Speaking at the handover of the long-awaited forensic technical audit report on the project at a workshop in Kampala on May 3, Paula Turyahikayo, who chairs the Committee, described Phase 1 of the project as a “liability” to the people of Uganda; for which the contractor and sub-contractors should be held accountable.
“We want a list of all the sub-contractors of Phase 1 of the project to be handed over to Parliament. They should be blacklisted,” Turyahikayo said. Blacklisting means that the firms will not be allowed to do public funded projects for some time. Turyahikayo, who appeared visibly irritated, said Parliament would be interested in making a decision on the contractors when the forensic report is tabled in the House for debate. The NBI/EGI is a project funded through a $106m (about Shs250 billion) concession loan from the Republic of China repayable in 20 years and being implemented by Huawei Technologies, also a Chinese IT firm.
Huawei subcontracted other yet unnamed companies to lay the cables and set up other related infrastructure across the country.
Last year, Parliament directed the National Information Technology Authority Uganda (NITA-U) to halt Huawei’s activities on the project until the forensic technical audit was finalized. Telecoms Infrastructure Ltd, a Kenyan company, conducted the audit mid last year. NITA-U Executive Director James Saaka, who handed over the report to Turyahikayo, said they would submit the list of subcontractors to the Committee within one week.
Problematic Phase 1
Initially, the ICT ministry did not want Phase I of the project to be subjected to the forensic audit, yet it was carried out before NITA-U and the Ministry of ICT were put in place to supervise it. Parliament refused; saying Phase I was more crucial to the NBI/EGI than Phase II.
Critics say the government has an important lesson to learn from NBI/EGI debacle – don’t implement such large scale projects before you put in place the institutional framework to manage and supervise them.
Speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the workshop, Saaka could not directly say if value for money had been achieved from the project so far. All he could say was, “The important thing is that the network is available and important lessons have been learned for the next phases.”
An independent company has now been mandated to handle the maintenance of the network and take charge of the commercial interests of the cable on behalf of NITA-U – an undertaking that should have been made as soon as the contract was signed in 2006. The whole project is now almost three years behind schedule. At the workshop, the finer details of the report and the way forward were discussed in camera after journalists had been forced out of the workshop without any clear explanation. However, Peter Kahigi, the NITA-U director for technical services, said in many places in the field the auditors found it hard to even locate the cable because mark posts were not put in place. The report generally points to poor workmanship, gross negligence and sheer incompetence on the part of the civil works and electrical sub-contractors. Some of the errors were simply too elementary to be conceivable. For instance, at one installation centre, an earth wire cable was used as a high voltage live wire.
The Independent has learnt that Huawei was not specifically faulted as main contractor only that it failed to act appropriately when it was pointed out that the casual labourers employed by the subcontractors worked under difficult conditions and were poorly paid, which led to vandalism of materials and the shoddy work that potentially undermines the integrity of the whole project. Huawei reportedly undertook repairs of the defects indentified on the project. Phase I - worth about $30 billion (about Shs 65 billion) - involved laying 187 Kms of optic fibre cable to connect Kampala to Jinja, Mukono, Entebbe and Bombo. Phase II and Phase III were meant to connect major towns in the country.
Phase III (300 km), would connect the NBI to Masaka, Mbarara and Katuna on the way to Rwanda and Tanzania.
Saaka said to date, Phases I and II had been completed with some 1,500 km of optic fibre cable laid - connecting 22 districts across the country via 22 optical switching transmission stations and will connect all ministries, government departments and public institutions in the ‘last mile’ phase of the project.
Phase IV, which is yet to get a funder, would extend the cable to northern Uganda and West Nile up to the border with South Sudan. The NBI project is seen as presenting great business opportunities and is expected to support the digital migration process by providing auxiliary infrastructure for the transmission and delivery of digital television signals across the country.
All public institutions and departments including ministries, local government headquarters, educational institutions, and hospitals would be connected to the Internet. Excess capacity is to be leased to telecoms.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Peter Nyanzi
Quelle/Source: The Independent, 14.05.2012
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