By Apollo Buregyeya
We can keep pretending until cows come home that the Standard Gauge Railway is a symbol of African progress. It is not. It is a well-polished iron chain extending a colonial infrastructure vision, not disrupting it. A debt trap disguised as development. A rerun of history dressed in new contractors.
The British never built railways to connect African communities. They built them to extract resources. Copper from Kasese. Cotton from Masaka. Tea from the hills. Railways were designed to connect mines to ports, not people to opportunities. We inherited that logic at independence, patched it up, and now we’re borrowing again to repeat it. Only this time, it’s not for the Queen. It’s for the Dragon.
The Standard Gauge Railway is not a tool of transformation. It is Africa’s submission letter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The track is new, but the motive is old. Move goods cheaply, push imports faster, deepen dependence.
How does this railway protect Kasese from armed conflict? How does it support cotton ginneries in Masaka? It does not. What it does is bring in more finished goods from overseas while burying local industries still learning how to stand.
Real infrastructure must first protect its people. Then it must connect production zones and markets within the continent. Only after that should it project us outward into the global economy. The Standard Gauge Railway jumps to the last stage, ignoring the first two. That is not progress. That is surrender.
Kisoro to Kampala is 490 kilometers. Kisoro to Bujumbura is only 420. And yet, that shorter, more strategic corridor has been ignored for a century. Beyond Bujumbura lies Lake Tanganyika, a waterway of immense trade potential serving over 100 million people.
Imagine a railway starting in Butembo, cutting through Bushenyi, linking Kigali, and ending at Bujumbura. Four countries. Dozens of cities. Millions of lives. That is the kind of railway Africa needs. A track for peace, production, and pan-African trade.
So I am actually glad that the President of Uganda has not given this project priority attention. Sometimes, doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing with borrowed billions.
What import duties have failed to limit, let poor infrastructure delay. Let rough roads serve the patriotic purpose of shielding our infant industries from being crushed by foreign efficiency. It’s not sabotage. It’s strategy.
We do not owe anyone a railway to Mombasa.
We owe ourselves a railway to the future.
The writer is an engineer, industrialist, and entrepreneur.
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