem, pushing the low-income and poor sections of the population further toward the margins of the urban sprawl.

“Densification” is now the only solution, the construction upward into high-rise apartment blocks and mixed-use buildings rather than across the landscape.

The rate of urbanisation is overwhelming any efforts at planning.

This urban planning does not take into account or consult the large-scale property developers and multinational investors.

Prof Philip Harrison, a South African urban planning specialist from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, is leading a research team studying Dar es Salaam’s growth and challenges.

He described the root of the crisis – government investment without forethought: “There has been a lot of investment [in] roads...Essentially what you’re doing, you’re putting in the new road, which then allows for more middle-class development further out, which then produces more congestion with more cars coming in the long distance every day into the centre [of Dar es Salaam], and then you’ve got to put in more road infrastructure. And so it becomes this never-ending cycle.”

This sounds very much like Kampala.

So far, over the last decade and a half, the focus has been on building infrastructure -- roads, bridges, drainage channels, and shopping malls.

What we haven’t seen much of is technical planning and thinking going into the why, the method, the layout and function.

President Museveni and his government officials are puzzled that they could have done so much to upgrade Kampala’s infrastructure but all they hear from the city’s residents is ingratitude and complaining.

The reason, apart from frustration with a careless and corrupt government that is close to 40 years in power, is that new infrastructure alone is not a solution.

Roads can be built at great cost to the country’s treasury and still not solve much.

Prof Harrison again, explaining to the BBC: “You drive through Dar es Salaam and it’s an easy flow of traffic because there’s 10kms of road that the Japanese have put in, and then there’s a massive bottleneck, and you sit there for 45 minutes getting through the bottleneck, and then later on you go over sort of a flyover that the Chinese have put in, and everything is smooth and as you come down the flyover, there’s another massive bottleneck.”

This disjoint, too, is familiar in Kampala. We have, for example, the new Northern Bypass going past Bwaise that usually has light vehicle traffic, only for piles of cars and lorries to greet one at the roundabouts heading into Wandegeya and Old Kampala.

The Kampala-Entebbe Expressway was built in good faith in the hope of decongesting the main highway to Entebbe.

Unfortunately, it was built through swampy land and isolated, sparsely-populated hilly terrain.

The old road goes through established trading centres, is flanked by schools, markets, restaurants, car repair garages, fuel service stations, churches, and so on.

The commuter taxis, then, have little use for the expressway since most people live in, to, or travel through the settled areas along the old road.

This partly explains why, four years since the expressway was opened, it still handles light traffic.

A case of new infrastructure built, but without a careful study of the economic and demographic map of the country.

And this is the general story in Uganda since independence, from Universal Primary Education (UPE) educational programmes to the Parish Development Model (PDM) that lacks field agricultural and veterinary officers to guide the rural population, building new central markets in several up-country towns, and yet most of the population is rural or peri-urban.