Nada Andersen

Your second photo tells the whole story: there is no speed‑limit sign anywhere, unlike the first. And that is exactly the problem. The Kajjansi–Munyonyo Spur has none of the signage you would expect of an ordinary dual carriageway. The median barrier is still as that on the "Expressway". It communicates nothing to the users. Apart from being dirtier than the KEE, everything else about it feels like an expressway and drivers behave accordingly. I genuinely do not think there is any signage at the point where you enter the Spur to inform drivers that they are no longer on the expressway. So drivers simply continue at the same speed. Why wouldn’t they? It is still dual carriage, still as wide as the expressway, and on some nights it is better lit than the stretch between the two toll booths. It is not a short distance either. And the only “control measure” in the form of those traffic lightsis dysfunctional 80% of the time. People use it as if it is an expressway because the infrastructure tells them it is one. Even Traffic Police Officers do not enforce anything on that Munyonyo Spur just like they do not enforce anything on the Expressway. That is why, and I say this without malice and with a heavy heart, Rajiv Ruparelia perished in that crash. And that is why I said at the time that government failed him and is still failing hundreds of thousands of Ugandans because some senior officials in the Ministry of Works and Transport have failed to grasp a basic engineering truth: There is no universe in which two people, let alone one million, think the same way about road safety. If human beings thought identically, dual carriageways would not exist. You would just have wide roads. Road safety is not psychology. It is engineering. And engineering must be used to protect people from the predictable variability of human behaviour. Because the system fails to communicate, fails to guide, fails to warn, and fails to enforce, the users may pay with their lives. This Spur is a textbook example of that failure.

"Patriotism is loyalty to your nation, not to your government. Be a good citizen, not a blind slave." — Mark Twain