Topmost in my mind is the obvious – how potholes on the Jinja-Kampala highway are only fixed when an important person dies. The rest of the year the non-entities can beg, plead, picket and offer to buy the road with no results.

The death of any person should be a big enough deal to spark action.  I suppose that is one of the things that separate us from the truly progressive and patriotic nations. They take notice of each catastrophe and work quickly to see how similar incidents can be avoided. Until we can start valuing each and every citizen of this country, there are a lot of things which will never be fixed.

As someone who uses the highway every week I can tell you that putting a random bribable cop at the spots where the speed limit is 50kmph isn’t going to prevent the next accident. Inadequate markings, no road signs, no real regulation to issuing permits, roadside markets, narrow stretches, the sugarcane vehicles… filling out a few potholes for two days means nothing. In fact, it is an insult to those who have lost loved ones on that road and to we who have to travel it frequently. One of the very first columns I ever wrote was dedicated to a friend who died in an accident on that highway and since his death I cannot say I have seen marked change for the better.

But I suppose we would have been angered by no action at all, so maybe we should not be so hard on the people responsible for these things. A lot of issues in Uganda are bittersweet. A second, unrelated rant is brewing. For almost a year, the power company have been sending us imaginary bills – the politically correct term is ‘estimated’. While they cannot be bothered to send someone to my house in tiny navigable Jinja to read the meter correctly, they can afford to send over two teams of six men in one week to ask me inane questions about whether I have been paying said imaginary bills.

They have been here twice in the past three days, waving lawyer letters and poking around in the meter box. When I asked what they were here for, the first team gave me the amazing news that there was a new meter in my box. Surely they would know about the new meter seeing as they replaced it themselves. Round two was an equally useless encounter.

Still, despite the useless extra dam we have in Jinja that no one talks about and the occasional blackout, I must admit that the power service has improved.  It is not all bad. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that things are not all bad here, otherwise we will despair.

Published on Sunday December 6, 2009