Calls are continuing to grow for government to ban scrap trade, due to serious devastation inflicted on vital road and electricity infrastructure, costing Uganda billions of shillings.
Over the past five years, valuable road and electricity infrastructure worth billions of shillings, has been vandalized across the country, as a result of unregulated scrap businesses.
It has also negativity impacted the Electricity Connection Policy (ECP) and the National Development Plan III’s target, of increasing electricity coverage to 60 percent of the population by 2022 due to vandalization of high voltage electricity lines.
This has raised alarm and generated desperate calls by different concerned stakeholders from the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development, plus Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA) to legally scrap the businesses.
Peter Kaujju, the head of Communications at UMEME, the country’s largest electricity distributor says they have been unable to expand their services to reach as many regions as possible, because of the vandalism.
“The 12 months ending, December 31st , we lost about Shs. 26 billion and in just one region alone, the western part of Uganda, we had a total of 133 KM of cable. The biggest cost actually is the cost of non supply, because when one line goes off, imagine there are hospitals there that go off, there are schools that go off, the security infrastructure that go off, and people who are conducting their business that depend on power,” says Kaujju.
At the newly constructed Kampala-Entebbe expressway, it is difficult to imagine the scale of vandalism that has been visited on the road infrastructure.
A section of 26 Km worth of road fence that was meant to secure the high speed road from encroachment by people and animals has been stolen. The repairs are set to cost 800,000 USD.
On some other roads this website visited, the metallic carriage barriers have also been stolen, something that will also cost government in repairs.
The director of infrastructure roads protection at UNRA, John Bosco Ssejemba says that about 13 million USD worth of infrastacture is lost annually to vandalism, which has also worsened road accidents.
“It is a problem, but there is a worse problem, the cost of people dying, that is the cost that we cannot even imagine so we have lost a number of people on our roads , we lose about 3000 people every year, and some of the losses are attributed to destruction of road infrastructure because there are no road signs, the drivers are not properly directed, so they end up getting accidents,” Ssejemba says.
It should be noted that stolen metals are sold to scrap factories, melted and transformed into roofing sheets, fencing wires, among other items.
Whereas the trade is offering employment to many and help in recycling, calls are being made for increased surveillance, as well as punitive measure for those vandalising government infrastructure.
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