Prime
KCCA seeks Shs1 trillion to reconstruct city roads
Motorists drive past potholes on Eighth Street in industrial area, Kampala. PHOTO /FRANK BAGUMA
What you need to know:
- The authority has an annual budget of only Shs26b for constructing and maintaining roads.
A t least 360 kilometres of city roads need to be reconstructed because their service life has expired, the executive director of Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), Ms Dorothy Kisaka, has said.
Highlighting the authority’s 2022 achievements, plans and challenges to journalists yesterday, Ms Kisaka asked the government to increase the authority’s annual budget for city road construction and maintenance from the current Shs26b to Shs1 trillion.
“The need is much bigger than the budget we have. If we are to meet all the needs, we would need much more than the funding we are receiving,” she said.
Ms Kisaka said her team was given a budget ceiling of Shs10b in the next financial year to reconstruct expired roads yet 1km costs about Shs3b to Shs4b.
“It puts us in a fix. The roads are wasting but we don’t have the funds to work on them. We cannot perform miracles without the money,” she said.
“Our contractors have done much work on credit that they are stopping to do it. All the budget we have up to June next year is already spent... We remind the government that we need at least Shs100 billion or even Shs1 trillion committed to the roads every year,” the KCCA executive director added.
She said on average, a paved road is expected to last 15 to 29 years before reconstruction, yet in Kampala City, most of the expired roads have an average age of 35 to 40 years with a backlog of up to seven years.
According to Ms Kisaka, the city has 2,100 km of roads of which 600km are paved or tarmac and 1,500km are unpaved.
She said challenges such as floods, and potholes have become perennial problems that KCCA has to deal with but needs adequate funding.
Ms Kisaka added that the floods have been heightened by the encroachment on wetlands and water corridors and the inadequacy of drainage infrastructure.
She, however, said the government had secured $288m (Shs1 trillion) from the African Development Bank to construct new roads.
“We are going to be doing a lot of new road constructions in the city. Some roads have been over-repaired and are going to be overhauled. The construction will commence in February next year,” Ms Kisaka said.
They would also construct walkways, junctions, pavements, and drainage and install more street lights.
On the issue of Parish Development Model, Ms Kisaka said all preparations in all the 99 parishes in different divisions were completed and they expect to receive the revolving fund next year so that city dwellers can benefit.
She also said KCCA was working on an outdoor advertising policy to generate revenue from it.
Ministry’s response
Mr Jim Muganga, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Finance, said allocation of funds is determined by the available resource envelop and informed by the competing priorities.
“We have never moved away from that. Resource allocation is informed by resource envelop and competition priorities. The competing priority in the past two years has been Covid-19. The roads too are priority but I can’t say that we will increase without increasing the resource envelop. We are in the budgeting process, we shall see what can be done,” he said.
He is optimistic that increase in revenue collection would help increase on the resources needed.
