We spent 2.3 trillion Uganda shillings on Isimba Dam. A whole dam. Not a goat shed. Not a pit latrine. A dam, with concrete, turbines, embankments, and dreams of energy security. But five years later, it’s cracking. Cracking so badly, they’re talking of shutting it down. Irreparable, they say. What’s more irreparable is the damage to our national confidence. And no, don’t blame Ugandan engineers.
We’ve built towers, bridges, and tunnels across Africa and beyond. The real fault line here isn’t in the structure. It’s in the structure of governance. This failure has politics written all over it. From inflated contracts to poor supervision, from rushed timelines to sidelined professionals, this is what happens when kickbacks trump knowledge. When technical decisions are made in hotel lobbies instead of boardrooms.
When political appointees confuse PowerPoint presentations with power generation. Isimba Dam is not a technical collapse. It is a case study in functional illegitimacy, a regime style that replaces competence with connections, merit with mediocrity, and vision with vultures. And, I’m restraining my honesty tone here. How many times have engineers been ignored, overruled, or sidelined? How often do procurement teams select contractors not based on track record, but tribe, ties, or the thickness of the brown envelope? We hear that the blue letters go for 100 million Ugandan shillings. We’ve normalized dysfunction. Now we’re exporting it to our dams.
And yet, this was our dam. Our money. Our river. Our future. Now, instead of electricity, we’ll generate excuses. Instead of accountability, we’ll hear spin. They’ll tell us it’s a “natural defect”. Or “unforeseen geological movements”. But what moved wasn’t the earth. It was integrity. To every young Ugandan engineer watching this, don’t be disillusioned. Be determined. The dam may crack, but you must not. Keep designing.
Keep building. But more importantly, start demanding. Demand systems that respect your expertise. Demand institutions that don’t treat engineers like errand boys. Because if we don’t fix our politics, no dam, no matter how well engineered, will hold. The next flood won’t come from the Nile. It will come from the rage of a generation tired of being robbed by the very people they elect to protect their future.
The writer is an engineer and a lecturer at Makerere University.
