Speaker of Parliament Jacob Marksons Oboth-Oboth has given ROKO Construction a 10-month deadline to complete the new parliamentary chambers, warning that further delays will not be tolerated.
Oboth-Oboth announced the directive during a plenary communication from the chair, saying the Parliamentary Commission agreed last week after a comprehensive site inspection to set a firm completion date of June 30, 2027, for the long-delayed project.
The Speaker made it explicitly clear that further delays would not be tolerated, securing a written pledge from the contractor to complete the modern parliamentary complex within the next ten months.
“The completion of the Chamber shall be achieved by June 30th, 2027. The contractor has made a commitment in writing, and we shall closely monitor execution to ensure this deadline is strictly honored,” the Speaker stated, reinforcing Parliament’s commitment to infrastructural discipline and financial prudence.
ROKO officials attended the inspection and committed in writing to meet the new target under close parliamentary oversight, the Speaker said.
The Speaker led the Parliamentary Commission on an August 26, 2026 inspection of the construction site to assess progress and address ongoing delays.
In a high-level meeting with ROKO and project consultants, the Commission reviewed the root causes of past setbacks, which ranged from structural design modifications introduced by the Commission to cash flow constraints experienced by the contractor.
ROKO Construction Ltd has pushed the completion date for the new Parliament building to the end of 2027, nearly a decade after construction of the Shs 179 billion project began.
The project, located on Shimoni Road in Kampala, was commissioned in 2018 to ease congestion at the current parliamentary building and provide additional space for legislators, offices, visitors and other parliamentary activities.
ROKO initially projected that the building would be completed in 2020 however, the project has suffered repeated delays, with Parliament leadership attributing the slow progress largely to funding challenges and, more recently, mounting pressure on the contractor to accelerate the works.
The original project cost of Shs 179 billion has also increased. In 2019, the Solicitor General approved changes to the design, including increasing the building from eight to nine floors to accommodate additional facilities, including a museum. The revised cost was put at Shs 206 billion.
The new parliamentary complex is expected to include a chamber capable of accommodating more than 600 legislators, compared with the current chamber, which has a much smaller seating capacity.
Other planned facilities include a museum, a modern archiving centre, a gallery and expanded office space for parliamentary staff and legislators.
The latest deadline now places completion of the multi-billion-shilling project by the end of 2027, following renewed pressure from Parliament leadership on ROKO to speed up construction.
