UMI should not run Civil Service College

Oct 11, 2010

IT was reported in the press on October 4 that some members of Parliament (MPs) led by Steven Birahwa are working hard to fail the public service ministry in its efforts to establish a Civil Service College, arguing that the Uganda Management Institute (UMI) is better suited to play that role.

By Kabuzi J. Kabengo

IT was reported in the press on October 4 that some members of Parliament (MPs) led by Steven Birahwa are working hard to fail the public service ministry in its efforts to establish a Civil Service College, arguing that the Uganda Management Institute (UMI) is better suited to play that role.

However, the MPs ought to know that UMI has been here for decades purporting to train public servants, but our civil service is becoming increasingly ineffective and inefficient. There are other reasons for this ineffectiveness but the inadequate training offered by institutions like UMI remains a big factor.

From the 1970s to 1990s when UMI was called the Institute of Public Administration (IPA), it was a Civil Service College which focused all its resources on in-service skills development for our civil servants. It performed so well that Uganda had one of the best civil services in Africa then.

In a bid to make more money, the management and staff decided to transform IPA into UMI, an academic and commercial institution offering degrees even to people from the private sector and NGOs. At that point, the institute lost its initial focus of improving performance in the public service. The name was even changed to remove the words “public administration” and replaced with “management” to cast their net beyond the public service. No wonder today, we have an ill-trained civil service which has started outsourcing even the most inherently governmental functions and defining roles of the state like public policy development.

Besides, UMI and the education ministry are not the ones mandated to spearhead human resource development for the civil service, but rather the Ministry of Public Service in liaison with other ministries and agencies. The Ministry of Education should, therefore, concentrate on improving the standards of pre-service formal basic education like Universal Primary and Secondary Education, and tertiary education whose quality is alarmingly poor and let the Ministry of Public Service do its work as well. If the latter has got any shortcomings, it should be supported to overcome them, not suffocated.

Indeed the public service is an end user of UMI products. If a user finds products largely wanting, why does anybody insist that the same provider be retained?

The writer is a concerned user of public properties

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