KAMPALA — The Busega-Mpigi Expressway was supposed to cut travel time to Entebbe International Airport. Instead, it has become a case study in how public infrastructure projects can go wrong. President Yoweri Museveni ordered the suspension of four staff members from the Ministry of Works and Transport on July 4.
The reason: corruption allegations tied directly to the stalled highway. The government borrowed from the African Development Bank to build it.
The project was meant to be finished. It is not. Only 40 percent of the work is complete.
All the money, however, has been paid. The president asked a blunt question in his letter explaining the suspensions: “What happened?” His answer points to engineers who changed the road’s route.
They avoided land that had already been compensated for, according to Museveni. Instead, they charted a new path through their own properties. That required fresh compensation payments.
The cost ballooned from 600 billion shillings to 1.3 trillion shillings. More than double the original budget. For commuters in Kampala, this is not an abstract scandal.
The expressway links the capital to the country’s main airport. That corridor is choked with traffic daily.
Families lose hours. Businesses lose money. The road was supposed to fix that.
Now there is no timeline for completion. The four suspended staff have not been named publicly.
The president’s order signals a crackdown inside the ministry. But the deeper issue is about trust. Public money borrowed from a multilateral bank was meant to serve millions of Ugandans.
Instead, it appears to have been diverted through land deals that benefited a few. Museveni’s letter did not mince words. He accused corrupt engineers of altering the route.
He did not say whether criminal charges would follow the suspensions. The Ministry of Works and Transport has not issued a public statement on the matter since the president’s order.
The Busega-Mpigi Expressway was a flagship project. It was supposed to demonstrate Uganda’s ability to manage large infrastructure investments. Now it demonstrates something else: how quickly a project can stall when oversight fails.
The African Development Bank loaned money based on a plan. That plan has been abandoned.
The money is gone. The road is not. Residents near the expressway route have watched construction stop.
Some saw their land compensated, then bypassed. Others saw new land acquired at higher costs. The human cost is harder to calculate than the budget overrun.
Time wasted in traffic. Money wasted on inflated contracts.
A road that may never reach the airport. The president’s intervention is rare. He does not typically suspend civil servants mid-project.
That he did so suggests the scale of the problem. The four staff members now face an uncertain future.
So does the expressway. No new contractor has been announced. No revised completion date has been set.
For now, the question Museveni wrote in his letter hangs over the entire affair. What happened? The answer will determine whether this project ever gets built.
And whether the next one faces the same fate.
