New Vision (Kampala)
31 October 2009
Kampala — THIS week there was a report on the Commonwealth (CHOGM) budget which was spent on hotels. Apparently most of the rooms were never used and some hotels were not actually ready.
The government prepaid for many rooms, with the understanding that money which was subsequently paid by guests would be refunded, but many guests did not turn up, or stayed at cheaper hotels because the prices were inflated.
Some hotels have subsequently paid nothing back, though the more reputable ones have refunded what was due. One unfinished hotel, the J&M Airport Hotel received sh2.2 billion six days before CHOGM to assist in getting ready for the conference, but it was not on the approved list and not a single CHOGM guest ever stayed there.
Anyone with a modicum of common sense would know that, even if more than a million dollars is spent less than a week before an event, it would still be impossible to make the arrangements and the man in the street can rightly ask - what sort of planning is this? The problem was that large amounts of money were earmarked and budgeted for CHOGM long before the conference took place, but this money was not released until just before the event.
I was invited to sit on a CHOGM committee for the beautification of the city, until I realised that I was wasting my own valuable time. There was a kind of game being played at these committees and subcommittees, whereby the time was spent drawing up budgets, which were then modified and revised time and time again.
But the Ministry of Finance generally failed to release the money, so months were spent planning how the money would be used, but very little was actually accomplished. Trees were, therefore, not planted until a few months before the event - so we had miniature trees all along the Entebbe Road.
Roads were not fixed until days or weeks before CHOGM and the final touches to the new airport are only now being added, two years later. Money is like rain - if it comes in the right quantities at the right time, when it has been planned for, it brings a good harvest and good results. However, when rain comes in sudden deluges it is actually destructive.
If the CHOGM money had been released in small amounts in an orderly manner, over several years on the run up to the event, it would have achieved lasting results. This is what Don Mackinnon (then Secretary General) was always emphasizing - use the money to build permanent infrastructure that benefits the country in the long term.
Politicians and public servants, however, sat around for two years planning for the CHOGM budget which did not come, then there was a storm of money just before the event, which was hurriedly disbursed with little accountability, on such daft projects as the Bwebajja hotel.
The excuse was that, because everything was so far behind at that point, it was urgent to get things moving. Budgets which had been approved and might have been relevant if they had been implemented a year beforehand, rained down on the lucky hoteliers or contractors, who were supposed to deliver miraculous results. If any private organization did its planning and budgeting in this way, it would go out of business, but this is government and we just hold another inquiry.
There are those who cynically assert that this was all a deliberate plot, because there was less scrutiny on how the funds were spent. As they say here, 'Me, I don't know'. But I do know that the taxpayer got poor value for money and sometimes the money was simply thrown away, as was the case with the J&M Airport Hotel.
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