Namboole is a waste of time and money

Viewed from Jinja Road, the Nelson Mandela National Stadium – Namboole, looks remarkable. But a shockingly filthy environment reveals itself when you turn off the highway and move up close. 

It looks like it was last dusted when Airtel signed up to sponsor the Cranes all those years ago and the enormity of the place tends to diminish whatever clean-up efforts have been made. 

But clearly it is going to take more than the occasional fresh coat of red paint to kill the overwhelming stench from the washrooms or the weeds that have engulfed the parking lots!

In many ways then, Namboole is a bleak reminder of our chronic inability to preserve our public facilities. But what it should also tell us is that the devil of infrastructure projects is not in the building costs, but in the detail of operation and maintenance costs.

Admittedly, stadiums are costly to build. Readers, and fans of English football will be familiar with Wembley. It was rebuilt in 2007 for the princely sum of $1.1b. And 25 years ago, our own Namboole was delivered by a Chinese grant aid package worth $36m!

But if that suggests that building costs are mega, a peek at operating and maintenance costs shows larger sums. For example, I had the opportunity to visit Wembley for the Champions League final of 2011 where I met a Ugandan maintenance clerk who told me it costs $17m per year to run the stadiums’ 8 restaurants, 34 bars, 98 kitchens and 2, 618 toilets. 

The water bill alone would bankrupt many districts in Uganda. And as for our Namboole, an extremely scandalous figure of $117m is being thrown around as what is necessary to renovate and complete it as envisioned by the Chinese who built it. That folks, is four times more than we budgeted for Tourism, an economic activity that brings in $2b per year.

Anyway, the Ugandan chap at Wembley said the stadium is largely self-sustaining. I guess this is the point where we ask whether Namboole’s economic ecosystem would justify such sums. 

Let alone $117m, what is the point of pouring the $26m phase 1 renovation budget that the government has already approved into a place that only fills up when the Cranes plays, which is 4 times a year or when the Pentecostal prayer marathons converge, which is once a year on New Year’s Eve?

This is not to suggest that Namboole be abandoned like the greasy carcasses of pioneer buses rotting in the parking lot beneath the VIP entrance. Far from. This is an invitation for us to reconfigure how we think about these things.

In our circumstances a more practical approach would be to channel the $117m into more feasible and decentralised investments in sport infrastructure and not just one white elephant. That money can easily spread 10 small 10,000-seater stadiums all over the country. 

These would be projects we can operationally sustain better, without mentioning the decentralisation value that such a spread would bring to national sport development.  And they can be built in a modular nature too that allows for easy expansion when we grow the legs.

In the meantime, some will ask what we do with the World Cup qualifiers now. Well, there is always St Mary’s Stadium, Kitende.  Others will say Namboole is an icon, an emotional investment for which economic sensibilities do not apply. 

And that after all these years abandoning it would be such a waste of time and money. To them, I say, trying to prop up a crumbling edifice we can ill afford to preserve is just that – a waste of time and money.

Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @MBanturaki