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Farmers in Pakwach District will wait a little longer after the commissioning of the Wadelai Irrigation Scheme was again extended by one month due to defects and unfinished work.

On October 30, State Minister for Water, Aisha Sekindi, issued a one-month ultimatum to Ambitious Construction Company Limited to finish the works on the Shs 61 billion scheme, which was scheduled to be completed by 2019.

However, records from the Office of the Prime Minister indicate that at least Shs64 billion has been injected into the project as of January, 2026.

Construction of the Wadelai Irrigation Scheme, located in Wadelai and Ragem sub-counties, started in 2017 but stalled due to land acquisition issues, compensation disputes and construction challenges.

The initial work was undertaken by Coil Limited, working jointly with Nasr General Contracting Company that withdrew their services in 2023 after failing to stick to the contractual timeframe.

Acting on President Yoweri Museveni’s guidance, the government subsequently engaged Ambitious Construction Company Limited to undertake the remaining works and rehabilitate sections of the infrastructure that had been poorly constructed.

The new contractor resumed work in November 2025, with the revised scope covering the headworks, critical sections of the spillway, main canal and completion of primary, secondary, tertiary and quadrant canals.

On Friday, Ms Sekindi, who visited the scheme to assess progress and establish whether the outstanding works had been completed to the required standards, said she was encouraged by improvements made since the government engaged a new contractor but insisted that the remaining concerns must be addressed before the facility is officially commissioned.

However, she directed the contractor to rectify the identified shortcomings within one month, after which she will return for another assessment.

“Those remaining issues have been given only one month to be corrected. I will come back and conduct a second assessment, and when I am convinced that everything is in order, I will commission the project,” Ms Sekindi said.

The scheme was designed to support year-round agricultural production, improve household incomes and strengthen food security among more than 3,000 farmers in the area.

Government records put the scheme’s original contract sum at approximately Shs54.8 billion, which was later revised to about Shs61 billion following changes in the project design.

The incomplete infrastructure also created problems for neighbouring communities, with water from the canals flooding homes and gardens.

The Wadelai Irrigation Scheme draws water from River Ora and is funded by the Government of Uganda and the African Development and Nordic Development Fund under the Farm Income Enhancement and Forest Conservation Programme phase II (FIEFOC-2).

Engineer Dinesh Kara, the project manager at Ambitious Construction Company Limited, who was present during the minister’s inspection, said some of the works had not yet been completed because of procurement challenges, as most of the materials are imported.

Although the scheme is yet to be officially commissioned, it is already supporting approximately 2,500 farmers, who say access to irrigation water has transformed their agricultural activities.

For Mr Lawrence Kertho, a farmer and landowner at the scheme site, irrigation has provided an opportunity to earn considerably more from farming than from leasing out his land.

“Before joining the scheme, we were getting very little because outside the scheme we sometimes planted only once a year. Here, after harvesting, you immediately begin cultivating again, and that has improved our incomes,” Kertho said.

However, he identified poor drainage and unclear land boundaries as some of the challenges affecting farmers.

He said waterlogging has affected some plots, while the removal of trees previously used to mark boundaries has contributed to disagreements among farmers.

Mr Kertho also raised concerns over the continued use of recycled seeds, saying repeated planting of the same varieties has affected yields.

Another beneficiary, Comfort Masendi, said the scheme had enabled her to increase production by allowing her to cultivate rice and vegetables throughout the year.

Ms Masendi also cited limited access to reliable markets, saying farmers sometimes sell their produce cheaply to local buyers, appealing to the government to support farmers with improved seed varieties to increase production and improve the quality of their harvests.

Pakwach District LC5 Chairperson Shaban Ofoi welcomed the minister’s decision to withhold commissioning until the outstanding works are completed, saying residents have waited long enough for the project to function as intended.

Mr Ofoi urged the technical team supervising the works to ensure that all the concerns identified during the inspection are addressed within the one-month deadline.

He also called for additional agricultural machinery, saying the single tractor currently available is inadequate to serve farmers across the scheme.

The district chairperson further called for the completion of the proposed weather station, saying reliable weather information would help farmers and scheme managers plan irrigation activities and regulate the amount of water released into their fields.

Jonam County MP Marshall Alenyo called on the government to extend electricity to the area, saying the absence of power continues to affect residents despite the presence of a major agricultural investment.

He also urged improvements to the access road connecting Pakwach to the scheme and better access to other essential services, including police services.

There is a need for an honest recognition that Uganda’s overarching economic policy strategy is defective, thus a return to the drawing board. I will explain. But first, a caveat is in order.

I am not an economist! My reflections and impressions are shaped by my field of academic training and professional specialisation – the study of politics. Thus, I come at this from the lens of national economic strategy as a function of politics and power play.

It wasn’t very long that our 1986 rulers fully embraced the articles of faith of neoliberalism and what was then dubbed the ‘Washington Consensus’, an agenda propagated by Western financial institutions and buttressed especially by the treasury of the United States of America.

Despite a supposed leftist, Marxist ideological background that would mean a sceptical attitude towards faith in free markets, and even after for a while toying with alternatives to standard market practices, President Museveni and his NRM government dramatically imbibed the neoliberal agenda.

At its core, it was an unmodulated faith in the magic of the free market to deliver a poor country like Uganda to the promised land of material prosperity. Except that, not in 1986 and not in 2026, there is no compelling evidence that an economically poor, socially and technologically backward country anywhere in the world ever attained economic turnaround through the magic of the market.

No doubt, the market is a very powerful tool that drives economic activity and shapes individual or firm incentives, but on their own, markets, however free, have never transformed societies. There is something more, in fact, many ingredients, that go into a grand strategy of national economic transformation.

A great deal of the problem is to conflate markets with capitalism, and to assume that unfettered capitalist pursuit of profit under conditions of unregulated markets means there will be economic growth and prosperity for all. Not quite.

In the case of Uganda, as I argued last week, under the neoliberal regime of economics over the last three decades, we got some modest economic growth but not much to write home about in attaining a turnaround.

In the main, we are still stuck in the colonially created structure as a raw material exporting economy, and an importer of expensive finished goods we are unable to produce domestically precisely because we lack the skills and sophistication to do so.

There has been a smattering of industrial parks here and there, the production of tiles, textiles and marble in Kapeka and Karamoja, but not much significant progress in real industrialisation as to move the needle in expanding the overall size of our economy.

The policy choices taken in 1989/1990 have proved sticky and hard to reverse despite recent haphazard attempts at returning to the basics, including reviving the national airliner and recapitalising the national development bank.

The cavalier disposal of Uganda Commercial Bank was arguably the biggest blunder of all. It handed the nation’s countrywide retail and small business banking needs to foreign capitalist interests that are unlikely to have a long-term vested interest in Uganda’s national development ambitions.

There is big rhetorical talk of a $500b economy in, God knows, how long from now and the quest for integrating all Ugandans in the formal economy. But the rulers must make hard choices and bold decisions, the first of which is to divest from the purveyors of free market fundamentalism.

President Museveni has been on record conceding that the only thing he regrets was to have listened to external actors. Unless Uganda, and indeed all of Africa, reasserts policy sovereignty and pursues policies and programmes that reflect local thinking and appreciation of what we want as a people, big talk and lofty ideas will lead nowhere.

There are lessons from elsewhere to look to. For a while now, a popular phrase in development economics is the notion of ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ to denote a distinct approach the Chinese took to their breathtaking march from a pitifully poor country only a few decades ago to a global economic and military superpower of our times.

Before China, the so-called Asian Tigers (Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) pulled off their own route to transformation from third- to first-world nations, doing so by not listening to some received wisdom from Western experts or the policy dictates of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In fact, quite the contrary, they pulled off their economic ‘miracle’ by defying those Western financial bullies.

If Uganda under the NRM has the revolutionary credentials its supporters trumpet, undertaking an autonomous and homegrown economic strategy would be the definitive reflection. This hasn’t been. Thus, the ramblings by a one Ian Otega, suggesting the NRM and Museveni are comparable to China and Mao Zedong and that there is a Deng Xiaoping in the offing, are either crass intellectual dishonesty or blithely ignorance.

Najib Nsubuga Ssekikubo confesses that a wetland is more than a waterbody. When it is destroyed, Nsubuga adds, he feels a personal loss. This should not come as a surprise if anything because Nsubuga belongs to the Mamba clan, associated with the lungfish whose habitat is water.

The lungfish and the wetland is part of a much older idea in Buganda where clans are associated with animals, plants, fish and insects as totems which are traditionally protected. If one belongs to the lungfish or any totem, they do not eat and are expected to protect and preserve it. As such, Nsubuga argues that if such a rule or idea is followed, culture becomes environmental conservation since in protecting the totem, people will think of its habitat.

‘If we follow our clans to the book, we’ll preserve our biodiversity,’ he says, underlining the crust of Buganda’s heritage. He notes that forefathers looked for what sits underneath the obvious.

In his career as a lecturer of journalism and communication, Nsubuga observes that cultural research and kingdom responsibilities in cultural research and heritage, and eventually leadership of the Buganda Heritage and Tourism Board, continue to open his eyes and mind to new knowledge. Small wonder, when we meet in the Kampala suburb of Kasubi, Nsubuga opts to have luwombo for lunch.

Full of questions

When the luwombo arrives, Nsubuga is in the midst of telling about his quest for knowledge. Much of the knowledge he is looking for is not written down, so he has had to turn to elders. As such, Nsubuga believes young people interested in understanding their culture must spend time with older people because elders carry knowledge that may not be found in books. And beyond getting information, he seeks to understand the reasoning behind the traditions.

‘When you eventually know why they did what they did, you can understand why we must protect and conserve it,’ the history enthusiast explains as the unfurling of the matooke banana leaves gives off steam.

That question, why?, runs through his understanding of Buganda. A clan, for instance, is more than an identity. He describes it as a network of relationships. He also explains that a member of your clan can be regarded as a brother or sister. Likewise, your mother’s clan creates another relationship, while marriage connects still more families.

Traditionally, a Muganda does not marry within his or her own clan, or the mother’s clan. The restrictions, he says, also helped spread relationships across communities.

‘You keep creating links that strengthen unity amongst the people,’ he says before digging into the luwombo.

The clan system also carried responsibilities, Nsubuga discloses after shooting a look that is suggestive that the luwombo is tickling his taste buds. He points to the fact that different clans have particular roles, including crafts and duties within the kingdom, citing that during the construction and restoration of traditional royal houses like the Kasubi Royal Tombs, for example, different clans and lineages handle specific tasks, from roofing and decoration to rituals.

Getting it right

Nsubuga recalls one occasion when a task had to be repeated because the right clan had performed it, but the people involved were not from the particular lineage expected to do it. To someone looking only at the finished building, that may seem like a small distinction but to a cultural enthusiast like him, it is the heritage. The building and knowledge surrounding it are separate.

The same thinking applies to barkcloth. How did earlier generations discover that bark from a tree could become cloth? Nsubuga says that the question opens a window into indigenous knowledge and ingenuity. He says Buganda once lost some of its pride in barkcloth, although it had long been part of its cultural heritage. Today, artists are finding new uses for it. A piece worth about Shs100,000, he says, can be transformed through painting into artwork worth several million shillings.

Again, he sees the connection, from how a tree becomes bark and a cloth and then becomes art. In turn, heritage becomes a possible livelihood. That way of thinking has shaped his work at the Buganda Heritage and Tourism Board, established in 2015 to bring heritage and tourism together. The argument is that people are more likely to preserve traditions when they also see their value. Nsubuga’s tourism thinking therefore begins with things many Ugandans overlook.

Take jackfruit. For a Ugandan, a jackfruit tree may barely attract attention which is different for a visitor encountering the fruit for the first time. When they pick it fresh from a tree, and open it and taste it, that becomes an experience. The same applies to food, farming and craft. Nsubuga commends that a visitor should not only eat matooke but also see where it is grown and learn how it is prepared. Likewise, they should not only buy barkcloth but be allowed the opportunity to meet the people who make it.

‘Culture is unmatched’

To that end, he advocates for a homestay experience where a tourist is able to go to the garden or a small workshop in the community where a visitor is taught how a traditional craft is made.

The board has been exploring cultural villages and community-based experiences built around such possibilities. Nsubuga emphasises that culture offers Uganda something wildlife cannot always provide, noting that animals can be found elsewhere in the region but particular traditions of a people cannot simply be copied.

‘Culture is the unique thing that any community can sell that no one else can sell,’ he says.

Yet turning culture into tourism carries its own danger. For instance, a ceremony altered too much for tourists can eventually stop being the experience it claims to represent. That is why Nsubuga keeps returning to understanding, arguing that one cannot properly market what they do not understand.

Similarly, people cannot preserve what they no longer value. Nsubuga recalls travelling on a bus with a family spanning three generations, a grandmother, her daughter and children. The children did not understand their grandmother’s mother tongue. To communicate, the middle generation had to translate. Grandmother spoke, then her daughter translated and the children replied. The mother translated again. Nsubuga saw more than a language barrier.

‘We are losing ourselves,’ he says, his luwombo reducing in size ever so fast.

The traditional fireplace

The experience brought into focus what Nsubuga had been discovering through his work with elders. Some traditions survive because people continue to practise them while others survive because someone remembers the meaning behind them. But memory has limits. When an elder dies, a language fades. In that scenario, a child grows up knowing a clan name but not what it means. Also, a ceremony remains on the calendar while the reasoning behind it disappears.

This is where Nsubuga’s old profession meets his new one. He believes the traditional fireplace has changed. Children spend long periods away at school and parents are busy.

In the end, families have less time for the conversations through which cultural knowledge once travelled. But young people have not disappeared. They have moved to digital spaces.

‘The modern fireplace is the media,’ he says.

Heritage, therefore, must go where young people are. Stories about clans, food, barkcloth, ceremonies and traditional knowledge need to be told through radio, television and digital platforms.

‘If we think we’ll get them at the traditional fireplace, we are lying to ourselves,’ he says.

There is something fitting about Nsubuga carrying that message. He began as a communications teacher. Curiosity took him into cultural research. Kingdom service took him to elders, and the elders led him deeper into a heritage held not only in monuments, but in people, relationships and the natural world.

Now, through his work in heritage and tourism, he is trying to make those connections visible to others. The lungfish is a fish but for him, it is also a clan identity, a wetland and a reason to care for what surrounds it. The same can be said of the luwombo, which he has finished eating. It can be deconstructed.

Perhaps that is the larger lesson buried in Buganda’s traditions. The past was not always divided into neat categories called culture, family and environment. For those who understood how the pieces fitted together, they were part of the same story.

Built with the needs of families in mind, Caramel Café and Lounge Naalya, is one of the few high-end eateries in Kampala, that is the ideal weekend family retreat. A place where children can eat, play and have fun, while adults unwind and enjoy a leisurely meal, or a football game over drinks with friends, in a modern sports bar.

Ambiance and décor

Located on the Naalya-Kyaliwajjala Road, below Quality Shopping Mall, the restaurant comprises of three floors. On the ground floor is a large outdoor eating area, adorned with palm, cypress and bamboo foliage, that leads to the main restaurant. My friend and I were welcomed by a number of servers who ushered us to our table. The restaurant which is surrounded by clear, glass windows, is spacious, well-lit and tastefully decorated with potted plants, modern paintings and contemporary art pieces.

The music which is soft and low, creates an atmosphere that is tranquil and relaxing. There is a spacious sports bar with large flat screens upstairs, and another eating place on the floor above it.

Child-friendly facilities

One side of the restaurant leads to a children’s playground, which was full of children squealing with delight, as they played on the trampoline, swings and rocking horses.

These child-friendly facilities extend to providing high-chairs for serving meals to toddlers and a diaper changing station in the ladies’ washrooms.

The menu

The menu is quite pricey – pasta, burgers and sandwiches range from Shs35,000 to Shs42,000. Fish, steaks and chicken dishes cost Shs43,000 to Shs69,000. Soups and salads go for Shs20,000 to Shs35,000. Habesha or Ethiopia/Eritrean dishes range from Shs44,000 to Shs52,000. Meanwhile, children’s meals go for Shs24,000 to Shs29,000.

On the drinks menu are fresh fruit juices, milkshakes, smoothies, mojitos and mocktails which range from Shs14,000 to Shs22,000. Teas and coffee cost Shs8,000 to Shs26,000 while desserts go for Shs8,000 to Shs21,000.

The food

It was years since we last tasted Habesha cuisine so we ordered the Bayenet Meat Special, a mixture of different meat dishes served on a platter with injera, an Ethiopian and Eritrean staple. Injera, is a slightly sour, soft and spongy, pancake-like flatbread, made from fermented teff flour. Traditionally, it is served flat on a communal platter, topped with piles of vegetable or meat stews and served with rolls or stacks of folded injera. A small piece of injera is pinched off the main piece and used to scoop up the meat, vegetables and sauces. After the toppings have been eaten, the bottom layer of injera, which has soaked up all the sauces during the meal, is eaten last.

The meal that was served to us on a platter comprising a flat piece of injera piled with minced beef, chicken and beef strips, collard greens and a heap of caramelised onions and garlic, beneath which was a chicken drumstick and a boiled egg, as well as a fresh vegetable salad. On the side of the platter were folded pieces of injera for scooping up the food. The waiter warned us that the food was hot and spicy, after serving it, instead of mentioning this when we placed the order. The food indeed was hot, but since I love spicy food, I enjoyed it. My friend, however, found it a bit too spicy and had to chase down each bite with gulps of water. We rounded off our meal with a large bowl of fruit salad, which, after the spicy dish, served as a palate cleanser.

The verdict

It was quite a culinary adventure, eating injera with its spicy sauces after many years. However, it is always advisable to adjust the spice levels of hot dishes, so that customers can select the level of heat they can comfortably tolerate. Caramel Café Naalya, is the perfect place for family outings and definitely worth a visit.