Form KCC road maintenance squad

Nov 30, 2004

KAMPALA’S ROADS are disintegrating at an alarming rate as incessant rains continue pounding the city.

KAMPALA’S ROADS are disintegrating at an alarming rate as incessant rains continue pounding the city.

Various roads in the suburbs, including Kitante North and Bombo Road just outside Makerere University, have developed unbelievably huge potholes that have added a needless bottleneck to our notorious traffic jams.

Why, for instance, should what begins as a small crack in the middle of the road one week is then allowed to develop into a pothole the following month and eventually into a traffic-diverting gutter three months down the road?

Would it not be so much cheaper, and easier, to seal the crack as soon as it appeared? And why is it that when sealing eventually comes, like the work carried out seasonally near the Mulago-Wandegeya roundabout, it lasts a short time?

The answer to the latter may lie in the failure to dredge drainages regularly, with the consequence that silt plugs the holes, and then water stagnates and eventually starts eating the tarmac away.

Why do we have to suffer all these needless inconveniences? Kampala City Council has been negligent of maintaining the roads.

There appears to be no coherent strategy to prevent extensive damage; all that is done is to react to oncoming damage, and even then this is never timely.

Granted, many of the city’s roads are old and prone to damage in extreme conditions, and will therefore in the long run need to be re-sealed in their entirety. But that does not excuse KCC from doing basic maintenance.

What the city council needs to do is to make a turn-around from a fire-fighting approach to being pro-active. Squads can be formed (at divisional level?) to maintain roads round the clock.

Supported by a budget and properly equipped, they would for instance take on one road a week, ensuring that drainage holes are never blocked for more than a day, that that little crack will not become a pothole.

Round-the-clock vigilance will help if KCC can adopt the proven approach of prevention being better than cure.

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