THE executive directeor of the newly established Uganda Road Fund (URF), Michael Odongo, has cautioned people not the judge the state of Uganda’s roads in terms of those in Kampala city.
He believes the national network has improved. In an interview recently, he said the length of tarmac roads has increased from 2,000 to 3,000km over the last 10 years. The roads to Hoima and to Arua are new.
“The Ugandan roads have progressively improved tremendously given where we have came from since 1980s. Beginning mid 1990’s, great emphasis by Government was on maintenance and significant local and development partner monies were ploughed into the sector. A significant fraction of roads in extremely poor state was lifted to good state,” Odongo said.
The road conditions have improved because maintenance has improved. But the roads in urban centres have remained poor simply because most of them have reached terminal age in terms of pavement life.
Terminal age is reached when a road has carried the traffic it was designed to carry over a specific number of years. Roads have a design life, depending on traffic loads and money available to achieve a specified design standard.
Normally, Odongo said, 15-20 years is taken to reach terminal life with good maintenance that ensures that specified interventions are delivered in time to maintain the road.
He said Kampala pavements appear to deteriorate so fast because in most cases, they do not receive, in time, the due maintenance. This has partly been due to lack of funds. For example a gravel road after four years must be re-graveled. For a tarmac road, after seven years you must reseal it. After 15 years, you are going to do pavement reconstruction to give it more life.
Odongo noted that the Road Fund finds relevance in the sector in terms of addressing this erratic flow of maintenance funds to enable agencies deliver due maintenance in time to prolong pavement life, he said.
“We have not come to criticise anybody nor have we come to find faults. We have come to complement sector-wide efforts to address weaknesses,” he said.
“I am at the head of a road fund that has come into the sector to build bridges and alliances with sector actors and complement their efforts as we all pursue the single goal of improving our road network. Institutions should not be seen to be fighting but they should also not deny that there is problems that need to be solved,” he observed.
Odongo said the challenge is now on urban councils as agencies of the URF to prepare strategic plans for uplifting the conditions of their urban roads to maintainable status. He said the URF has already put KCC on notice with this request and it will be a precondition for continued funding of its maintenance programmes.
He said the Uganda Road Fund was set up by the Uganda Road Fund Act 2008 to finance the periodic and routine maintenance of public roads. It is modeled along what is popularly known as second generation fund which are independent of government general budgetary system in how it generates revenues from road user charges and disburses it for maintenance of roads.
Uganda has about 80,000km of public roads comprising 21,000 km of national roads under the Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA), about 5,000 km of urban roads, about 22,500 km of district roads and anything between 30,000 and 40,000 km of community access roads.
“We finance the 87 districts of Uganda for maintaining their district networks and 23 urban councils for their urban networks. We also finance the maintenance of community access roads in the nearly 1,000 sub-counties all over the country. But the emphasis is financing the maintenance of national roads under UNRA 100%. These others are financed on cost-sharing basis,” he said.
However, he attributed the poor state of roads in the country to a number of factors.
He said there has not been adequate, reliable and timely flow of road maintenance funds to agencies. Consequently, agencies have been unable to make long-term plans for programmes and projects that are delivered in time for road users.
Another problem he identified is procurement which is beset with so many rigidities owing to lengthy, extended and elaborative processes, apparently to assure transparency. As such, he noted, agencies are not able to use disbursed monies in time because of the extensive stages. In that sense, he said, it is self-defeating in terms of delivering value for money for the country.
The other problem, according to him, is in respect of the private sector in which they have put a lot of hope for undertaking most of the works as they absorb most of the disbursed funds. He said there are cases where contractors have exhibited lack of capacity and ability to deliver projects in time, quality and within costs.
He warned that it is now urgent that the contractors, especially the indigenous ones, rise up and address the poor image so as to be reliable partners to the URF.
