The elders would cry if they saw our new roads and schools

The combination of heavy rains and possibly a break in Lake Victoria’s exploitation occasioned by the Covid-19 lockdown, has left it bursting with water.

In the lakeside Ugandan city of Entebbe and the outskirts of Kampala, high waters have submerged plush residences and posh hotels that had been, on the face of it, built a reasonably safe distance from the lake shore.

In a rare phenomenon, tiny islands have been unmoored and are descending on Owen Falls Dam, now appropriately called by the good old African name of Lake Victoria, the Nalubaale Hydroelectric Power Station, in Jinja.

The main source of power in Uganda, it sits a short distance off the point at which Nalubaale meets River Nile, and the river begins its long journey to Egypt.

A few days ago, one of the floating islands disrupted the turbines and cut power to most of the country. There is a battle to keep the rest at bay.

On April 19, President Yoweri Museveni visited the dam. The gates have been opened to allow the extra volumes to push through.

Pointing at the gushing waters, Museveni said the last time such a sight was witnessed was in 1964.

And that said a lot. The dam was completed under the British colonial government in 1954. Its builders had in mind a scenario that is playing out 66 years later. And it has many decades to do.

Nothing could differentiate some of the more forward-looking colonial apparatchik and the immediate post-independence generation of, especially, the African bureaucracy and its progressive politicians, from the political class of today.

It is not just dams. All over East Africa are schools, hospitals and Parliament houses built decades ago, that are standing as solid as when they were completed.

These early builders erected schools with the plan that would be enough to hold growing populations.

At Makerere University, two halls of residences have such thick walls that campus myth has it they were built to withstand bombs.

In the Tanzanian-aided war that overthrew dictator Idi Amin in 1979, students who couldn’t flee moved to the two halls, to wait out the war as shells fell in Kampala, with a couple landing at the university.

Today, we don’t even build dams sometimes. We eat the money, leaving only stubby foundations to show for the billions of shillings purportedly spent.

New school buildings and hospitals are blown away by the first average storm.

Especially in Kenya and Uganda, land grabbers are seizing for themselves the school plots over which the early 20th century creators of these institutions were planning they would grow.

In many places, land for public hospitals has also been stolen.

There are people who study peculiar things. One I know studies East African infrastructure in disturbing detail.

He told me that the vast majority of infrastructure in East Africa, and the foundations for it, were built or set down in the 40 years after the end of World War I, from about 1920 to 1960.

The railways, towns, airports, major hospitals, technical institutions, key government buildings, state houses and roads.

Now ageing, he told me with scorn: "you later generations have done little. You’ve expanded existing airports, paved existing earth roads, rehabilitated existing structures, renewed some of the railway lines, but in the larger scheme of things, you haven’t broken much new ground.”

The state building and development project was clearly a great inspiration. Nationalists who took over power at independence were flawed; some were tribalists, greedy and autocrats.

However, they had grand visions — to drag their countries into the modern age and improve the lot of their people who were deprived and denied by colonialism and earlier chiefdoms.

In one East African country, nearly 100 new big schools and 60 hospitals and medical centres were built in five years after independence.

There were high-minded bureaucrats who decided that every region would have a big industry, and they went out and built them — bequeathing us a few white elephants in the process.

They decided a development bank was necessary to build a native business class, and they did.

And even with what are now hotly controversial land holdings, they actually created a large class of big owners, scattered across the country, not just for the president and his siblings.

Few roads today last beyond one election cycle. I was told there is logic to it. They are built to last such a short time so that the next government or minister will also have something to eat from rebuilding them. And that is the key difference.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the Wall of Great Africans; @cobbo3