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Uganda: Nile Bridge is Falling Down - Just Because the Colonialists Left
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The East African (Nairobi)
COLUMN
12 May 2008
Posted to the web 12 May 2008
Charles Onyango - Obbo
Nairobi
The Nile Bridge near Owen Falls in the eastern Uganda town of Jinja is so badly cracked, it's about to collapse.
This "shocking" news was broken to a parliamentary committee last week. That would spell disaster not only for Uganda, but also for other landlocked countries like Rwanda, Burundi, and DR Congo, who use it as their main link to Mombasa. The 54-year-old bridge is the only road link across the Nile on the eastern route.
The news, however, was not shocking to those in the know, because over the past 10 years experts had been warning that the bridge was falling down, and urgent action was needed to halt its decay.
Nothing was done.
The bridge needs Ush9 billion (about $5 million) to patch up so it can last a few more years, but the government has provided only half the money.
THE GOVERNMENT ISN'T broke. It just lacks the will. For example, it cost nearly that amount to buy cutlery, china and furniture for the refurbished State House in Entebbe, so the Queen of England could throw a banquet for Commonwealth leaders during their summit in Uganda last November.
The problems of the Nile Bridge are typical of most of Africa. Hospitals, roads, railways, and airports built by the colonialists started to fall apart after 25 years of independence.
Sometimes, it's because of corruption. Repair jobs are given to contractors who share the money with their corrupt political cronies. In other cases, political narrow-mindedness is the culprit. A president will let roads leading to opposition strongholds became impassable as a punishment.
The biggest cause of this ruinous neglect, however, is that colonialism had a logic for the Europeans that independence doesn't seem to hold for many of the leaders who replaced them.
The colonialists built roads, as in some parts of Central Kenya, in order to enable them to move equipment and men quickly to put down the Mau Mau rebellion. They imposed poll tax on the "natives" to force them to grow cash crops like cotton and sisal, so they could supply their industries at home with cheap raw materials. And they needed to get the commodities to the high seas, so they built railways and roads.
In the suburbs, because they had low tolerance for malaria, they built houses at distances that made it impossible for a mosquito that had just fed on the occupants of one to fly to the next. When we took over, we broke these houses down, crammed the space with apartment blocks or built giant mansions so close together, one house is separated from the next one by just the wall. The mosquitoes celebrated.
An overstretched British Empire didn't have enough of its own people to manage its dominions, so it built schools to educative a "native" cadre to manage the minor jobs in the colonies and to be consumers of its goods.
THESE DAYS, SOME COUNTRIES FUND over 90 per cent of their budgets from donor handouts. So whether or not there is production, there will still be money in the bank - which the rulers then steal. The incentive for them to invest in infrastructure is therefore less than that of the British governors, who had their targets set for them by the Home Office.
Three years ago, the then CEO of Nation Media Group, Wilfred Kiboro, argued that because Uganda was Kenya's leading trade partner, the Uganda High Commissioner should be the most important diplomat in Nairobi.
But he isn't. Instead, the big noises are the American and British envoys. Now imagine if Kenya were the UK or USA. For sure it would be building bigger embassies, and moving more staff and its best diplomats to Beijing.
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Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group's managing editor for convergence and new products.
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