Angelo Izama
30 June 2009
Kampala — Electricity losses on the national grid amount to $50 million dollars a year World Bank country chief, Kandiresan Kundavi has said.
This is enough money to build a Bujagali Hydro-power plant in five or six financial years at its original cost.
Kundavi, in an exclusive interview said preventable losses from power and other sectors amounted to corruption on a large scale and threatened the government's capacity to weather the global economic slow-down.
"Leakages are a direct and specific form of waste. They occur when released funds are not spent on the inputs for which they are intended, or when funds are spent on the intended used but the input purchased does not show up at the point of service" she said adding that " this is a form of corruption which incurs large losses to government".
She said, for example, that a study by the World Bank, one of several, showed that teachers in primary school are absent "one day in five" accounting for 71 billion shillings in money paid for no work done.
"Furthermore, the studies show that primary teachers were found in the classroom and teaching less than 20 percent of the time" she said.
To stress her point about leakages she pointed out that government was not getting value percent in 70 per cent of all its contracts after a review of 1000 procurements showed 70 per cent did not comply with Uganda's procurement law 5 years after it was enacted.
"The recent public expenditure review estimates that government losses were close to Shs30 billion due to absenteeism [and] 93 per cent of the drugs procured by the National Medical Stores did not reach their intended recipients" she said.
The Uganda government has come under fire from many quarters about unbridled official corruption. After the reading of the 2009/10 budget the President hinted he would initiate a commission of inquiry into the primary education sector after reports of ghost schools, teachers and pupils.
This follows on the heels of a judicial inquiry into the health sector and a military investigation into ghost soldiers in the army. Both revealed huge losses to corruption but also inefficiencies in administration and procurement.
Kundavi said Uganda stands a chance, because of prudent macro-economic policies in the past years and investment in productive areas of the economy, to weather the global financial slow-down.
"The only problem remains with implementation" she said.
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