The pothole index and Kampala’s future

Monday, the hashtag #KampalaPotholeExhibition trended on Twitter, in which Kampalans shared photographs of the best and brightest of the city’s back-breaking potholes.
Apart from a handful of streets, Kampala now easily has the most potholed roads in East Africa. Around 2002, it arguably had the best streets in the region. It’s hard to resist the juicy pothole jokes, but we will try. The decline in Kampala’s roads over the last 10 years is not a laughing matter.

Like the state of toilets at international airports, potholes don’t lie. Many countries will have gleaming airports, but the toilets will always reveal whether it is all façade or there is substance too. Often, the toilets will not be clean; there will be no freshener; toilet paper will be out; some water taps won’t work; and the hand dryers will be faulty. It is usually a good sign that the broader political and social system is creaky.

A city might have gleaming skyscrapers, luxurious houses in the suburbs, expensive cars plying its streets, fancy shops and restaurants, with a state government releasing rosy economic statistics. Still, the potholes will give the game away. The potholes tell you it is all built on a pillar of sand. The whole thing is fake at the core, a colourfully painted shell.
The best combo economic-political-social index in Uganda, then, is the pothole. To begin with, we need to find out how many potholes there are in Kampala, let alone the country. Many countries in the world keep a close count of their potholes. Last year, the US reported that there are about 55 million potholes - small, medium, big - across the vast spread that’s America.

The best pothole data in Africa are from South Africa, which has long fallen to the position of the continent’s third-largest economy (after Nigeria and Egypt) but is still its most industrialised.
Last year, the South African National Roads Agency (Sanral) revealed that the country’s roads had about 25 million potholes — around seven million more than the estimated households in the country. The South African potholes are a sign of the economic and infrastructure decay in the country over the last 20 years and a measure of how much the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has sunk into corruption and incompetence. The data collection tradition, which can count potholes, is a holdover from the apartheid era. Like in many immoral political systems, data was critical for apartheid.

Even chaotic Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, two years ago was able to report that it had filled some 20,000 potholes. One of Kampala’s problems today is that it can’t count its potholes.
However, 20 years ago, it would have done better. So what went wrong? Kampala is in a death spiral. One of the key sources of its malaise is politics.
Since elections were introduced, even under the Movement system as a one-party state, President Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) has never won Kampala’s mayorship. It remains an opposition stronghold, impervious even to the best of the NRM’s election-rigging machinations.

Partly because of that, the NRM regime has emotionally divorced Kampala. True, Museveni tried to work around that by setting up the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), and it had a good run between 2011 and 2018 under the able Jennifer Musisi. Ms Musisi, however, became a victim of politics, her reformist zeal blamed for Museveni’s disastrous electoral performance in 2016 when he had some hopes about Kampala. But more than the KCCA solution was going to be needed. It is a bureaucratic intervention. Kampala needs the NRM to invest its political imagination in it. However, it seems past that.

The turning point came in 2007 with the 2007 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) meeting. State House Entebbe was rehabilitated, and President Museveni formally relocated from Nakasero to Entebbe.
Kampala’s decay was deepened by positive developments elsewhere. If you visit around Uganda, most cities/towns are more liveable than Kampala. The streets are cleaner and less potholed. Several are better lit and have beautiful gardens, and even parks, that Kampala doesn’t. Yes, they have less traffic and fewer people. But there is, to borrow the expression, a “slow rise of the rest”.

Kampala isn’t going anywhere soon. The urbanisation of the districts surrounding it will make it a more prosperous city. It will remain the most creative Ugandan city, its most culturally lively, and where enormous fortunes are made. But it will become filthier, nastier, and brutal, smothered by millions of bodas bodas run amok. It will become Johannesburg, a rich death star. After 2050, there will be a Ugandan equivalent of Cape Town, which is more attractive. Which one it will be, we aren’t sure. But the road to it has already been built.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3