If Karuma Bridge could speak, it would thrill us

The Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA) closed the Karuma Bridge from May 6 to lorries, trailers and buses to allow for emergency repairs after parts of its structure were found to have deteriorated dangerously. The bridge is the main and busy link to northern Uganda, South Sudan, and the northern Democratic Republic of Congo. Fortunately, there are quite motorable alternatives, but they will add a lot more kilometres, and cost, to the journey north.

For the historically-minded, the UNRA statement announcing the temporary closure had some eye-catching parts. It said, “The continued exposure of the bridge to the EVER-INCREASING TRAFFIC (emphasis added) is likely to accelerate its deterioration and serviceability if not addressed in time”. 
Speaking to Daily Monitor, Lawrence Pario, head of Bridges and Structures at UNRA, said the cracks were first detected 15 years ago and some remedial works were done in 2012. The paper reported that, built in 1963, the bridge was supposed “to last for 50 years, which lapsed in 2013, with its additional years of use after this period called ‘service life’.”

Karuma might have got a longer lease of life because of tragedy; the northern Uganda wars, especially from 1987 to 2002, when the worst of it petered out with the bulk of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) driven out of Uganda into southern Sudan (some years before it became South Sudan). In the early years of the war, the Karuma-Gulu road was closed to most trucks, except military-escorted convoys. And those too were few. Only one other entity, British American Tobacco (BAT) travelled with relative ease in the wider northern region, distributing cigarettes. It was the only item the government troops and rebels agreed on; so the National Resistance Army (NRA), later UPDF, let the tobacco vans travel through its lines, and the rebels never shot at the vans.

In the 15 most active years of the northern wars, a BAT van was shot at only once by rebels. The staff weren’t injured. The rebels shot at it by mistake, and did something they probably did only that once – they sent an apology to BAT. The mystery of soldiers, rebels, tobacco (and beer). The road “rested” in this period. The ”ever-increasing” traffic UNRA talks of is also a result of war. 

During the Museveni-led bush war against the UPC government/UNLA in Luweero from 1981, most people from the interior of the region who didn’t flee the area completely, gravitated to the few pockets of humanitarian zones and internally displaced persons’ camp near the Kampala-Gulu roads. For about two years after the NRM came to power, these places remained desolate, though they had more life than the skeleton-littered areas further inside. Then they exploded in a burst of recovery, and the population rapidly swelled. However, there had been a key demographic change – Luweero folks became “road people”, in that they became concentrated in a narrow strip along the highway.

This hyper-compressed population was part of a process of rapid urbanisation and created a market concentration - a “modernisation” that drove an economic boom. The war in the north had much the same effect as the conflict in Luweero. A people scattered in their vast countryside were killed, or driven in huge numbers and squalid IDP camps. A large number of those who fled, the more entrepreneurial, came south of the Karuma Bridge.

 They too “modernised”. They transformed from peasants in the north to petty commercial farmers and traders concentrated along the upper neck of the Kampala-Gulu road, especially in the Bunyoro region. Subsequently, they have contributed, without doubt, to creating the most economically dynamic corridor in Uganda, and also the most cosmopolitan and multicultural, if Bweyale, which teems with South Sudanese refugees, is added in.
There is no comparative experience (except perhaps Ishaka in the west) travelling that corridor, through Karuma, and on to the wild Kamdini Corner, if you are enchanted by the sights of hustling people. When UNRA speaks of “ever-increasing” traffic, it’s guilty of understatement.

The lucrative commercial traffic to South Sudan didn’t exist until after 2005, with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, also known as the Naivasha Agreement, signed on January 9, 2005, by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and the government of Sudan in Khartoum. The heavily-Uganda-backed war died down, and the trucks and hustlers started the rush on South Sudan. The independence of South Sudan on July 9, 2011, to become the world’s newest nation, opened the gates to the market further to Uganda.

Northern DRC had come into play on a bigger  scale after the overthrow of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997, in a war in which Uganda was one of the backers of the rebels. If Karuma Bridge could speak, it would tell a story for the ages. It has brought a lot of death, but given more in life. In its later years, it too could finally do with some love.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, 
writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3