Kampala roads : 70 percent of the potholes have been worked on – KCCA

The Executive Director of the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) Dorothy Kisaka has revealed that the authority has successfully patched up 70 per cent of the potholes in the roads in the city.

Kisaka made this revelation during an interaction with the members of the Parliamentary Committee on Commissions, Statutory Authorities, and State Enterprises on Tuesday. She said by the end of this month, there will be no more potholes in any of the roads in Kampala.

She also clarified that although there are a lot of challenges that must be addressed within the city, currently the authority is focusing on addressing potholes that require patching, rather than undertaking sectional repairs or comprehensive revamping.

“We have aggressively responded with regard to the resources that were given to our engineers in the five divisions and have done a good work and there is a big progress,” she said.

Eng Justus Akankwasah, the director of Engineering and Technical Services at KCCA also informed the member of COSASE that Uganda Road Fund for this Financial Year received Shs29 billion and upon receiving it, an aggressive program was drafted that has been followed to date.

“We are supposed to cover 13500 square meters of potholes and then do sectional repairs of around 33000 square meters. Immediately we launched that program and every division was up in arms to seal these potholes. We should have concluded today with the pothole ceiling but because of the rainy season, we have not. But out of what we had targeted we are now at 70 per cent and we believe by the end of this month we would have covered most of the potholes in the city,” he said.

However, on the issue of sectional repairs, Eng Akankwasa said that KCCA is yet to commence and they are just waiting for framework contracts to be signed off. And according to Akankwasah, such contracts will be signed off within this week. “I want to comfort Ugandans that KCCA is aggressively addressing the issue of potholes and by the end of this month we will have covered all these potholes.”

He also added that there some roads with potholes that have not been patched because they have been given to contractors for overhaul construction and renovation and these included 6th, 7th and 8th Streets, Apollo Kagwa Road and others including Old Port Bell Road.

Currently, Kampala City has a total road network of 2,100km, of which only 646km (30%) are paved roads. When it comes to Kampala divisions and their road network length, Central has 178km, Nakawa (539km), Lubaga (464km), Makindye (502km) and Kawempe (428km). However, it is worth noting that most of the paved roads have served far beyond their full lifespan of 20 years.  

So far the authority is patching potholes on 94 roads in the five divisions of Kampala. These are about a quarter of the roads in Kampala. The divisions include Nakawa (14 roads); Rubaga (18 roads); Makindye (29 roads); Kawempe (14 roads); and Kampala Central (20 roads).