Even when large-scale infrastructure projects remain unfinished, people find ways to use them and live with them. Consider Uganda’s Entebbe-Kampala Expressway, which has sparked significant public debate for nearly fifteen years. Since construction began in November 2012, the four-lane, fifty-one-kilometer toll road connecting Kampala, Uganda’s capital, to Entebbe, the site of Uganda’s main airport, has been a major point of contention. Funded by the government of Uganda and the Export-Import Bank of China, the highway opened to traffic in June of 2018. According to official figures, the highway incurred a total cost of USD 476 million, more than five times what it should have cost,¹ leading to claims that it’s “the world’s most expensive road.”² State officials attributed the exorbitant cost to difficult terrain, to the absence of competitive bidding, to land acquisition challenges, and to redundant consultancy services marred by copious kickbacks and corruption.

The highway was expected to spur economic growth, foster social transformation, and decongest the Greater Kampala Metropolitan Area. With an aspirational and capitalist agenda, it was envisioned as a “new standard”³  for Uganda in its progression toward middle-income status. As the first toll road in the country, it introduced innovative technologies for automated toll collection such as smart cards,⁴ which can be reloaded via mobile payments or through bank transfers.

Six years after its opening, the highway does not live up to its aspirations, and it receives mixed reviews as a project that fails to meet its stated objectives. Several of its intersections remain incomplete or under construction, even as astronomical sums have been invested already. The road’s drainage, sidewalks, and crosswalks must be frequently renovated and repaired to accommodate a broader spectrum of the population, since the original designs disregarded local contexts and informal use. And due to the tolls, using the road is prohibitively expensive, so much so that the majority of Ugandans will never use it as a primary route. This has prompted questions in the public domain about how exactly the highway is expected to address growth, social transformation, or decongestion.

Accordingly, users constantly devise creative ways of repurposing the highway, leading to its own continuous decay. Since its inception, the road has been a continuous work in progress requiring attention and updating and repair. In many ways, this is the fate of all roads. But the Entebbe-Kampala Expressway merits a deeper reading—particularly regarding broader reckonings of obsolescence. The road is incomplete, but not in the sense that it is missing or lacking something. Indeed, part of the perceived problem is that it has taken on life in excess of its original designs. The reality of the road is that it is constantly in the making—but not according to plan. Instead, the road is evolving in ways that challenge capitalist and aspirational concepts of technological determinism.

The highway’s incompleteness raises fears of obsolescence among urban elites in particular: If the highway is not built according to plan, will Uganda fall off the trajectory of progress? Yet this incompleteness also opens the infrastructure up for marginalized populations who may not share these expectations. Obsolescence appears very different to the people who are not whizzing past in their sedans. For those who live and work here, this space could become obsolete if construction were to restart, and these people would have no place in it anymore.

Decomposition and Recomposition

The highway is marked by erosion and wear-and-tear in some sections, giving the road a material life of its own. Elsewhere it seems as if sabotaged, destroyed, and purposely manipulated. In many sections, the absence of proper road signs, some of which have been stolen or destroyed, has led to confusion and misuse. Unclear and frequently changing information about speed limits⁵ has resulted in motorists being flagged down at exit points for exceeding 100 kilometers per hour. This speed limit has sparked reactions from motorists who question the relevance of the expressway concept.⁶ Certain sections of the road are also prone to flooding during rain and storms, and it is clear that some areas still lack properly functioning streetlights in the evening and other essential facilities such as pavement and pedestrian crossings.

Yet in its irregularities, a variety of makeshift constructions have emerged. New markets have been constructed by the roadside, with vendors peddling their wares from ramshackle stalls. Enterprising individuals use umbrellas, kiosks, or motor vehicles to strategically position businesses such as food shops, repair stalls, car washes, and garages. Residents now travel the road on boda bodas (motorcycle taxis), which were originally prohibited. It is common to find people jogging or walking animals along and sometimes on the road—this was also not in the plans. One can observe goats, stray dogs, or herds of cattle crossing some intersections, soiling the pavement and trampling any pretense of separation from the agrarian surroundings.

This process of material and technological decomposition and recomposition gives the highway an ambivalent character. It invokes aspirations of progress, but also raises fears among urban elites of a Uganda that doesn’t quite fit the bill. It gives rise to new forms of business and life along the road—but these are precarious at best, dogged by the threat of being ripped away by planners’ allegiance to their plans. These specters of obsolescence sit awkwardly beside one another on the Entebbe-Kampala Expressway. Obsolescence here is a matter of heterogeneity, shaped by both technical demands and social circumstances. If incompleteness renders the highway obsolete as an ideal, it also opens the road to new uses and meaning—thus making it something other than obsolete.

The highway’s human and non-human occupants embody a multitude of different possibilities, rendering this infrastructure as dynamic and unpredictable. Indeed, many residents harbor an inclination to keep things incomplete. Some employ tactics derived from their own more situated ways of life to make this space more heterogeneous. The highway, then, underscores urban populations’ potential to foster diverse ideals—ideals that might otherwise go unnoticed through blind faith in progress, innovation, and modernity. Thus, the highway, primarily designed to cater to middle- and upper-class urban elites, must travel along variegated, intricate, and splintering trajectories.

Multiple Trajectories

The highway has received criticism from urban elites with the subtle expectation that modern infrastructures must evolve in a certain way, following a specific trajectory of technological determinism. Yet, infrastructure is a sociotechnical constellation supported by diverse actors with diverse agendas. This highway’s transformation has been shaped by foreign investors expanding their portfolios, officials maximizing profits, political elites accumulating wealth, city planners seizing redevelopment opportunities, private entrepreneurs speculating on new markets, individual sojourners seeking personal gain, protesters staging various forms of resistance, and residents navigating hurdles both expected and unexpected. The highway is a site that many actors—state and private, local and international, democratic and non-democratic, pragmatic and speculative, expert and novice—have engaged with and shaped, through various forms of profiteering, speculation, extortion, wealth accumulation, and resistance.

As a result, the road takes on multiple forms and trajectories. To some, it is incongruous, approaching obsolescence without the maintenance that it needs to measure up to aesthetic and functional ideals. With the highway failing to conform to the logic of technological determinism, they argue that it is now defective, inadequate, and divergent. News reports frequently highlight setbacks in the road’s development in order to emphasize the project’s failure to meet its stated goals. This includes reports of government shortfalls in meeting monthly toll collection targets, legal cases from road users concerning incomplete construction, damaged or ruined structures, and similar issues.

It is important to consider the fact that the highway itself is not removed from what happens or exists around it; in fact, it could be argued that the highway helps to constitute particular geographies of obsolescence—geographies where the material configuration must embody informality, makeshift urbanism, and temporal incompleteness. Clearly, technological innovation should not be expected to follow a single trajectory or linear progression. On the real Entebbe-Kampala Expressway—not on the plans—innovation follows multiple trajectories, as do its accompanying threats of obsolescence.

The Entebbe-Kampala Expressway may not neatly align with its preconceived technocratic design, but it reminds us of the possibilities within the incomplete technological and infrastructural forms of our contemporary world. Going forward, Ugandans across a wide socioeconomic spectrum will most certainly reshape the highway’s trajectories, and they will push beyond its initial design in ways that defy its intentions. It is important to open up to different ways of theorizing decomposition and recomposition, beyond linear and singular presumptions of development, and beyond normative ideals of impact and success, to better understand the nature and dynamics of infrastructures in transition. ■

1. Paul Collier, Martina Kirchberger, and Måns Söderbom, “The Cost of Road Infrastructure in Low and Middle Income Countries,” Policy Research Working Paper, WPS7408, World Bank Group, September 2, 2015, documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/
   124841468185354669/The-cost-of-road-infrastructure-in-low-and-middle-
   income-countries. ↩︎
2. Tom Goodfellow and Zhengli Huang, “Contingent Infrastructure and the Dilution of ‘Chineseness’: Reframing Roads and Rail in Kampala and Addis Ababa,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 53, no. 4 (2020), 655–674, journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308518X20967962. ↩︎
3. “Let Entebbe Expressway Be Our New Standard,” Monitor, June 16, 2018, www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/oped/editorial/let-entebbe-expressway-be-our-new-standard-
   1762670. ↩︎
4. “Gallery: Upesi Cards,” Kampala-Entebbe Expressway (KEE), accessed August 12, 2024, kee.go.ug/gallery-item/upesi-cards/. ↩︎
5. “Speed Limit Enforcement Starts on Entebbe Expressway,” Independent, August 24, 2023, www.independent.co.ug/speed-limit-enforcement-starts-on-entebbe-
   expressway. ↩︎
6. Justin Ojangole, “Is Speed Limit on Entebbe Expressway only 40km/hr?” NewVision, July 4, 2024, www.newvision.co.ug/category/blogs/is-speed-limit-on-entebbe-expressway-
   only-40k-NV_191530#google_vignette. ↩︎