The secret grand security plan  at the country’s heart

“Museveni and his government are not fools or as incompetent as they are portrayed”, one of my inquisitors persisted, “so the rot in Kampala, the broken roads, must be deliberate. The only question is what the goal is”.

He has a point that governments used the provision and denial of infrastructure as political tools. The late Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi splashed big time on infrastructure, and Tripoli the capital of Libya was marvellously built. However, he ensured that parts of the city that were inhabited by critical intellectuals and writers were decrepit. 

Beyond punishment, this services apartheid created a useful political division between the “infrastructure haves” and “infrastructure have-nots”.
In Kenya, after independence, some scholars argue that President Jomo Kenyatta began to slowly kill the Kenya-Uganda Railway, because he wanted to create a new African class of businessmen who made their fortune from transporting goods by road. 

His successor Daniel arap Moi faced opposition and dissent from Kenyatta loyalists in central Kenya. To subdue them politically without firing a shot, Moi decided to break their economic back, and stranglehold on the economy. He reasoned, correctly and tragically, that one of the best ways to do this was to collapse commercial agriculture, run down infrastructure built for milk, beef processing, cereals storage, agro-supporting financial institutions, and so forth. Sadly for Kenya, he succeeded.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, when it was known as Zaire, its corrupt dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, was glad to ensure the vast mineral-rich had some of the worst road infrastructure in Africa because it enabled its restive regions to remain isolated from each other, and thus make a united national opposition against him impossible. It all went well until 1996 when Rwanda led Laurent Kabila’s rebels against his regime in Kinshasa. They legged it through the bush for one and a half years, easily flanking the Mobutu forces who were stationed at a few road choke points.  Mobutu’s men had prepared to fight a foe struggling to move over impassable roads, whom they could pick off easily.  They ended up with one shooting at them from nearby trees and hilltops, for whom they weren’t prepared.

I have found three interesting explanations for why Kampala’s streets are worse than Fort Portal’s, Gulu’s, and Arua’s, and are darker than Kapchorwa’s, to name a few.
One is the dichotomy between the early and late movers. Kampala was rebuilt first, before the other cities upcountry. In 1998, it was a liveable, neat, pothole-free city. Places where things get built first often go to rot too, and legacy forces and vested interests make it hard to use them as platforms to build something new.

The destruction of the wars in the North, and West Nile, and early existence in the margins of the Fort Portals and Kapchorwas, made them a blank slate on which it was possible to erect something new at low cost.
The second is partisan politics. The Museveni government is able to rally the areas where better roads are being built, against a Kampala that hates him and his NRM. This, though, is a problematic picture, because he would be cutting his nose to spite his face. The reputational damage from a rutted capital, the increased cost of doing business and lost productive hours in the place that creates nearly 75 per cent of national wealth, is self-sabotage of gigantic proportions.

The third, which is related to the above, is quite intriguing: that Kampala is run down for security reasons. The argument goes that there is a  Mobutuist element to the calculation. The Museveni government views the biggest threat to it as an uprising that starts on the streets of Kampala. Over the years, it has concentrated many of its critical defence and military resources outside Kampala. The infrastructure setup allows for fast evacuation of key constituencies and economic assets from Kampala, through the by-passes. 

Most importantly, it allows for very rapid deployment of military assets from outside the capital to lay siege to Kampala from its north, west, east, and south in a pincer movement.
The only problem there is that I don’t think the Museveni state is that clever.

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