Reinforce social will to fight corruption

Feb 02, 2009

Watching from a distance President Museveni’s tour of the Teso region in the second half of the year 2008, one was left disgusted at the drama the district officials and local politicians staged.

By Stephen Olukor

Watching from a distance President Museveni’s tour of the Teso region in the second half of the year 2008, one was left disgusted at the drama the district officials and local politicians staged.

The most mind-boggling dramatic irony was evident in Katakwi district where the President was led to farms purportedly funded by National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS). Yet the truth on the ground is that the owners of these farms had never heard any programme called NAADS, but were struggling on their own.

If the President’s other objective in this tour was to identify such individuals and publicly praise them as he did, then it was worth it. But if it was solely to see what the NAADS programme had done, then the two-facedness it exposed was not only immoral but surpassed criminality.

One would argue that some of these criminals be arrested or politically lynched for duping the President, but that would not solve the problem.

The tour clearly showed that the President has a vision for the country which is to eradicate poverty, but the cadres at the district level are running with unrestrained greed. While the district leaders showed themselves as devoid of patriotism, the local people by forming the audience to watch this satire in silence showed their ignorance of their rights.

By laughing at the President being fed with toxic lies the people were pitiably laughing at themselves. These recipients of the programmes failing to voice their disapproval of such underhand dealing were in my opinion the most corrupt. This attitude displayed the lack of the social will to fight corruption where even some political will exists.

It is possible that the experience the President got in the political tour in many districts showed him the immense rottenness of the local governments in handling public funds. This may have resulted in the unveiling of the Gombolola Barazas on the NRM Liberation Day. This might be the needed form of liberation.

However, Your Excellency, this might not be enough considering how deep-rooted and decentralised the culture of corruption is at district level. This is because the civil society is largely ignorant of their responsibility and the black-eyed leaders can call such demands for accountability sabotage of government programmes.

I would like to appeal to the President to find time to visit some of the schools implementing the Universal Secondary Education (USE) programme.

Some of the headteachers, who themselves are not transparent in the handling of these funds are scared to expose the big rats at both the education ministry and district level.

Bureaucratically speaking, the corruption in Uganda starts from the highest offices so that there may be little for the gombolola barazas to monitor.

The way forward would be:

- The Government should support the work of non-governmental organisations like Uganda Debt Network that has grass root monitors and many sensitisation programmes. lThere is need to carry out massive sensitisation of the people on corruption and seek to protect the whistle blowers.

- Work with the opposition leaders since they are development partners.

- Clean up the corrupt judicial system from the sub-county level and strengthen the existing laws.

- Above all, consult your neighbour, President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame for advice on how to fix the evil.

The writer is a social activist

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