Uganda’s productivity crisis: Museveni’s blunder on Jinja-expressway

I recently hitched a Coaster bus from the Old Taxi Park to Jinja. I got to the Taxi Park at midday, the bus set off at 3 pm, and we arrived in Jinja past 7 pm.

It is 2025, and a mere 96-kilometre journey in Uganda took more than four hours. Those four hours were an eye-opener for me. They revealed something about Uganda’s productivity crisis, largely caused by our inability to connect places, or better stated as poor traffic management.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Uganda’s GDP (current US Prices) is USD 64.23 billion. It implies that Uganda’s productivity by the hour comes down to USD 7.3 million. In an hour, Ugandans collectively produce value worth USD 7.3 million.

It thus goes without saying that Ugandans are losing money to the drain with every hour wasted in these traffic gridlocks. Thus, if we unlocked our productivity on the roads, we could achieve multiplier effects in our GDP.

Let’s return to the Kampala-Jinja highway. This is Uganda’s most important road. It is our main inlet and outlet to the external world. This road accounts for more than 90 per cent of Uganda’s imports and exports.

In 2018, the African Development Bank approved the Kampala-Jinja expressway road project. Construction was slated to begin in 2022 with the project estimated to take five years.

That means, in 2027, the project would have gone live. By the time of writing this commentary, bid evaluation is ongoing, and thus, the country cannot expect to reap the benefits of this project until 2030. And what happened?

It is alleged that a whistleblower went to the President with reports of bribery and corruption around the initial awarding of the project. In 2020, the President wrote a letter to the then Works minister, Monica Azuba and directed that the tendering process of the Kampala-Jinja expressway be halted.

Then, the President ordered that the process be redone in a more transparent manner with a different financing approach. The overall cost of the project is placed at $1.5 billion. Let’s assume the value of corruption surrounding this project was up to $20 million, does it in any way equate to the GDP lost through the traffic congestion?

In development, there are no perfect solutions, just trade-offs. And in the case of this road, by aiming to have a corruption-free project, we’ve set the country back, we’ve cost it much more than we were attempting to save. And the project won’t even get cheaper; it will get more expensive, due to the time factor involved.

In hindsight, I have concluded that this was a presidential blunder of historical proportions. It was a national betrayal. For lack of better words, we could say that these kinds of delays on critical infrastructure amount to economic terrorism. The President in his letter, had argued that ‘roads are not the major cost reducers compared to railway and electricity’.

But someone ought to have whispered to the President that this was not just any other road, it was the national artery. Better still, it should be known to the President that there’s no railway yet to compare this road to, and this road cannot be compared to electricity (it’s apples to mangoes).

Logistics (roads) and electricity (utilities) play different functions in the production chain, and thus are incomparable. The economy is about activity, and activity is about turnaround. How quickly can a person turn around a truck from Kampala to Jinja or from Kampala to Malaba?

You have time productivity loss, lower turnover, and higher unit transport costs. Coupled to this, you have higher operational costs. If a truck is going to spend twice as much on the road, then it is implicitly implied that fuel costs double, driver costs, increased vehicle wear and tear and a loss in perishables.

It also means that the country cannot achieve competitiveness on its key route. The Kampala-Jinja highway is a national artery. And a neglect of the national artery is tantamount to economic sabotage.

We cannot afford further delays on this road. It must be treated as a national emergency, and a different procurement process ought to be devised for such critical national projects. Thus, if I were the President of Uganda, and such a thing happened, I would be left with no option but to offer a national apology.

And the President of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni ought to do that. To offer an apology not just to the current citizenry, but to the future generations who’ve been robbed of a head-start because of a delayed road.

The author is a concerned citizen