The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
COMMENT | RONALD AMANYIRE | The crackdown on taxis labelled as being in dangerous mechanical condition has produced the entirely predictable outcome: passengers stranded across the city and an immediate surge in boda‑boda use. That alone exposes a simple truth which is that even in their poor state, these taxis were filling a critical public‑transport gap that government authorities have long neglected.
The same authorities now enforcing impoundments are the ones that failed to recognise, plan for, or invest in the fact that public transport is fundamentally a government responsibility. Here are the challenges:
1. The system has no single brain.
Kampala’s transport is run like a body with five heads and no spine. KCCA, MoWT, Police, and taxi associations, each pulls in a different direction. When a system has no central authority, chaos is obvious outcome.
This fragmentation guarantees:
➡️Inconsistent enforcement
➡️Contradictory directives
➡️Policy paralysis
➡️Endless loopholes
Public transport cannot work when nobody is truly in charge.
2. The city relies on informal transport because formal transport is unavailable for decades.
Kampala has never built a structured mass‑transit backbone.
➡️No scheduled buses.
➡️No integrated ticketing.
➡️No dedicated corridors.
➡️No regulated feeder routes.
Which led to the informal taxis and boda bodas individually owned, uncoordinated becoming the de facto system.
This is like running a national power grid on generators and then complaining that generators are noisy.
3. Infrastructure is collapsing under demand
The roads are too narrow, too few, poorly signaled, and badly drained. Congestion is not a “traffic problem”, it is a capacity problem.
You cannot move 2 million daily commuters on infrastructure designed for 300,000. The city is choking because it was never built to breathe.
4. Enforcement is unsustained, not systemic. Uganda’s enforcement culture is reactive:
➡️Crackdowns
➡️Operations
➡️Impoundments
➡️Press conferences
But not sustained, data‑driven enforcement. Enforcement has become a campaign instead of a system and as a result compliance becomes temporary and corruption becomes permanent.
The crackdown on taxis labelled as being in dangerous mechanical condition has produced the entirely predictable outcome: passengers stranded across the city and an immediate surge in boda‑boda use. That alone exposes a simple truth which is that even in their poor state, these… pic.twitter.com/xOzLyzitLv
— Ronald Amanyire (@amronaldo) August 25, 2026
5. Vehicle condition is a symptom, not a cause
Taxis in poor mechanical condition are not the disease; they are the fever.
The disease is:
➡️Weak motor vehicle inspection system
➡️Absence of fleet renewal policy
➡️Economic pressure on operators
If we don’t fix the pipeline that produces DMC vehicles, impounding them will not solve anything in the short, medium or long term. We shall remain stagnant.
6. Boda bodas are both essential and dangerous
Boda bodas move Kampalans. They also kill Kampalans. But the danger is not inherent to motorcycles.
It is inherent to:
➡️Lack of their regulation
➡️Lack of road discipline
➡️Lack of training
➡️Lack of enforcement
Boda bodas are treated as both a lifeline and a nuisance and they are regulates as neither.
7. Urbanisation has outpaced planning by a decade
Kampala’s population and commuter demand exploded. Planning did not. The result is a transport system permanently in emergency mode.
8. The public transport economy is broken
➡️Operators run on razor‑thin margins.
➡️They cannot afford fleet renewal.
➡️They cannot afford proper maintenance.
➡️They cannot afford formalisation.
A system where operators survive by cutting corners will always produce unsafe vehicles and chaotic behaviour.
Kampala’s public transport is not “misbehaving.” It is behaving exactly as a fragmented, under‑planned, under‑regulated, under‑enforced system should behave.
➡️The crisis is structural.
➡️The chaos is engineered.
➡️The failures are predictable.
Until government builds a formal public transport system the city and the country at large will continue to blame operators for problems created by the system itself.
*****
Ronald Amanyire is a transport expert. This piece is adapted from twitter @amronaldo
