Mr Daniel K. Kalinaki
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then a country’s roads should be a good indicator of the state of its democracy, local governance, and collective priorities.
This is probably the point at which you look up again at the headline, see roads signposted in the article, and then wonder if your columnist has finally yielded to the voices in his head. Not yet. Now give me a chance to explain.
Repairs on the Northern Bypass resumed recently and we were told that the road surface had reached its end of life, of about 20 years – although the 21-kilometre road was only officially launched in 2022.Plans were drawn in the late 90s, and construction began around 2003, but it took us two decades to complete the road. We, essentially, built a kilometre of road every year. Disputes over compensation to landowners was one of the biggest but not the only problem behind the delay.
An outsider might think this was because we are such a wonderful democracy in which life and private property are guarded jealously, right? Far from it.
During the same time, however, hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly displaced off their land in northern Uganda. Tens of thousands more were allowed to resettle on land they did not own in other parts of the country.
Over the same period, the military took over the High Court to impose its will on the law. We also amended the Constitution to serve very narrow individual interests not once, but twice, using bribes and then armed commandos in Parliament
.In other words, the State demonstrated coercive capacity when it needed to, which only makes its bureaucratic and execution incompetence more glaring.
A state that can send commandos into the High Court or into the parliamentary chambers can, if it so wishes, ensure a contractor finishes a project on time. It only has to apply the same dictatorial tendencies but for the wider public interest.Look around the many public projects around Uganda that are way over budget and long past deadlines, and you will see that not only are we bad at democracy, but we are also rather lousy at dictatorship.
Getting things done, especially public projects, requires a combination of positive and negative incentives. In a democracy with an accountable government, dodgy contractors would be blacklisted into bankruptcy. In a functional dictatorship, they will build to spec and deadline lest they are sent pictures of their kids at the school playground with a warning. The debacle of the one-kilometre-a-year Northern Bypass is being repeated as we speak on many of the road projects across Greater Kampala. Many have ground to a halt because landowners, unhappy with the compensation amount offered to them, have refused to hand over land to contractors.
In typical tinpot dictatorship fashion, our approach has been to seek to amend the laws to allow for compulsory acquisition of land for such projects. There is a better way and one that is even more democratic.
Say a piece of land has many competing ownership claims or a landowner who is unhappy with the compensation amount offered. The money offered should be put in an interest-bearing escrow account overseen by the court, then the bulldozers called in to clear the way for the roadworks while the legal dispute(s) continue.
Once the court determines the rightful owner, they collect the money. If the court awards more in compensation, that should be covered by the interest and, if not, topped up. The road will have been built in the meantime, and the interest in the property will be compensated in full.
The backlog of court cases need not be an excuse, either. Surely, their lordships can set up mobile courts in project areas and speedily resolve these compensation claims, no?
Quick and fair resolution of disputes is an essential aspect of equity in democratic societies, as is the application of the rule of law in which the same standards apply to all.We have demonstrated, time and again, that we are inclined to rule by law and to forcefully bend the collective will to whichever direction we want.
If we think that public projects are good and accept that we have failed at being a democracy, can’t we at least try to be a functional dictatorship that makes things work and builds things on time? It’s not like we are asking for free and fair elections or a peaceful transfer of power from one elected leader to another!
Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and a poor man’s freedom fighter.
[email protected]; @kalinaki
