Aboneka Writes

Of recent, we have been faced with all sorts of issues ranging from allowances for medical interns, car and special funeral facilitation for MPs to teachers spending months without salaries. This country boasts of the National Development Plan which outlines seven priority areas including agriculture, infrastructure, and human resource development. What is puzzling is that we seem to consider priorities according to the whims of those who hold higher offices, not in public interest. I am surprised that government does not have money for medical interns whereas billions sit unspent on accounts of some state institutions; that teachers go for two months without salary yet some individuals are debating on how to own cars worth Shs 200m and have a ‘death’ package of Shs 60m. We are in a country where it is okay to buy medals, pay transport refund and treat medalists to a sumptuous meal but not okay to clear the heavy water bills slapped on crucial public institutions such as Mulago na

There has always been a call to reduce the size of public administration thus reducing the cost of public administration. The argument has always been that creating more administrative units is actually stretching the budget so hard that you will have more of expenditure and consumption rather than production and provision of services. Whereas the spirit of the decentralization policy is to bring services closer to the people, this has not been the case and thus there is need to probe further. Lets us look at one of the factors-cost of running public administration; it is so humongous for the tax payers to hold, one would need at least 139 Billion to just birth a new district, how about we used this money to enhance service delivery? We have been lost in creating more local units in the name of delivering services without even taking an honest audit on the performance of the existing ones. The intention of the administrative units is to bring services closer to the people and not