There is a road in central Uganda that has cost the careers of five public officials, and it is only 23.7 kilometres long. The Busega-Mpigi Expressway runs from Busega, on the western edge of the capital, Kampala, towards the town of Mpigi. On paper, the reckoning over it looks decisive. A permanent secretary has been made to step aside. An engineer-in-chief has been retired in the public interest. A head of design has been indicted. Two design engineers have been interdicted. No one can accuse the Ugandan state of inaction over the Busega-Mpigi Expressway.
But an examination of the project’s own documentary record — and the account of a person with direct knowledge of the file — reveals a mismatch at the heart of the case. The decisions that committed public money to the Busega-Mpigi Expressway, and that allowed its cost to swell, were not taken in the design office. They were taken at the points where authority and money meet: in the signing of a contract, the approval of a route, the release of a builder onto the ground. And it is not, for the most part, the officials who held that authority who are now paying for it.
The distinction matters because of a principle that governs any functioning accountability system, and that the record here quietly violates. Authority determines accountability. The officer who holds the power to decide owns the decision. A recommendation is not an approval. A drawing is not an authorisation. The person who drafts a document does not own it; the person who signs it does. Measured against that test, the punishments and the signatures on the Busega-Mpigi Expressway do not align.
Strip the story to its essentials and it is not, at its core, a story of bad engineering. It is a story of the gates where money is committed. The Busega-Mpigi Expressway was tendered on an incomplete design, its civil-works contract signed in June 2019 while the drawings were still being revised — a decision that belonged to the accounting officer, the contracts committee and top management, and to no draughtsman. The change of alignment that reshaped the entire project was authorised on 13 October 2017 by a memorandum signed by the director of network planning and engineering. And the single most consequential act in the whole chronology — the release of the contractor onto the new, unapproved alignment on 19 December 2019, after which nothing could be undone — was authorised by a letter from the acting executive director, acting in the capacity of accounting officer. That letter is remarkable for what it admits. It directs construction to proceed on the new alignment “as shall be approved by the employer,” conceding on its own face that the alignment had not yet been approved.
Set against those authorising acts, the conduct of the engineers reads very differently. The Busega-Mpigi Expressway was run, in its formative years, by the Uganda National Roads Authority, or UNRA, a semi-autonomous agency that designed the road and handled its procurement before it was dissolved and folded into the Ministry of Works and Transport. When the consultant’s revised bill of quantities came back more than doubled, it was UNRA’s own engineers who took it apart, line by line, in March 2020. They flagged swamp excavation overstated at roughly twice what the ground required. They flagged culverts spaced too closely, testing that had been padded, vehicle numbers multiplied without justification. They demanded savings in the region of 200 billion shillings — on the order of $50m. The technical review, in other words, did not fail. It worked. It caught the overpricing and pushed it back. The road did not haemorrhage money because it was badly designed. It haemorrhaged at the commercial and authorising gates, where the design engineers had no vote.
Then there is the detail that ought to arrest any honest investigator. The head of design now under indictment is the same engineer who, in May 2016 — three years before the contract was signed — put it in writing that the civil-works procurement should be launched only after the design was complete. He warned, on the record, against the precise sequence that produced the disaster. The state’s answer to that warning, seven years later, was a criminal charge against the man who gave it.
Lay the five sanctions over the map of who actually held authority, and the misalignment is not subtle. Four of the five officials sanctioned over the Busega-Mpigi Expressway are engineers: the head of design, two design engineers and the engineer-in-chief. The penalties cluster, almost entirely, on the technical lineage of the project — the people who produced its visible artefacts, the drawings and the design reports and the reviews. The sharpest instrument the state possesses, a criminal indictment, has been reserved not for the highest office but for the head of design, one of the most technical and least commercially empowered of the five roles. The decisions that moved the money, meanwhile — the contract signed too early, the alignment authorised without approval, the drawings released onto it, the variation that breached the statutory cost ceiling, the no-objection never sought from the project’s financier — were exercised at the level of accounting officer, contracts committee and director. On the record examined, those signatures have so far attracted no adverse finding at all.
The state’s instinct is not baseless, and fairness demands that it be acknowledged. The engineers were the face of the project. They carried its institutional memory, they authored its papers, and when parliament or the board wanted an explanation, it was an engineer who stood to give it. It is psychologically natural, and administratively convenient, to hold responsible the person who can explain the thing. But explanation is not authorship, and authorship of a document is not authority over a decision. The head of design prepared the relevant board paper because he had been the institutional memory of the project since 2010 — a fact the director himself placed on the record while distancing himself from that very paper. To convert “he knew the most” into “he is answerable for the most” is to punish knowledge and reward the silence of those who held the pen.
The two most senior officials caught in the net share something that turns the story from troubling to alarming, and it must be stated with the caveat it deserves. When UNRA was absorbed into the ministry, the sitting permanent secretary did not inherit the file passively. He constituted a formal technical committee — including the engineer-in-chief — to review the Busega-Mpigi Expressway specifically. The committee consulted and produced a report. And the permanent secretary was preparing to act on it, to sign or to refuse to sign the variation order that would either legitimise or reject the disputed billions, when he was removed. The two officials who led that review are two of the five now sanctioned.
The caveat is real: the exact dates that bind this sequence, and the stated grounds for each sanction, have not been published by the state, and it is possible the actions rest on facts not yet in the public domain. But the pattern is too consistent to leave unspoken, because it runs the length of the file. The officers who warned, in 2015 and 2016, were faulted in 2023. The officer who paused — who tried to test the variation before executing it — was removed before he could. And the officers who authorised the consequential decisions between 2017 and 2022 remain, so far, at liberty, and in some cases still advising. Were accountability tracking authority, that order would be inverted. It is not inverted. It is precisely upside down.
What is doing the work here is a substitution: rank and visibility standing in for authority. An engineer’s signature on a drawing is visible, technical, easy to point to and easy to charge. An accounting officer’s failure to seek a no-objection, or a contracts committee’s approval of a contract on an unfinished design, is quiet, procedural and all but invisible to a public that does not read committee minutes. On the Busega-Mpigi Expressway, the engineering signature is lit on the stage. The authorising signature sits in the dark.
And behind it sits the question this entire enforcement drama has not touched: who benefits. It must be said plainly, and repeated, that no document in the record shows money diverted, and that the value of the road, measured per kilometre in constant terms, is not obviously inflated. But if a stream of benefit exists anywhere in this project, the record points to a single place it has never been examined — the ownership of the land along the realigned corridor, the route that was moved without a signed approval, on the strength of a discussion that was never minuted. That is the stone no one has turned over. It is conspicuous that the investigation has reached, instead, for the drawings.
The body with the mandate to turn it is the Inspectorate of Government, Uganda’s anti-corruption watchdog, headed by Inspector General Lady Justice Naluzze Aisha Batala. Whether it has the aim, as well as the mandate, depends entirely on which trail it chooses to follow. If Batala follows the signatures rather than the seniority, the case unlocks quickly, because the consequential instruments are dated and their signatories, in the decisive cases, are known. The inspectorate would need to establish who authorised the 19 December 2019 release onto the unapproved alignment. It would need to separate, line by line, the unlawful portion of the variation — the rate uplift charged on scope already tendered and priced — from the legitimate cost of genuinely new work, because only the first is a breach. It would need to establish whether any variation order has in fact been signed since July 2024, by whom, and on whose authority. It would need to recover the dates that bound the technical committee and the removals, and the stated grounds of each of the five sanctions, and test them against the map of who held the power to decide. And it would need to follow the corridor land. Do those things, and the inquiry into the Busega-Mpigi Expressway converges on authority. Stop at the design layer — indict the draughtsmen, retire the reviewers, close the file — and the state will have produced sanctions without producing an answer. It will have punished the road’s biographers for the decisions of its authors.
Neither the ministry nor the inspectorate has made public the specific grounds for the individual sanctions on the Busega-Mpigi Expressway. This account asserts no crime against any named person. It asserts one thing only: that accountability must follow authority, and that on the documentary record now available, the sanctions and the signatures do not match. Where motive is undocumented it is not supplied; where a benefit is unproven it is named a question, not a finding; and where the state holds facts not yet public, that possibility is left open. The record is dated, and it can be checked.
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