On Africa’s narrow roads, the young won’t give way

If you are a frequent user of Ggaba Road, then you are familiar with the back route that drops off Muyenga-Kiwafu road, down to Heritage International School, and through to Kansanga-Bunga or back onto Kiwafu Road. 

It is a narrow corridor of about a kilometre at most, which should ordinarily offer relief and alternative to the main road, but it only achieves the reverse. 

Instead, it contributes a great deal to the traffic choke-hold in the area between Kansaga and Bunga, taking anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour out of commuters’ time at peak hour.

First, it has potholes to make you wonder what sort of insurance cover Vitz drivers take out when they choose to use it.

But even worse, it is nearly impossible for any two cars to drive past each other without waiting or having to turn off into someone’s gate – wasting a lot more time. For as long as anyone can remember, both situations – crater potholes and a three-inch road – have been constants.

Seeing as to talk about potholes on Kampala roads is to make poor use of this column’s space, let me focus on what happens when you refuse to think; or fail to act after thinking. The said narrow road, as explained, is a loop. 

So it is possible for users to simply agree to a one-way road policy, where those going to Kampala through Muyenga will exit from one end, while those going to Bunga-Ggaba-Munyonyo will enter from one end. 

Admitting that it might be preposterous to assume that nobody has considered this as an option, the question should be why nobody has acted on it, and whose responsibility it is to.

It is important to ask this because it is not a problem to be found just in Kiwafu. It is the same in nearly every middle-class residential area around the city and its environs. Perimeter fences that kiss the road, allowing for just one vehicle at a time and no pedestrian along with it. If a car should breakdown anywhere on the road, nobody else will go through or turn back because both options weren’t even considered to begin with.

Whether it is one-way loops, or community conversations about public roads and perimeter walls (or whatever else will help), the reason none of it is happening might be down to how we – and those responsible for solving persistent problems – approach creative thinking and problem solving.

And if you extrapolated this to everything else, you realise how this thinking – or lack of – can lead to disastrous effects.. 

Gridlocks and the inability to unlock them eventually mean that nobody and nothing will work, at least not as efficiently as they were meant to.  And because you can only freeload for so long, those to whom services are owed get agitated by the inabilities and inaction of those on whom responsibility has been bestowed. Since nobody takes constriction and deprivation as a way of life forever, the implosion by the led is inevitable.

The result is a standoff between the young, who face the brunt of systemic gridlocks, and for whom change must therefore come, now; and the old, who often get right of way, and see no cause for alarm. 

The leaders, usually made of more substandard mental-stitching than the led, then resort to violence – because its easier to bulldoze your way through trouble than work the bends of the mind. But this only brings even more carnage and outrage.

You have probably seen how the script is pretty much the same everywhere – from Zimbabwe, to Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan, and the Lekki toll gate in Nigeria. 

It starts with government screwing up and getting away with it for so long; then one day, citizens decide they have had enough, and show out in protest; government shows up with batons, bullets, tear gas and water canons – all directed at those it is sworn to protect; unarmed citizens crying for help, scores get injured and others die. 

If you are watching helplessly from a distance, you are probably recognising how much similar your own endless loops of systemic narrow roads are to theirs. 

You are probably envying them for refusing to give way, while also silently acknowledging, with such trepidation, that your government wouldn’t treat you any different from theirs, if you sought sought to unlock the gridlock. 

Oh! To be young and African.

Mr Rukwengye is the founder, Boundless Minds. [email protected]