When Big Men see sharks in Kampala’s waters

It is now a month since the sensational citizen-driven #KampalaPotholeExhibition, a campaign to draw attention to the appalling state of roads in the country’s capital.

Kampala authorities were shamed, and as the images and Twitter posts of the campaign went viral globally, President Yoweri Museveni announced he had authorised the release of Sh6 billion – a small fraction of what the Kampala City Council Authority (KCCA) said it needed – to fix the potholes. Some critics of the campaign said it was damaging the country’s and capital’s image and a damper on tourism. 

However, it would seem that, too, was one of the reasons the KCCA leaders, the president, and Parliament were aroused to action – or appearing action.

Now the moment of reckoning has arrived, and there are signs that #KampalaPotholeExhibition, while maintaining its status as the country’s most attention-grabbing social media campaign ever, might not win the trophy for being the most effective on the ground.

This column, “The pothole index and Kampala’s future”, of April 19, 2023, argued that Kampala’s potholes were a product of deep structural problems and would likely not be fixed by a shaming campaign. Instead, it “will become filthier, nastier, and brutal, smothered by millions of bodas bodas run amok. It will become Johannesburg, a rich death star. 
“Still, it was reasonable to expect a performative show of sorting the pothole nightmare and to grab the easy political points that would come from it. Maybe not that too.
There are some realities which clash with the above product. The most obvious one is coming in January next year.

The 19th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is scheduled to be held in January 2024 in Kampala. It will be an event equal to, and possibly bigger than, the 2007 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), the last time Kampala got a significant facelift. Before that, the previous major remake had happened in November 1993, when the Preferential Trade Area (PTA) met in Kampala.

That PTA summit was President Museveni’s and the ruling National Resistance Movement’s (NRM) coming out party, the most presidential-studded event in the country since they took power in January 1986. It was essential to turn out at their Sunday best.

It also turned out to be a significant summit in pan-African economic terms because the treaty establishing the Common Market for  Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), which succeeded the PTA, was signed then and ratified a year later in Lilongwe, Malawi.
These city facelifts reveal a familiar truth; the Museveni state rarely does things like that for the people. It does so for foreigners.

Apart from the NRM government’s anti-Kampala political bent, other socio-cultural factors exist. There isn’t a critical mass of Ugandans for whom Kampala is their first home. If there were, we Kampalans would treat it more affectionately (we don’t, and have turned it into a filthy pile). And if the government and city authority knew that we cared deeply for it, they would respond robustly to demands to fill its potholes and light it up at night (and we wouldn’t steal the lights once they are put up).

To appreciate the importance of this, one has only to look at the Rwandan capital Kigali, considered one of the cleanest, if not the cleanest, in Africa and among the greenest in the world. There are many reasons Kigali is clean, but one of the important and unsung ones is that Kigali is home is now the first home of a whole generation of post-1994-genocide Rwandans.

Returning after nearly 40 years away as refugees and all family connections severed by the Genocide against the Tutsi, Kigali was their village (kilo) and new ancestral land. The pretty face of the city is partly built on that platform.

The short of it is that the major patch-up of Kampala’s roads will likely happen closer to January 2024, not immediately.
At the macro-political level, it is vital to defeat #KampalaPotholeExhibition because allowing it to succeed would set a precedent that the government considers dangerous. For what is there to prevent Kampalans from asking for a cake after you have given them bread?

If the pothole campaign succeeds, then next could be a campaign to release NUP political prisoners, reintroduce presidential term limits, or stop President Museveni from seeking a 9th term in 2026. Because of that, even if the government’s spirit were willing to fix the city’s potholes on the back of the social media campaign, the body is unable or afraid that it would be signing its political death warrant.
That also is why Sh6 billion, not Sh24 billion, was promised. If it ever comes and is not stolen, it will be a drop in the pothole ocean. They are afraid to feed what they see as sharks.

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