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.                   

           

Balunywa Foundation involved "Bulungi bwa Nsi" community work. Mutabazi is welcome

The Balunywa Foundation is the association of young people who came together to support one another so as to realize their potential. They train one another and also extend the activities to training others including youth, women and entrepreneurs in the Iganga area. Last weekend, they were involved in the Corporate Social Responsibility. I always pride myself as coming from the industrialized village in the country because our village has a steel rolling mill, Tembo steel rolling mill at Kasolo Iganga. It is a shame that right outside their gate, they had a gutter which was caused by partly their actions of putting a channel on the road side which channel doesn’t take the rain water from the road side. The result has been that people have been falling off boda bodas right in front of the factory. The young people working with several people in the village decided to do “bulungi bwa nsi” and fill the pothole with stones and murram. The laws of the country are interesting. We were told that government will not be pleased that we were filling these potholes in the road. However for the sake of the lives of the people in the area, we went ahead with doing the task. The Foundation was joined by another young social entrepreneur; the +256 group supported the effort making improvements in the lives of the people who use the area. I noted that there are hundreds of Boda bodas that pass this area and this simply was a call for better roads and better transport system in form of buses. When we talked to the mini bus owners who passed by they decried the road as the problem. The Local Chairman of the Lwengo area, Mr. Mutabazi who was recently involved in “bulungi bwa nsi” community work in his area cained people. Mutabazi is a hardworking person who has brought change in Lwengo district and he is loved by his people. His mistake was to bring TV people while implementing his policies.

What Mr. Mutabazi did was controversial yes but then you wonder whether people know that they are poor. No government in this country will have enough funds to do all the roads. Some voluntary work to improve ourselves is necessary. It is tough to remove poverty among people who do not know they are poor.

Celebrating Ugandan Women Entrepreneurs: Prudence Ukkonika

Hardworking, innovative, risk taking and opportunity seeking are features that define Prudence Ukkonika and this is what entrepreneurship is about. Prudence was speaking at the MUBS Entrepreneurship Centre event organized to mark the job entrepreneurship week. Prudence has an interesting story as she used her fees to buy old clothes and take them to Kampala. Her father who was also an entrepreneur had given her the money to pay tuition fees at the college in Kampala.

The buses to Kampala used to leave at 4am and you would get to Kampala after two days. The roads were very bad and there were insecurity so the buses would stop over on the way. Prudence had been to a college in Kampala and she realized there were no old clothes in Kampala at least in the places she visited so she decided to buy them from Kabale and bring them to Kampala. However that day, luck was not on her side, the bus did not take off and she went back home. Being a business man, her father wanted to use the money for something that day and he asked her to give it back to him. The father was furious and thought Prudence was actually not studying. Prudence got cash in Kampala when she finally travelled and used the money to buy groundnuts which she fried herself and gave to the boys who were on a ship to Kalangala. She had seen another opportunity and still took risk. She fried groundnuts herself and wrapped them in old newspapers and gave them to the boys on the ship to Kalangala. She did not want the money back, she requested them to buy pineapples from the island which she sold in Nakawa market. Prudence has a very interesting story and tells it in “a no holds barred” manner.

Her risk taking nerve led her to putting a Charcoal sigiri in her car boot to take it to work so that she can give her customers hot food. She says she did not think a lot about it. The petrol tank is near the area of the boot and she dared to out the sigiri in the boot. Prudence’s story is one of the surprises and good decisions when concept belonged to her deceased son who had started bringing locally made wine to Kampala from Northern Uganda. She exploited the idea and used to sell the wines in jerricans, plastic bottles but now labels her wine, Bella Wine like any other international wine. She said the name Bella meant Belief Leads to Lasting Achievement. She indeed believed and she now sells her wine not only in Uganda but Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya.

I cannot say, Prudence is soft spoken but she is articulate and raw. She is a tough lady who does not tolerate mediocrity. She works closely with employees but it is tough when they make mistakes. She amazed people when she said she doesn’t want to beg when she can do things herself. She was appreciative of President Museveni’s support but the bureaucracy of reaching him and the feeling by many people in the process that they are doing her a favour made her not follow up those promises.