Mr Daniel K. Kalinaki
Two weeks after the disaster at Kiteezi, and despite close to forty confirmed deaths and dozens more still reported missing, there is still no accountability and no sense of who should take responsibility.
Such is the despair over the state of affairs in our capital that many people have, in recent days and weeks, found themselves reminiscing about the days of Jennifer Musisi, the former executive director of the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA).
This is not surprising. Nostalgia is a go-to human emotion, as is declinism; the sense that things are getting worse. In our political culture of individual merit, it is also easy to attribute success and failure to big men and women, instead of the underlying conditions.
The conventional wisdom is that the KCCA under Musisi enjoyed political support that unlocked money to fix Kampala. This is true but does not tell the full story. The old KCC was broke because it was also very corrupt and self-serving and wasted away much of the money it collected.
Yes, KCCA came with a bigger budget, but it also closed many of the fiscal leakages and was able to triple its revenues from Shs30 billion in 2010/11 to Shs90 billion by 2018/19. More than just dry numbers, perhaps the greater value of the new city administrators was to imagine a city of the future. There was talk of a light commuter rail, fights to reclaim city parks and public spaces, and even futuristic dreams of cable cars.
Some sceptics, your columnist among them, thought some of the ideas were pie-in-sky but there is no harm in shooting for the moon and ending up among the stars.
The problem was that KCCA had been set up as a political project to win the city for the ruling party, not as a mechanism to improve service delivery. The more the new technocrats sought to brush aside the elected political class as obstacles to development, the more entrenched the latter became and the more hostile voters got towards the ruling party and the president.
The data are instructive. In the 2011 election, President Museveni received 225,698 votes in Kampala, narrowly losing to Kizza Besigye who received 229,527, a margin of only 3,829.
KCCA was set up soon after but in the election that followed five years later, President Museveni’s votes dropped to 157,098 while Besigye’s rose to 334,919, a margin of 177,821.
In 2021 Robert Kyagulanyi had replaced Besigye on the ballot paper as the face of the opposition but it did not stop the margin from increasing to 263,129 as Museveni’s votes dropped to 128,658. Over that time opposition-leaning Lord Mayor Erias Lukwago had become unbeatable in the city.
It is not hard to see the flaw in the system design. A better-resourced KCCA had to be imposed on the city from the top so that the opposition could not claim credit for any improvements to the city services. In turn, however, the opposition had to discredit the new organisation and show that the government had all along simply refused to fund the city better because it did not vote for it.
This dysfunction has now played out to a goalless draw. The technocrats at KCCA have more money at their disposal but are mostly accountable to a political setup that treats city residents with suspicion and disdain. The elected city officials have no authority to direct service delivery and instead extract political capital from resistance and pushing back.
City residents are net losers. They cannot remove the technocrats because they do not appoint them. Yet they do not want to vote out their elected leaders because they know that they are powerless and, in any case, do not wish to be forced to vote for the government to get services their taxes ought to provide them with.
Having failed to win hearts and minds with service delivery, the two sides are now left to see who can get more officials into positions of authority across the city. The result is a city with perhaps the lowest per capita service output per official in the world.
There is a minister for Kampala City and Metropolitan Affairs, a state minister to deputise them, a Lord Mayor and their deputy, and an executive director and their deputy, not to mention the rest of the elected officials at the Authority and the rest of the executive.
Then there is a mayor, speaker and town clerk for each of the five city divisions, who are closely watched by resident city commissioners appointed by the president. These also have deputies and this layer of political appointees has a coordinator in the Office of the President, who reports into a mandarin there and then the minister in charge of the presidency. I strongly suspect that Kampala has more political officials than city planners, and it shows.
Capital cities tend to vote opposition the world over. We should stop trying to force the vote in Kampala and focus on service delivery as an end in itself. We can’t do that if we have more chiefs than Indians.
Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and poor man’s freedom fighter.
[email protected]; @Kalinaki
