8 November 2009
editorial
Commissions of Inquiry are useful tools for enforcing accountability in public service if their recommendations are acted upon. But in Uganda, as in much of Africa, they are largely used to assuage public outrage at institutionalised abuse and misuse of office.
And so, it is with mixed feelings that Ugandans will be advised to receive the news that the National Resistance Movement government is preparing to investigate the widespread theft of money meant for Universal Primary Education - through establishment of a judicial commission of inquiry.
Ugandans will be the more dubious because of the reported choice of judge to head this inquiry. The Honourable Principal Judge James Ogoola is one of the clean-cut individuals on the bench; a practicing Christian whose anti-graft credentials are difficult to impugn. Judge Ogoola performed excellently when he headed the inquiry into the suspicious collapse of Co-operative Bank and then he raised the bar higher when he investigated the notorious theft of hundreds of donor millions intended for the management of HIV/Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
In a word, if you want to lend credence to a public inquiry, your man is Judge Ogoola. But that is before you are confronted with the serious matter of what has become of those splendid reports Judge Ogoola has written? Where are the well-connected fat cats who were implicated in the mischief?
Answer: either their cases are bogged down in the morass of our labyrinthine court system or their files are gathering dust on a shelf in the Director of Public Prosecutions' chambers.
Another wasteful inquiry, another assuaging of the public anger and then it is business as usual. We fervently hope not.
Billions of shillings are supposedly invested in primary education every year. But as President Museveni noted in his speech on Budget Day, a substantial part of this money is looted. The bloodsucking reportedly starts at the ministry headquarters and continues all the way to the remotest location in this country.
Things have gotten this bad because the grassroots looked up, saw the rot above them and quickly followed suit. The suffocating stench of rapacious greed that have come to define the Museveni years hangs heavy in the country. And this is why Judge Ogoola's re-introduction is at once good and cynical: Cynical in that it might be another conscience-cleaning exercise but good because the misdeeds of the high and mighty are again about to be recorded for posterity.
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