Entebbe express way diverted over compensation

By Billy Rwothungeyo

Parts of the proposed Kampala-Entebbe expressway route have been diverted to avoid paying off expensive property owners and ease the weight on a constrained compensation budget.

The affected areas are between 6km to 11km (Katale-Bukwenda and Katale-Busawula) and 14km to 19km (Lumuli and Kiryamuli/Ssekiwunga)

The Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA) says the realignments in these areas were made to limit the number of people affected by the project thus lowering the cost of compensation. It was also done to make the road safer.

“We have completed valuing the properties affected by the new changes. The valuation reports for these areas are now ready and are awaiting approval by the chief government valuer. We hope to start paying them in the next few weeks,” Dan Alinange, UNRA’s head of corporate communications told New Vision.

Construction of the express way, which started in November, is on-going alongside compensation.

“We can always make changes to the design and there is no problem with that. The reasons for change in alignment are not only limited to cost of compensation but there are other issues such as road safety audit and development,” said Alinange.

“We are facing a number of challenges, especially to do with land acquisition. You can only remove people from land when you have got funding for a road project.

Alinange adds: “The current Land Act provides that for roads and other infrastructural projects, the Government must pay market price for land before it can have access. There is no provision for compulsory acquisition while disputes on value are being resolved. Every individual property owner has to be valued and assessed before payment is made.”


In many cases, such intricacies lead to long negotiations, court injunctions and proceedings which delay the
issues such as road safety audit and development,” said Alinange.

So far, 400 out of the 700 property owners identified have been compensated. This has cost UNRA sh20b of the budgeted sh100b compensation package.

The roads authority is awaiting the release of sh24b by the Ministry of Finance to pay out the remaining 300 people.