EXPLAINER: The Busega–Mpigi overrun is a procurement story. The audit is treating it as an engineering one

KAMPALA, Uganda — The most expensive decisions on the Busega–Mpigi Expressway were commercial ones. A civil-works contract was signed on an unfinished design. An alignment was changed without approval. A variation breached the statutory cost ceiling, and a required no-objection was never sought from the financier. Those are procurement and contract-management failures, and they are where the money on this 23.7-kilometre road went wrong.

The state’s reckoning, however, has fallen on the technical men. A permanent secretary has been made to step aside. An engineer-in-chief has been retired in the public interest. A head of design has been indicted. Two design engineers have been interdicted. Five careers now hang in the balance or have ended — and the project’s own paper trail points to a different set of hands than the sanctions do. It points not to the design office, but to the gates where money and authority meet, and past them to a question no one investigating this road has yet asked out loud.

The principle is not in dispute. Authority determines accountability. The officer who holds the power to decide owns the decision; a recommendation is not an approval, and a drawing is not an authorisation. The person who drafts a paper does not own it. The person who signs it does. Apply that single test to the five sanctions and the picture is not reassuring.

Strip the story to its load-bearing facts and it is not, at its core, an engineering failure. The road was tendered on an incomplete design, the civil-works contract signed in June 2019 while the drawings were still being revised — a decision that belonged to the accounting officer, the contracts committee and top management, not to any draughtsman. The change of alignment that reshaped the whole project was authorised on 13 October 2017 by a memorandum signed off by the director of network planning and engineering. And the single most consequential act in the entire chronology — the release of the contractor onto the unapproved new alignment on 19 December 2019, after which nothing could be undone — was authorised by a letter from the acting executive director, in the capacity of accounting officer. That letter is candid to the point of self-incrimination: it directs construction to the new alignment “as shall be approved by the employer,” conceding on its own face that the alignment had not yet been approved.

Now set the conduct of the design function beside those authorising acts. When the consultant’s revised bill of quantities came back more than doubled, it was the roads authority’s own engineers who tore into it, line by line, in March 2020 — flagging swamp excavation overstated at roughly twice what the ground required, culverts spaced too closely, testing padded, vehicles multiplied without justification — and demanded savings in the region of 200 billion shillings. The technical review did not fail. It worked. It caught the overpricing and pushed it back. The road did not haemorrhage money because it was badly designed. It haemorrhaged at the commercial and authorising gates, where the design engineers had no vote.

And there is the fact that ought to stop any honest investigator cold. The head of design now under indictment is the same engineer who, in May 2016 — three years before the contract was signed — put it in writing that the civil-works procurement should be launched only after the design was complete. He warned, on the record, against the precise sequence that produced the disaster. The state’s answer to that warning, seven years later, is a criminal charge against the man who gave it.

Lay the five sanctions over the authority map and the misalignment is not subtle. Four of the five are engineers — the head of design, two design engineers, the engineer-in-chief. The sanctions cluster, almost entirely, on the technical lineage of the project: the people who produced the visible artefacts, the drawings and the design reports and the reviews. The sharpest instrument the state possesses, a criminal indictment, has been reserved not for the highest office but for the head of design, one of the most technical and least commercially empowered of the five roles. The decisions that actually moved the money — the contract signed too early, the alignment authorised without approval, the drawings released onto it, the variation that breached the statutory ceiling, the no-objection never sought from the financier — were exercised at the accounting-officer, contracts-committee and director level. On the sighted record, those signatures attract no adverse finding at all.

The state’s instinct is not baseless. The engineers were the face of the project. They held its institutional memory, they authored its papers, and when Parliament or the board wanted an explanation, an engineer stood to give it. It is natural, and administratively convenient, to hold responsible the person who can explain the thing. But explanation is not authorship, and authorship of a document is not authority over a decision. The head of design prepared the relevant board paper because he was the institutional memory of the project since 2010 — a fact the director himself put on the record when distancing himself from that very paper. To convert “he knew the most” into “he is answerable for the most” is to punish knowledge and reward the silence of those who held the pen.

The two most senior officials caught in the net had one thing in common, and it must be stated with its caveat. When the roads authority was folded into the Ministry of Works and Transport, the sitting permanent secretary did not inherit this file passively. He constituted a formal technical committee — including the engineer-in-chief — to review this project specifically. The committee consulted and produced a report. And the permanent secretary was preparing to act on it — to sign, or to refuse to sign, the variation order that would either legitimise or reject the disputed billions — when he was removed. The two officials at the head of that review are two of the five now sanctioned.

The caveat: the exact dates that bind this sequence, and the stated grounds for each sanction, have not been published by the state, and it is possible the actions rest on facts not yet public. But the pattern is too stark to leave unspoken, because it runs the length of the file. The officers who warned, in 2015 and 2016, were faulted in 2023. The officer who paused — who tried to test the variation before executing it — was removed before he could. And the officers who authorised the consequential decisions between 2017 and 2022 are, so far, at liberty and in some cases still advising. If accountability were tracking authority, that sequence would be inverted. It is not inverted. It is precisely upside down.

The substitution doing the work here is rank and visibility standing in for authority. An engineer’s signature on a drawing is visible, technical, easy to point to and easy to charge. An accounting officer’s failure to seek a no-objection, or a contracts committee’s approval of a contract on an unfinished design, is quiet, procedural and invisible to a public that does not read committee minutes. The engineering signature is lit up on stage. The authorising signature sits in the dark.

And behind it sits the one question this entire enforcement drama has not touched: who benefits. No document in the record shows money diverted, and that must be said plainly; the value of the road, measured per kilometre in constant terms, is not obviously inflated. But if a benefit stream exists anywhere in this project, the record points to one place it has never been examined — the ownership of the land along the realigned corridor, the alignment that was moved without a signed approval, on the strength of a discussion that was never minuted. That is the stone no one has turned over. It is conspicuous that the investigation has reached instead for the drawings.

The Inspectorate of Government, under Inspector General Lady Justice Naluzze Aisha Batala, has the mandate to turn it. Whether it has the aim depends on whether Batala follows the signatures or the seniority. If it follows the signatures, the puzzle unlocks quickly, because the consequential instruments are dated and their signatories, in the decisive cases, are known. Establish who authorised the 19 December 2019 release onto the unapproved alignment. Separate, line by line, the unlawful component of the variation — the rate uplift charged on scope already tendered and priced — from the legitimate cost of genuinely new work, because only the first is a breach. Establish whether any variation order has in fact been signed since July 2024, by whom, and on whose authority. Recover the dates bounding the technical committee and the removals, and the stated grounds of each sanction, and test them against the authority map. And follow the corridor land. Do those things and the investigation converges on authority. Stop at the design layer — indict the draughtsmen, retire the reviewers, and close the file — and it will have produced sanctions without producing an answer. It will have punished the road’s biographers for the decisions of its authors.

Neither the ministry nor the Inspectorate has made public the specific grounds for the individual sanctions. This article asserts no crime against any named person. It asserts one thing only: that accountability must follow authority, and that on the documentary record now available, the sanctions and the signatures do not match. Where motive is undocumented it is not supplied; where a benefit is unproven it is named a question, not a finding; and where the state holds facts not yet public, that possibility is left open. The record is dated, and it can be checked.