A massive Shs 800 billion cost escalation on the African Development Bank-funded Busega–Mpigi Expressway has triggered a high-level government investigation, following the discovery of internal Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA) records detailing how a revised road alignment quietly crippled the project.
The leaked internal status reports—compiled right before the project was transferred to the Ministry of Works and Transport under the Rationalisation of Government Agencies and Public Expenditure (RAPEX) reforms—expose a detailed paper trail of approvals, explosive material spikes, and administrative choices that ultimately forced the contractor to walk away.
While the documents stop short of proving explicit criminal corruption, they are now the central battleground for state investigators. The records chart the trajectory of an infrastructure project that signed out at Shs 548.1 billion in June 2019, only to explode past Shs 1.37 trillion (excluding 18% VAT), with final estimates now threatening to breach the Shs 2 trillion mark.
The 23.7-kilometre project was designed to ease congestion along the critical Kampala–Masaka trade corridor. However, internal records reveal that the governance structure of UNRA made a series of crucial design decisions before the Ministry of Works took over.
On July 10, 2019, just weeks after the civil works contract was sealed, the then-Director of Roads and Bridges Development, Eng. Samuel Muhoozi, sent an official letter to the contractor, China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC).
“The purpose of this letter is to forward to you the revised road alignment to enable you plan for mobilization and other site establishments,” the letter read.
What seemed like a routine administrative adjustment set off a catastrophic chain reaction. The supervision consultant—a joint venture led by Dohwa Engineering Company and IDCG Engineering Group—was ordered to redesign the highway to match the new path.
On October 8, 2021, UNRA Executive Director Allen C. Kagina issued an official institutional “no-objection” to the Final Design Update. Crucially, Kagina directed the consultant to obtain the contractor’s financial proposal for the modified route under Clause 13 of the contract, legally transforming a drawing-board adjustment into a multi-billion shilling variation claim. By February 2022, final construction drawings for the altered sections (KM 8+700 to 21+060) were rushed out to stave off contractor delay penalties.
By early 2023, the engineering reality of the route change hit the Treasury. The new alignment had inadvertently steered the multi-lane highway deep into unforgiving swamplands, demanding an astronomical volume of civil works.
An internal audit of the engineering quantities exposes the staggering scope of the miscalculation:
By March 2023, the consultant presented an initial variation evaluation of Shs 1.346 trillion. By October 2024, that figure was adjusted upward to Shs 1.370 trillion, excluding VAT.
The financial weight proved fatal to the site operations. In May 2024, CCECC officially invoked its contractual rights regarding employer financial defaults and suspended all works. The contractor had completely exhausted the original Shs 548.1 billion budget, and with no legal guarantees of additional funding from the government, the machinery went silent.
When the Ministry of Works inherited the stalled project under the RAPEX restructuring, Works Minister Fred Byamukama formed an independent technical committee alongside the Engineers Registration Board to salvage the corridor.
The committee’s final report, delivered in April 2025, presented the government with a brutal economic dilemma terminating CCECC’s contract and starting a fresh procurement process would take at least 12 months. During that year, the existing, untreated swamp works and exposed earth embankments would severely deteriorate would drive the remaining works to an astonishing Shs 1.979 trillion.
The committee ultimately concluded that stuck with the current contractor, despite the inflated variation, was the most fiscally prudent option available to protect the taxpayers’ initial investment.
The Busega–Mpigi crisis has since blown past a mere contractual breakdown, morphing into a full-scale political purge. Acting on directives from President Yoweri Museveni, Minister Byamukama shocked Parliament by announcing the summary dismissal of six senior engineers linked to major infrastructure failures, including key personnel overseeing the Busega–Mpigi project, such as Patrick Muleme and Isaac Wani.
The fallout has sparked intense finger-pointing within the engineering fraternity. In his defense, Wani has publicly argued that investigators are looking at the wrong targets, stating that the critical issue is not who officially transmitted the altered drawings, but who internally initiated the route change within the Design Department and why.
Appearing before MPs, Minister Byamukama laid bare a systemic culture of poor contract management, irregular payment distributions—where favored contractors allegedly bypassed older payment certificates—and land acquisition flaws.
“We have agreed that no road contract will be signed unless at least 50 per cent of the required right of way has been acquired,” Byamukama informed a heated parliament, adding that the President has since ordered that threshold raised to 75 per cent to prevent alignment changes from causing future compensation crises.
Ugandan taxpayers are now left holding the bill for a project caught between a critical transport need and a staggering paper trail of structural failure. Whether this Shs 1 trillion inflation was an unavoidable consequence of shifting terrain, or a orchestrated drain on public funds, remains for investigators to prove.
