Mr Charles Onyango-Obbo
In January 2020, a true visionary emerged on the Ugandan political scene in the shape and form of State Minister for Foreign Affairs Henry Oryem Okello.
Appearing before a parliamentary committee, Oryem said rather than whining about the country’s bad roads and atrocious potholes in the capital Kampala, Ugandans should wake up to the commercial opportunities they offered. He said the potholes could be a wonderful tourism experience for people from very affluent countries. Oryem was ahead of the times, and I must confess I was one of the many people who didn’t get just how trailblazing he was, until a few days ago.
In the meantime, the potholes got worse. As motorists endured hours in traffic, and rising garage repair bills, there was a big backlash, resulting in the world headline-grabbing #KampalaPotholeExhibition last year, which forced the government into throwing a little money at the problem. There, however, was no national pothole consensus. Some people in government labelled #KampalaPothole[1]Exhibition creators traitors and unpatriotic miscreants who were shaming the country, and driving away investors.
Irish ambassador to Uganda, Mr Kevin Colgan, remained in Okello’s yellow corner and helped us reset. Last November, he amplified the minister’s line, calling on the world's tourists to come to Uganda and behold the “crater potholes in Kampala’s Industrial Area” and its wild boda bodas.
Uganda is truly gifted, because as we jumped up and down about the potholes, tourist assets in the form of garbage hills and mountains were forming. Tragically, a workplace accident at East Africa’s largest mountain of garbage at the Kiteezi landfill on the outskirts of Kampala on August 9, led to a waste slide that killed over 40 people – and we are still counting.
This week, a section of disgusted Kampala residents and activists launched the #KampalaGarbageExhibition campaign on social media to shame the Kampala City authorities and the government into acting to stem the garbage crisis. However, we have now stumbled upon leaked documents from a secret unit headed by Oryem, that has been quietly working on taking the Kampala potholes to the global tourism market. It turns out they saw the potential in garbage, and have created a pothole and garbage package.
This kind of tourism falls in a wide category variously called Danger Tourism, Extreme Tourism, Dark Tourism, or Shock Tourism.
At the benign level, it is about travel to deadly jungles, deserts, caves, canyons, or participation in dangerous events where one can be seriously injured. At the morbid level, tourists visit places associated with death, war, and tragedy, and which are scary (forests where people go to commit suicide, cliffs and bridges off which many people have jumped to their deaths. The Oryem Extreme Tourism Working Group is on to something. Forget oil, forget chimpanzees and lions. This is what will establish Uganda in the middle-income economy class. In April, a report by Allied Market Research said the global extreme tourism market was worth $24.2 billion (Shs88 trillion) in 2022, and is projected to reach $91 billion (Shs337 trillion) by2032. The growing influence of social media is a powerful force surging demand in the extreme tourism market, it said. So those fellows behind #KampalaPotholeExhibition and #KampalaGarbageExhibition are great patriots, after all. Being among the world’s pothole and garbage elite, one can see that if we had cornered this market properly, we could fund the whole of our 2024-25 financial year budget of Shs72.136 trillion from potholes and garbage alone. Studying the leaked documents, they have done a couple of clever things.
They have “Premium Combo”, which offers the “ultimate pothole and garbage experience”, and they market it as a buy one get one free (BOGOF). That one, which includes a hotel for a week, goes for $10,500. It also has selfies with the country’s top leaders. Another package, called the “Equator Delight”, offers either “World Class Potholes” or “Historical Garbage Hills” with a free entrance to any of the national parks to view wildlife, or crocodile colonies on the River Nile. There is a paragraph about the “Unconquerable Kiteezi Garbage Summit”, but in the event of the latest tragedy, it was hastily struck through. There are lots of notes on the margins about sites where key battles were fought in the Luweero bush war, and in the northern war, but not in the text of the strategy paper. It looks like in the next version these will be mainstreamed.
The country, obviously is hurting, angry, and not on the same page – for now. This is a project for the decade after 2025. Which is why, if there’s to be a transition in 2026, NRM should pick Oryem for president. He’s the only man who can lead this great nation to the next level; to Pothole and Garbage Nirvana.
•The editor cannot confirm or deny whether this column is tongue-in-cheek.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”.
Twitter@cobbo3
