Jinja city has embarked on reconstruction of some of its key roads at a cost of over sh 16.5b, secured from the World Bank under the Uganda Support to Municipal Infrastructure Development (USMID).

The road works have received a lot of criticism for the pace and quality of the construction process.

It's important to understand that World Bank won't keep supporting a municipality or a region or a country where the bank's effort is felt in negativity.

The issues in contention are;
1) The quality of the road and,
2) The road design.

However, the complainants must know that the standard of quality is what World Bank found suitable,not only for Jinja, but other municipalities as well and details of specifications are embedded in the Bills-of-Quantities.

As such, the contractor, Star Ltd, faults nothing when he follows that World Bank specifications in their BoQ.

The road design was given to the contractor as a working document to guide them during road construction and It's against these documents that the consultant checks the contractor's performance.

Don't fault the contractor for doing what the funder, World Bank, expects them to do.

Ironically, the local leaders know all this and in detail, but prefer lining up unsuspecting locals, furnish them with little detail, use them as tools, pay them little, to shout at issues that can't be sorted by the people they are apportioning blame.

They know that the contractor has NO problem at all, and neither is the JMC administration who are the receiving authority who pay for work done.

Their "wise" fight is actually a direct attack on the donor, *The World Bank.*

We stand to lose as Jinja or as a country because world bank has NO contract binding it to Jinja.

If we find the quality and designs of world bank's products lacking, then the bank will inevitably identify another receipient in need of these supposedly "substandard" products.

I call on the locals to be wiser than their leaders, especially those that don't know that the road is designed to handle future traffic, since Jinja is fast tracking city status.

World Bank under USMID, has donated roads with similar quality and designs to other municipalities like Mbale, Soroti, Lira, Gulu, Hoima, Masaka, Mbarara, and others.....
NO complaints were observed but instead, locals adjusted to the trend.
Sometimes, you don't get what you want, but what you need.

Consider any city, NO main road has junctions every 20meters.
You can't install traffic lights in Jinja at the total junction when scindia road is open and others roads are crossing every 20meters.