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Uganda: Quit Excuses And Build New Bridge
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The Monitor (Kampala)
EDITORIAL
10 May 2008
Posted to the web 9 May 2008
Experts must be exhausted of saying "we told you so" to the government. The latest accident in-waiting is the deplorable state of the only bridge linking the east of the country to the rest of it at the Owen Falls Dam in Jinja.
A decade ago, the government was warned that the bridge was at the risk of collapse by an international firm. But nothing has been done yet to build another bridge and no doubt the government is waiting for another "we told you so" moment.
But lack of strategic planning and action seem to be a habit of this government. Before Kenya erupted in post-election violence in December 2007, the government had been warned that the draining of the fuel reserves would hurt the economy since there was no alternative route to the sea. It looked on until long fuel queues emerged because there were no fuel reserves in the tanks in Jinja.
The national electricity crisis is still ongoing even after experts long ago predicted it would simply get worse. The state had an option to build a dam early but when Mr Hilary Onek, a leading expert, warned against constructing a power station parallel to the Owen Falls Dam, the government ignored this advice.
The result has been the lowest power production cycle in Uganda's history. The result of the lack of action on such strategic challenges even in the face of prior alerts is needless suffering for individuals, their businesses and communities.
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When a baby dies because of a power blackout in a hospital, it will not be enough to say the government was incompetent. If businesses lay off workers because they can no longer make enough money with the cost of energy eating away profits, it is not enough to tell families who will lose a breadwinner their government was caught napping.
No modern country should walk into a crisis but Uganda does. This must stop. Crises which are self-inflicted have time and time again proved to be opportunities for the government fat cats to inflate budgets and steal taxpayers' money while the rest of the country suffers from their mistakes.
The Ministry of Works says it needs $40 million to build a new bridge. The government must find the money and stop making excuses. If the bridge collapses, which it certainly will at some point, it will be too late to say yet again "we told you so".
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