At the weekend, we had a small gathering to discuss road infrastructure in Greater Kampala. The attendees were the typical nerdy types who grow out their hair and beards and find the idea of reading project appraisals and bid evaluation reports fun.
Also in attendance were the doers: the folks who design, finance, and build the roads. I learned many new things but the most insightful one came from a comment by one of the speakers about the relatively rapid pace of the new stadium in Hoima. How come the same country that took almost 20 years to complete the 21-kilometre Kampala Northern Bypass, 15 years to get the Bujagali dam done, and is many years late on several other infrastructure projects, is about to build a 20,000-seater stadium in a little over a year?
Some of the answers are easy to figure out. The most obvious are that a stadium has fewer moving parts than a power dam, financing was ring-fenced early, and this was a greenfield project without the usual fights over land compensation. In addition, the contractor is doing their first job in Uganda and has pressure of wanting to do a good job, fast, to unlock new opportunities, as well as not being corrupted by local contexts and business practices.
But there is more to it, and it has everything to do with incentives. The stadium must be built in time for the Africa Cup of Nations tournament which Uganda is co-hosting with Kenya and Tanzania. That introduces the need to not be compared with peers and found wanting.
The tournament will also be held in 2027. Unless there’s a regional or global force majeure event, it cannot be moved to early 2028, or 2029 simply because one of the co-hosts is still waiting for the paint to dry or the grass to grow. The games allocated to Uganda would simply shift to the other co-hosts, or the tournament itself moved to a country with ready infrastructure.
Thus, faced with an immovable object — the deadline by which the stadium must be ready, inspected, and certified for the tournament — and nudged on by peer pressure, our chronic delays and excuses all melted away, and the different state agencies have come together to ensure that the contractor delivers on time.
This is more than just bragging rights, mind. Infrastructure, say a road, is not a consumable but a growth multiplier. By cutting down travel time for goods and people and connecting markets to consumers, they facilitate economic growth.
The longer it takes a project to be completed, the longer it is for it to pay for itself, and that’s before you factor in the missed velocity in the delayed period. Once a commitment is made to do a project, therefore, it makes economic sense to build it on time and spec.
To rev up Uganda’s economy, we must improve the execution and delivery of public infrastructure projects and can do this by making small nudges to the incentive scheme.
One, since land compensation is a major cause of delays, road projects should be awarded through a competitive process with priority going to districts and municipalities that have secured rights of way or waivers from landowners. Even a simple commitment from landowners to allow construction to proceed while they fight over compensation sums would speed things up.
The second is to create a name-and-shame system where the public can see how long it takes each contractor to do each project. Contractors with undue delays would be blacklisted from winning public contracts for five to 10 years. Contracts should also be redesigned to provide stiff penalties for delays and bonuses for on-time completion.
We are bleeding money to the culture and practice of open-ended building and losing time and pace against regional and continental rivals. We can fix this by building faster and developing it as a competitive muscle.
If you travel by matatu, there’s rarely any hurry because if you miss one there’s another just round the corner. But if you turn up late for a flight you will pay through the nose for that tardiness. For Uganda to really take off, we need to act like airplane, not matatu, passengers.
Hoima stadium can be a turning point, not an outlier.