Role of elected leaders in g road maintenance programmes

By Eng. Dr. Michael M. Odongo

The 2016 general elections have brought into office new leaders at both central and local governance structures. In a number of cases incumbents have received renewed mandates to continue in their elective positions.

To all those leaders, hearty congratulations from Uganda Road Fund, the premier organisation set up by the Uganda Road Fund Act 2008 to finance routine and periodic maintenance of public roads from lines of funding that include mainly road user charges. Uganda's road network is estimated at well over 80,000km with a replacement value in excess of $4b.

Institutions charged with management and development of this vital asset includes the Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA), which has responsibility over the 21,000km national main highways and Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) for the 1,100km Kampala City roads.

These two authorities were set up by law to function as independent corporate entities supervised by boards (Council for the case of KCCA). District roads amount to some 22,500km and are managed by district local governments. The districts also have sub agency relationship with Town Councils and sub Counties for overseeing performance of these lower local governments in managing their local roads. Sub counties in particular oversee community access roads where their main preoccupation is mainly removal of bottlenecks.

Funding from Road Fund permeates throughout this spectrum of designated agencies for purposes of financing agreed road maintenance programmes of the agencies. UNRA takes well over 65% of the road fund budget for the fact that they are looking after national roads that convey 80% of the road-based traffic while the rest is shared between KCCA and the local governments. For the coming financial year 2016/17, the road fund budget stands at sh417b.

Routine road maintenance also known as reactive maintenance are those treatments that are applied to a road, in order to keep it functioning properly. They are performed on road pavements as they too limit impact of deterioration causing factors.

Typical examples include filling potholes, local crack sealing, edge repairs, shoulder recharging and line-marking.

Off-pavement routine works include slashing road reserves, signage repairs and drain clearing. Mechanised routine maintenance on district roads are delivered through force account using agency equipment. Manual routine maintenance are delivered through road gangs based on the new policy set by Ministry for Works and Transport.

Periodic maintenance treatments on the other hand are applied on road pavements prior to their manifestation of distresses. These treatments are intended to prolong the life of a pavement by restoring (or maintaining) desirable properties while such measures are still cost-effective so as to delay future deterioration or correct existing distresses. Periodic maintenance maybe be preventive such as thin-film surfacing to improve integrity and waterproofing or resurfacing/resealing and/or functional overlays to improve skid resistance.

On district roads, these are also delivered through force account approach. On national roads UNRA uses a mix of force account and contracting to deliver various categories of road works; choice of methods depends on complexity of the works.

The founding Uganda Road Fund Act 2008 confers upon elected leaders at both the centre at local level, responsibility for providing oversight over these road works. Every district must have a district roads committee in whose ranks are district chairman, mayors of local authorities in the district, Members of Parliament from the district, Chief Administrative Officer, District Engineer, Secretary for Works and Municipal Engineer as listed in Section 25(2) of the URF Act. Station engineer of nearest UNRA station may attend in observer status. Only the MPs or chairman of the district are eligible for election by members as committee chairman. The law recognises the district engineer as the secretary of the committee.

The committee considers and approves district-wide annual road maintenance programmes of the district and its town councils and sub county sub-agencies and clears the resultant performance agreements for signature with the road fund. There is year round role for the committees to track performance of the programmes ensuring all time physical and financial accountability of resources. As such it conducts its affairs through meetings, field inspections and filing regular reports and minutes of meetings to URF.

The Fund provides for cost of committee work including reimbursement of travelling expenses of members. The committees work in close coordination with councils of districts and lower local authorities within its geographical bound. Accounting officers of districts and municipalities should declare to members budgets, income and expenditure for road maintenance as well as all physical and financial accountability reports to URF.

The committee should, in addition, interface with UNRA local representation on the committee or at the nearest stations to keep track of national road maintenance programmes in the district. The committees also play a very supportive role in respect of facilitating access to private land for quarrying road materials, promoting road safety and coordinating with enforcement organs to fight overloading of roads.

The outgoing crop of elected leaders, including members of the 9th Parliament performed well on constituting the committees in 98% of the districts. However, their record of overseeing road works in the districts was abysmal; many did not meet nor file reports to URF.

Reasons for this wanting performance were mainly explained in terms of political intolerance of members, especially where parties differed and clash of time-table with parliamentary or council.

The new members should endeavour to fully operationalise these committees in their districts and work around these challenges to ensure the committee presence is felt in the district. One issue of concern that the new members should consider seriously is the inefficiencies in road maintenance financing leading to losses of funds either through wasteful expenditures, corruption or end-year return to the Treasury.

Over the next five years to 2021, we project to disburse in excess of sh5 trillion to agencies. It will be unfortunate for such a magnitude of investment to be left without due oversight for one reason or another.

It is only fitting that the DRCs rise to the task mandated to them in law to oversee the use of these resources. It should also not be lost on the elected Members of Parliament that the URF law is still works in progress because we are yet to access the mandated line of road user charges mandated by section 21 of the URF Act 2008.

Accordingly, the 10th Parliament needs to build on the work done by the 9th Parliament in respect of fully operationalising the road fund by amending section 14 of the URA Act to ensure predictability of road maintenance funding.

As a way forward, immediately the new political leaders are sworn in office, the chief administrative officers should call for an inaugural meeting of the DRCs to elect chairpersons of the committee and generally set agenda for operation in the financial year 2016/17 and beyond. There are guidelines in the districts to guide their conduct in lieu of the regulations, which the Minister for Finance is yet to gazette.

The Fund is optimistic that over the next five years, district roads committees will gain ground and play a very supportive role to oversee road maintenance programmes in agencies. We shall take stock of their performance at the mid-term in 2018 and at end-term in 2021.

For more details on your role as a member of the district roads committee, please visit THIS PAGE.      


(The writer is the Executive Director Uganda Road Fund)