5 September 2008
editorial
President Museveni has promised to launch investigations to establish how districts spend the grant the central government extends to them. Addressing Rutega residents in Kanungu District, Mr Museveni said he has been impressed by roads only in Kanungu and Soroti districts out of all the districts he has visited. Mr Museveni has so far visited Bunyoro, Bugisu, Teso, Bushenyi and West Nile sub-regions.
In an agriculture-dependent country like Uganda, attempts to transform the subsistence agricultural sector to one that is commercial cannot be successful without good roads to transport produce to the markets. The President, therefore, ought to be commended for acknowledging the problem, and seeking to find a solution.
The question that needs to be asked, however, is why it should take the intervention of the President to tell that the roads in the districts are in poor shape? What is the relevance of district chairmen and councils, members of parliament, resident district commissioners, chief administrative officers, councillors, and the other members of this army of district-based bureaucracy? Apart from the obvious problem of graft and shoddy work being accepted, it appears that the sheer number of districts today - 80 at the last count and growing every year - might have reached a point whereby supervision is very hard or next-to-impossible.
While there is some credibility in the argument that increasing the number of districts does, in some cases, help take services closer to the people, that can only happen where those districts are closely supervised to ensure transparency, accountability and efficient service delivery.
In the absence of these safeguards, the creation of more districts simply provides new avenues for the wastage and embezzlement of government money by decentralising corruption.
Rather than launch investigations on how districts are using their money - and there have been several over the years, including some on similar issues - the President is best advised to ask whether his Cabinet and the bureaucracy that his ministers head have the ability to supervise these local governments.
This will help in two ways; on the one hand, it will force ministers and their officials to do the jobs they are paid for, including ensuring that taxpayers' money is spent in the right areas and in the right way.
Freed of the millstone of micro-managing, the President can then have the time to focus on the important national issues such as ensuring the rule of law and application of justice, constitutionalism, making the economy competitive, and cementing democratic practice. The President should allow cabinet and the civil servants to work; his job should be to lead.
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