The enraged City dwellers say since the inception of the City nothing tangible has changed apart from the name from Municipality to City.
Their worry has been worsened by the slashing of the City Budget of the next financial year from 57Bn in the current financial year to 40Bn in 2023/24
During the laying of the budget proposal in Council recently, the City Secretary for Finance Twaha Waniala revealed that the slashing of the budget follows government decision to reduce on its grants to the City.
He revealed that City Council only generate 10Bn local revenue annually and the rest of the budget is financed by government through grants.
The concerned locals say the budget cut shall affect service delivery since, this comes when a number of city road infrastructure are in a poor state. Majority roads in Jinja southern Division have huge potholes and others have turned into gullies but authorities say they cannot fix them due to limited resources.
The City residents argue that declaring Jinja as a City was a low deal since they have not yet felt service delivery as expected earlier.
Before Jinja became a City, it was operating at a budget of between 28Bn to 32Bn.
A number of local governments were annexed into the City forexample Bugembe Town Council, Mafubira Subcounty and Budondo all these local governments had huge budgets but according to locals those budgets are not reflected on the current budget of Jinja City Council.
Peter Kasolo the Mayor of Jinja reveals that the annexation of those local governments widened his area of jurisdiction where voters need services but he cannot provide services since he operating on a very limited budget.
Kasolo calls upon government to allocate a special budget for infrastructural development because majority roads are unmotorable since they were last tarmacked during Obote regime.
“Some investors have threatened to relocate to the neighbouring Njeru Municipality because of our roads are nolonger motorable” Kasolo said.
Jinja has a total of 500Km road network but according the Mayor Peter Kasolo they can afford to construct not more than two Km every financial year courtesy of the USMID funds.
Like other Urban areas, Jinja City receives road fund of about 1Bn which cannot manage to fix all potholes since they have other murram roads to work in the City suburbs especially Mpumudde, Kimaka, Walukuba, Masese, Bugembe, Mafubira, Budondo among others.
