Residents of Gulu Municipality may have to wait for five more years for the roads to be fixed.
The 40-kilometre road network in both Gulu Central Business District and the suburbs of the municipality are in very bad shape. The roads in the town centre are full of potholes while those in the suburbs are nearly impassable during the rainy season.
Ambrose Atwoko, the Gulu Town Clerk, says the town has only two kilometers of tarmac which is also in a very bad state.
Atwoko explains that the government recently borrowed ten billion shillings from the World Bank to rehabilitate the roads in the town. Under the project, two billion shillings will be spent annually on rehabilitating the roads in Gulu town.
Atwoko, however, says the money is too little because one kilometre of tarmac road costs over 900 million shillings which means less than six kilometres of the road network will be fixed in the next five years.
The town clerk appeals to government to allocate additional funds besides the money from the World Bank.
He says improving the road infrastructure in Gulu will help it develop faster since it’s a regional centre where traders from across the border in South Sudan buy most of their produce.
Deo Ochen, a resident of Pece division, says people are bitter over the failure by government to fix the road network in the town.
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Aramazan Opio, another resident says the drainage system along the roads in the town is in a very bad state.
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To Geoffrey Ogabo, who also lives in Gulu Municipality, one of the major concerns is that the town floods whenever it rains.
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The over two decades of war affected the infrastructure in Northern Uganda.
