The nightmare of being a pedestrian in Ugandan towns.

Be it in towns or on highways, being a pedestrian on Uganda Roads or I guess elsewhere “Africa,” is something that requires a lot of mental skills. About 99% of Uganda’s populations walk to work or to buy something on shops. The reason of walking is because they don’t have money to pay for the very expensive transport mainly boda boda which is the main means of transport in the country.

In the areas where buses and taxes cannot ply, you have to travel by boda boda. It is a contradiction because it is the poor who travel by boda boda which is a very expensive means of transport. But they have no choice. Most roads both in county side and urban areas are impassable. Vehicles cannot go there because of the potholes due to poor maintenance. Mass transport which is a bus and train is the main means of transport for the low income earners everywhere in the world, even for the high income earners, they find trains convenient and cheap. Trains never experience traffic jam and therefore very convenient and fast.

Back to the pedestrians. I have walked in the several streets in Kampala and on highways and what have observed is that we drivers, am one of them, have no respect for the pedestrians. Not only do we drive fast, but we are not mindful of the safety of the pedestrians.

The roads in Uganda are very small, in most cases and the road shoulder is used by both the cyclists and pedestrians. Now and again the boda boda people also use the shoulder as they are pushed off from the road by the motor vehicles. The shoulder is also used for parking and when the vehicles breaks down, they park on the same shoulder taking away the space for the pedestrians and forcing the get into the main road where traffic is speeding.

In towns, the situation is worse. Have personally experienced challenges walking on many roads in Kampala especially its suburbs.  This is true anywhere else in Uganda’s towns.

Roads in towns should have sidewalks to enable pedestrians walk with comfort without looking over their shoulder to check that nobody is about to knock/crush them. However, very few roads have sidewalks. In many cases, there is not even space for one. In many of our suburbs, people build their houses without leaving space for roads and worse still they drain their water into the roads. But even organized places like Kololo and Bugolobi the problem is not different. Most of the house owners have planted fences of flowers in the area meant for sidewalks. The pedestrians forced to walk in the narrow roads with the boda boda and motor vehicles coming from in both direction. It requires a lot of mental skill to walk through this confusion.

Thank Jenifer Musis, she has made improvements on Kampala roads. She needs to invoke the law and compel  the house owners in Kampala especially the non slum areas to ensure that they make provisions for sidewalks.

I hope that those house owners who read this article should  voluntarily provide sidewalks in their respective plots.