By JOACHIM BUWEMBO

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Failing to prepare is preparing to fail, so the old adage goes. And in its six decades of independence, Africa has failed to prepare its transport systems so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the continent is a graveyard of failed transport projects.

With the exception of Ethiopian Airlines, it is hard to find a national airline whose story is not a chronicle of incompetence and corruption. The railways are a similar story of vultures’ feasts. And roads are the chapter Africa is contributing to “The Mafia’s Textbook for Stealing a Loan Before the Borrower Sees It”.

Six decades after the decolonisation of Africa gathered momentum, the colonial masters’ descendants are having a hearty laugh at the confusion in Africa’s transport ‘systems’, if they can be called systems. When the colonisers came, they purposefully built roads and railways designed to take Africa’s resources to their countries, as unprocessed as possible. They achieved it.

Today, Africans design infrastructure projects whose immediate outcome is to take the sweat of its unborn children to the lender country through skewed loan arrangements, with a chunk the amount that gets into Africa “eaten” by the local Mafia.

Much of what is actually used to build the road is what the borrower contributed in local counter funding. But in one East African Community country, even that was one time taken away by the lender and angry parliamentarians forced them to return the money.

Focusing on EAC, the experiments with airlines are simply interesting. When we the dying elders try to recall the glorious East African Airways (EAA), we are quickly shut up by being told how the aviation industry world was affected by 9/11.

While air passenger traffic to East Africa has grown over tenfold since EAA folded 44 years ago, it is hard to find a financially viable national carrier in the region. We have been talking about a common market, economic union, but unifying EAC’s airspace has eluded the combined brains of the region’s experts and leaders.

Air travel within EAC thus remains extremely expensive as what passengers are paying for are punitive charges by national governments, imposed by politicians whose tickets are paid for by their suffering taxpayers.

The youngest airline in the region, the reborn Uganda Airlines, is mired in scandals before its second birthday, and the Ugandan president has been calling its managers uncharitable names, with some now facing prosecution. All because of failing to prepare

Did we think such a big undertaking would succeed without taking its human resource seriously? Meanwhile the country is borrowing heavily to expand Entebbe Airport for other (foreign) carriers to operate better.

If any country in the region should take transport systems seriously it is Uganda. Being in the heart of Africa and with no direct access to the sea, Uganda has the choice of being the busiest gateway to the continent, not by declaration, but by careful planning and disciplined implementation.

Uganda Airlines should be the biggest on the continent and should be funding the development of the country’s oil industry. Instead we keep hearing stories of financiers getting weary of the project.

But all is not lost. Uganda is putting its budding young technicians to work to do Original Equipment Manufacturing in the transport industry. The other day, the president laid the foundation stone to the vehicle manufacturing plant in Jinja which is 85 percent complete, and for which not a single penny has been borrowed. A few first class buses designed and built by young Ugandan engineers working with the army have been on the road now for two years.

After being convinced of their capability, President Yoweri Museveni banned the importation of buses, and the new plant has already got an order to make 1,000 buses. Given the massive, almost frantic efforts to build good roads across the country, one can say road transport is finally being planned in the national interest. Maybe we can live with the unfavourable road construction funding arrangements for now.

But before the East African Community can approach aviation seriously and declare one airspace regardless of how many small corrupt national carriers there are, we regional citizens shall not take them seriously when they utter lofty stuff like single currency and political federation.

Joachim Buwembo is a Kampala-based journalist. E-mail: [email protected]