Health ministry spends Shs6.5b on vehicle maintenance

KAMPALA. The Health ministry is spending roughly Shs6.5b each year to maintain its fleet of 295 vehicles, some of which are in the hands of unauthorised officers, this newspaper can reveal.
The ministry’s total expenditure on vehicle maintenance excludes fuel costs, which takes a bigger chunk of the transport budget.
Our computations are based on official figures contained in a May 5, 2017 Health ministry internal report in which the chief mechanical engineer in Works ministry, which manages government fleet, was quoted to have said that maintaining each government car costs Shs22m each year or Shs1.8m a month.

This means that the Health ministry, which has 295 cars according to its count this year, spends Shs6.5b on vehicle maintenance alone in a year, an amount higher than the annual individual budgets of all, except four, of the 13 regional hospitals.
Such an expenditure outline, said State Health minister Sarah Opendi, is no evidence that bureaucrats in the ministry that she superintends, are wasteful or have national health priorities wrong.
“This is a service ministry and we are not office-based. Most of the time we are in the field, either supervising or doing some inspection; so, this fleet of cars are not just here at this ministry [headquarters]...,” she said.

The troubles with management of Health ministry cars came into the limelight after the Permanent Secretary, Dr Diana Atwine, who took office last November, constituted an ad hoc committee to carry out an inventory of the ministry’s vehicles to inform an overhaul of their allocation to staff and disposal system.
Under official rules, a government vehicle is supposed to be disposed of after five years or when it covers 250,000 kilometres, depending on which of the two comes first.
Following the latest inventory, the ministry is to sell 130 vehicles upon clearance by relevant arms of government.

To be donated

Some of the old vehicles, according to Health ministry transport officer James Tukahirwa, are to be donated to Education ministry to be used to teach students at vocational institutions across the country.
The committee headed by Dr Henry Mwebesa established as indicated in an earlier vehicle census report that many of the cars were not allocated in accordance with task assignment and “a big percentage was in the hands of non-core junior and mid-level managers”.

According to the Establishment Notice Number 1 of 2003, which standardises vehicle allocation to government employees, officials entitled to vehicle for official work include, among others, the ministers, the head of public service and deputy, permanent secretaries, directors, senior consultants and projects’ overseers.
In the case of the Ministry of Health, it was discovered that ineligible officers benefited and two employees whose contract had expired, for unexplained reasons, abandoned two official vehicles in Bweyale, Kiryandongo District and Nabbingo, Wakiso District.
The ministry also lacked a vehicle allocation, fuel management, fleet maintenance and plans for disposal of those to be boarded off.

Dr Mwebesa’s team has subsequently recommended for the establishment of fleet management information system at the ministry to facilitate recording, compilation, analysis, retrieval of information necessary for recall of vehicles when required.
“The sheer magnitude of movements and deployment of vehicles makes it difficult, if not impossible, to collect data on all vehicles in the fleet,” the team concluded.

Lack of reliable data on government vehicles coupled with lackluster supervision have led to widespread abuse in the use of official vehicles by staff across ministries, which prompted PS Atwine to do in-housing cleaning of the problem.
She told this newspaper in an interview last week that said all Health ministry vehicles will going forward to be fitted with computerised trackers and fuel usage monitoring devices. The move, according to the PS, is aimed at curbing vehicle misuse, abuse and ensuring that there is value-for-money in fuel and maintenance expenses.

The ad hoc committee had recommended that “all future fuel allocation should be based on assignment and task given while fuel for entitled officers should be based on estimated consumption per week”.
PS Atwine said that projects vehicles, which bear red registration number plates and are mostly donor-procured, are the most abused when compared with government-purchased cars registered in the UG....M series for Health ministry.
The ministry’s transport officer Tukahirwa said it has been hard to trace some of their vehicles and officers using them.

How it started
The troubles with management of Health ministry cars came into the limelight after the Permanent Secretary, Dr Diana Atwine, who took office last November, constituted an ad hoc committee to carry out an inventory of the ministry’s vehicles to inform an overhaul of their allocation to staff and disposal system.

[email protected]