Recently, I drove to Busia, then to Bushenyi. I often drive to Gulu, Hoima and Fort Portal via Mubende. These experiences both stress and depress me. Kampala and every town near it are all one continuous garbage dump. The roads are not just dirty; they are filled with potholes which in many places have turned into giant craters. Then there is the menace of boda bodas, the indiscipline of taxi drivers, the mud or dust depending on whether it has rained or the sun has shone and the chronic traffic jams. To anyone living in and around Kampala, President Yoweri Museveni's administration has been an unmitigated disaster for the country.
Then sometimes I fly over Kampala in a helicopter. From the skies, you see a different city: very many raised buildings springing up all over the CBD, Kololo, Bugolobi, Nakasero, Mbuya, Old Kampala, Naguru, Bukoto, etc. You fly all the way to Namugongo, Entebbe, Kyengera, Mukono, Gayaza, Bombo, etc. seeing beautiful homes, many apartment blocks, hotels, shopping malls, sprawling mansions with swimming pools and tennis courts, etc. To someone who last visited Uganda in 1995 and has not used our roads, the Museveni administration has been a spectacular success. This is Museveni's biggest success, the creation of a large, educated and worldly middleclass with beautiful homes and elegant private schools they can only access through garbage, potholes, traffic jams etc.
Driving to Busia, I was held in traffic for seven hours. From Kampala all the way to the border, there are hundreds of thousands of cars, buses, minibuses, and trucks - especially trucks - snaking the road for kilometres on end, carrying people and goods to and from the city to the border. As a motorist, sitting and stagnating in this slow traffic for seven hours, I was angry at Museveni. I kept wondering why he is seeking reelection, claiming he wants to "protect the gains". Which gains? my mind kept asking. These bad and congested roads that are making all of us drive at a snail's pace? If built, the Kampala-Jinja expressway will not have solved the problem, as it will dump traffic at Jinja and cause massive congestion from there to Busia.
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But the analyst in me saw an entirely different picture. I studied at Busoga College Mwiri till 1993. It used to take us less than an hour to drive from Kampala to Jinja, only two hours to reach Busia. The current volume of traffic, especially trucks carrying cargo to and from the border, is evidence of the phenomenal growth of Uganda's economy. In 1986, Uganda's GDP, after adjusting for the then distorted price of the dollar, was $2.1 billion, which when adjusted to 2020 prices comes to $4.9 billion. Today, it is $65 billion, a 1,200% growth in 40 years. Uganda's population in 1986 was 15m. Now it is 46m, a 200% growth. Do the math.
We have had incredible economic growth, but the government has been unable to match this growth with the necessary infrastructure. This is now choking growth as goods take ages to move across the country's highly traffic-congested and massively potholed roads, which are themselves very expensive to build and maintain. Over the last 30 years, we could have built railways and water transport to decongest our roads. It costs $1,200 dollars to move a 40-foot container by road from Kisumu to Kampala, $900 by rail and $500 by water. Yet Museveni's government has not built one ship or dredged one foot of seaport to handle cargo transport to Kampala.
Museveni gave a speech in 1988 promising to rehabilitate the railway from Busia to Kampala, and 38 years later, he has not delivered on that promise. He inherited a fleet of three big ships which the Milton Obote government built immediately after it came into office in 1980: Kabalega, Kaawa and Mpamba. One crashed and sunk in Lake Victoria, while the other two are rotting in the dockyard at Port Bell. He has not expanded the road from Kampala to Busia and Malaba despite spectacular growth in the size of the economy and thereby the volume of trade between Uganda and Kenya.
For instance, in 2000, Uganda exported goods worth $16m to Kenya and imported goods worth $320m from that country, 20 times more. In 2022, Uganda exported to Kenya goods worth $735m and imported goods worth $735m from there. Museveni's government has been so successful in its trade policies, it has almost eliminated the huge trade deficit, and in some years, we have had a trade surplus with Kenya despite the many illegal restrictions they put on our dairy and poultry products. This could not have been due to luck or the blessing of the gods but was the result of economic policies and political institutions that manage our international trade.
Is the atrocious transport infrastructure a temporary side effect of rapid economic and population growth which the state has been slow to respond to and therefore a weakness remaining to be fixed? Or is it a structural outcome of the very dynamics that produced this very economic success and may thus be very difficult to reverse? I believe the latter. A lot of private sector success (the shopping malls, sprawling mansions, luxury hotels, beautiful apartment blocks, private schools, etc.) has been built or sustained by systematically demonizing and then looting the state and thereby enfeebling its capacity to deliver public goods.
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The neoliberal orthodoxy that has been responsible for our economic success made us believe in the malevolence of the state and the benevolence of the market (or private sector). It justified corruption and incompetence as inevitable consequences of state action and taught us to see the private sector as a substitute, not a complement, to the state. The specific variety of neoliberal beliefs that gained ground in Uganda worshipped money and lionized the rich regardless of how they made money. When combined with the specific way democracy has evolved in Uganda, it made criminality the foundation of success. Hence, we got gangster capitalism.
I criticize Museveni with a lot of humility because I was an ardent believer in neoliberal ideology. We wanted the market to supplant, not to supplement, the state. We believed it would build ships, railways and superhighways to move cargo. Yet there was little or no evidence that the market has ever done this anywhere. Like all ideological beliefs, ours was based on axiomatic faith, not historic or contemporary evidence. I plead guilty to having been part of the ideological vanguard of this disaster.
