By JOACHIM BUWEMBO

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Kampala’s permanent residents usually cherish the last ten days of the year when there are hardly any cars on the usually congested roads, but this time it has been different. For while most cars followed tradition and “went upcountry” for the festive season, the few that remained had to contend for less space than usual because of ongoing road repairs.

The roads were being repaired by the army. This practice of the army undertaking civil works is becoming a new normal of thinking outside the box that could have started earlier.

Thinking inside the box in public affairs is justifiable because now the known procedures that were designed to work do not work. You borrow money abroad and tenders are published to implement the project so that the most competitive bidder is awarded the contract.

Unfortunately, “smart” people devised means to vulgarise the projects funding box decades ago so, when you borrow $100 million for a project, only about $20 million worth of value is attained. Or less. Even zero in some cases.

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But because the established procedures have to be followed, you continue following the long-abused processes to finance and “implement” public projects.

For, unlike what the Great Teacher said 2,000 years ago, here it is man being made for the law, not the law being made for man.

Thus, Kampala city infrastructure alone must have swallowed $1 billion in the past three decades, and the outcome leaves it worse than it was. So, while the questionable borrowing continues, someone decided to get some work also done by deploying the army. That is why movement has been rather constrained this festive season. And appreciably so.

Looking at the region, there appears to be some military capacity that could be put to civil work that would make a huge difference for our people. At the beginning of the year, our leaders deployed forces to help stabilise eastern DR Congo, a fellow member of the East African Community.

But soon DRC authorities decided they were better off without the regional force and, in effect, sent the EAC troops packing. Now, instead of grumbling, the EAC leaders can just deploy an equal number of troops with an equal amount of funding to a common cause to benefit the whole region. That is the climate cause.

Consider this: Only a couple of weeks back, big delegations returned from the fortnight-long climate 28th Conference of Parties in Dubai. Uganda sent 600 delegates. That is a battalion in military terms.

So, Uganda alone can contribute a battalion of men and women in uniform on a climate intervention project in the region, and besides their regular salaries and food rations, throw in an equal amount of dollars as it spent on the 600 Dubai delegates.

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The EAC can help redeem the image of irrational waste portrayed by national governments by undertaking climate projects instead of begging the big polluters for climate funds which, in any case, rarely come. The EAC wouldn’t be starting from zero, as it already has pro-climate projects underway in different countries, over which not enough noise is even made.

There, for example, is Tanzania’s electric railway project that has done successful trials. Regional troops should be deployed to work on it and extend it onto a regional network. Uganda’s army has, for a while, been growing capacity to make rails, so the regional railway project wouldn’t be starting from scratch.

The same Uganda generates about twice the electricity it consumes, though it has to pay for the unused power and the loans that it borrowed to build the dams. So, it can as well donate the excess power to the EAC electric railway without incurring further losses.

And the Ugandan army partnered with academia to pioneer the making of electric buses as the national vehicle manufacturing plant takes shape. All electric buses on Uganda’s roads so far have been built in the military facility, and even as soldiers don’t excel at blowing their trumpet, the buses are already enjoying steady demand from the business community, who think carefully before spending their money.

These projects are direct interventions for solving the problem of emission. Even if the public is not yet ecstatic about them, the EAC should jump onto them and see how the member states can coordinate their climatic interventions, using the freely available manpower — the military.

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