Elected leaders have a role to play in overseeing road maintenance

By Michael M. Odongo
Posted 


Thursday, March 31 

2016 at 

01:00

The 2016 general election brought into office new leaders at both central and local governance structures. To all those leaders, hearty congratulations from Uganda Road Fund, the organisation set up to finance routine and periodic maintenance of public roads from lines of funding that include mainly road user charges.

Uganda’s road network is estimated at well over 80,000kms. Institutions charged with management and development of this vital asset include the Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA), which has responsibility over the 21,000km national main highways and Kampala Capital City Authority for the 1,100Km Kampala roads. District roads amount to some 22,500kms and are managed by district local governments. The districts also have sub-agency relationship with town councils and sub-counties for overseeing performance of the lower local governments in managing their local roads. Sub-counties in particular oversee community access roads.

Funding from Road Fund permeates throughout this spectrum of designated agencies. UNRA takes well over 65 per cent of the road fund budget for since they are looking after national roads that convey 80 per cent of the road-based traffic while the rest is shared between KCCA and the local governments. For the financial year 2016/17, the road fund budget stands at Shs417b.
The founding Uganda Road Fund Act 2008 confers upon elected leaders at both central and local level the responsibility to provide oversight over road works. Every district must have a district roads committee in whose ranks are district chairman, mayors of local authorities in the district, Members of Parliament from the district, Chief Administrative Officer, district engineer, Secretary for Works and municipal engineer as listed in Section 25(2) of the URF Act. Station engineer of nearest UNRA station may attend in observer status. Only the MPs or chairman of the district are eligible for election by members as committee chairman. The law recognises the district engineer as the secretary of the committee.
The committee considers and approves district-wide annual road maintenance programmes of the district and its town councils and sub-county sub-agencies and clears the resultant performance agreements for signature with the road fund. There is year round role for the committees to track performance of the programmes, ensuring all time physical and financial accountability of resources. As such, it conducts its affairs through meetings, field inspections and filing regular reports and minutes of meetings to URF.
The Fund provides for cost of committee work, including reimbursement of travelling expenses of members. The committees work in close coordination with councils of districts and lower local authorities within its geographical bound. Accounting officers of districts and municipalities should declare to members budgets, income and expenditure for road maintenance as well as all physical and financial accountability reports to URF. The committee should also interface with UNRA local representation to keep track of road maintenance programmes in the district. The committees also play a supportive role in respect of facilitating access to private land for quarrying road materials, promoting road safety and coordinating with enforcement organs to fight overloading of roads.
The outgoing elected leaders, including members of the 9th Parliament, performed well on constituting the committees in 98 per cent of the districts. However, their record of overseeing road works in the districts was abysmal; many did not file reports to URF. Reasons for this were mainly explained in terms of political intolerance of members, especially where parties differed and clash of timetable.
The new leaders should endeavour to fully operationalise these committees in their districts and work around challenges to ensure the committees fulfill their mandate. One issue of concern is the inefficiencies in road maintenance financing, leading to losses of funds either through wasteful expenditures, corruption or end-year return to the Treasury.
Over the next five years, we project to disburse in excess of Shs5 trillion to agencies. It will be unfortunate for such huge investment to be to be left without due oversight. It is important that the districts rise to the task mandated to them in law to oversee use of these resources. It should also not be lost on MPs that the URF law is still work in progress because we are yet to access the mandated line of road user charges mandated by section 21 of the URF Act 2008. Accordingly, the 10th Parliament needs to fully operationalise the road fund by amending Section 14 of the URA Act to ensure predictability of road maintenance funding.
As a way forward, as soon as the new political leaders are sworn in, the Chief Administrative Officers should call for an inaugural meeting to elect chairpersons of the district roads committees and set the agenda for operations. There are guidelines in the districts in lieu of the regulations, which the Minister for Finance is yet to gazette.
The Uganda Road Fund is optimistic that over the next five years, district roads committees will gain ground and play their role in overseeing road maintenance programmes in agencies. We shall take stock of their performance at mid-term in 2018 and end-term in 2021.

Dr Odongo is the Executive Director, Uganda Road Fund.