The Inspectorate of Government (IG) has revealed that a total of 194,548 public officials are yet to declare their wealth.

This gives us a total number of 205,452 public officials who have so far declared their assets out of the required 400,000 officers.

According to the IG secretary, Rose Kafeero, the Leadership Code Act (LCA) was amended in May 2021 to include the declaration of public officers.

This increased the number of officers required to make declarations to approximately 400,000 from 25,000.

Kafeero made the revelation while presenting IG’s government performance summary for the last three financial years at Royale Imperial Hotel in Kampala.  

On May 19, 2021, the IG launched a declaration of income, assets and liabilities by public officers.

Subsequently, the IG developed an online system ― Inspectorate of Government Online Declaration System (IG-ODS) ― which makes it easy and faster for leaders to submit their declarations.

According to IGG, leaders are required to declare their income, assets and liabilities every two years, with the next declaration period in 2023.

However, when the Leadership Code Act (LCA) was amended in 2021, all public officers, who do not fall in the category of leaders but get salaries from the consolidated fund, are required to declare their income, assets and liabilities every five years.

The meeting was to engage with development partners to rally their support and goodwill for the new strategies.

Kafeero also revealed that as a result of the prosecution of corruption cases the funds directly recovered from the consolidated funds increased from 3,450,000,000 to 7,959,120,441 as a result of the stepping up the assets recovery.

“Currently, 109 public officers have been dismissed, 38 interdicted, 94 reprimanded and 200 are under disciplinary action,” Kafeero said.

In her remarks, the Inspector General of Government, Beti Kamya, revealed that the IGG has already identified and published the names of 183 accounting officers of 150 whose government votes have the biggest budgets.

The Inspector of Government in her remarks Beti Kamya told the development partners that her office has started an aggressive public sensitisation campaign by widely publicising the statistics and translating them into the opportunity cost

She revealed that her office has already embarked on the campaign of sensitising the Kampala Lord Mayor and his leadership and it will trickle down to the grassroots population to feel the pinch of corruption

Kamya added that they will join and own the war against corruption to save the sh20trillion each year.

The population is told that with their participation, Uganda could easily save 50% of the sh20trillion lost to corruption annually.

Development partners speak

The USAID mission director, Richard Nelson, advised the government to fight corruption saying that a lot of money is spent on fighting corruption which should have otherwise been spent on productive economic projects.

“We are engaging different stakeholders to ensure that the monies got from oil are not misused, since the monies used to fight corruption are far higher than that expected to come from oil,” Nelson noted.

The deputy head of mission at the Belgium embassy, Koen Van Acoleyen, called for government involvement of schools in the fight against corruption.

“To what extent are you working with schools in the fight against corruption, this can help the children knowledge that corruption is not good,” Acoleyen said.

Joyce Ngaiza, the governance advisor at the British High Commission, advised that the Chief Justice should be engaged in some of the processes of fighting corruption since laws may take long to be put in place.