By Don Cayo
KAMPALA,Uganda
“How are you getting around Kampala?” people here ask, especially when they learn that I’m staying in the downtown heart of this chaotic city of two million.
“Taxi,” I reply (though I am learning I can get around much of the compact business/official district on foot.) And in a recent conversation I added, “I don’t want to drive in Kampala.”
“Let me tell you,” said the local man I was talking to, “nobody wants to drive in Kampala. Nobody.”
–snip–
According to Vali Jamal – a Ugandan-born Indian with years of international experience, a host of Canadian connections, and an unending stream of funny and pointed stories – there were 50,000 cars in this country in 1972. Today there are 500,000.
Yet there are no new roads. And worse, he says, about 30 per cent of the roads that do exist are degraded by “potholes, pot craters, pot bellies and pot valleys.” (Mind you, that’s still an improvement over 1972, when 60 per cent of the roads, even in Kampala, were mud.)
http://communities.canada.com/VANCOUVERSUN/blogs/globalization
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