Ugly truth behind sacking entire UNRA staff in 2015 emerges

According to the lead story of Saturday Vision of September 10, the IGG is investigating claims that top jobs advertised at the Uganda National Road Authority (UNRA) have been given to allies, relatives and friends of the executive director of the authority.

The Saturday Vision story titled ‘IGG investigates UNRA over jobs’ states that a whistle-blower submitted a petition in August to the IGG in which it is alleged that UNRA boss Allen Kagina was recruiting close friends she worked with at URA, many of whom come from her region.

One of the new recruits, Ms Mary Kutesa, who is director of the legal directorate, announced that UNRA plans to increase staff from the current 1,400 to 1,800 to absorb some of the 4,000 candidates who were interviewed for jobs at UNRA.

On September 29, 2015, Ms Allen Kagina announced that the entire staff of the organisation had been summarily dismissed which was in violation of Uganda’s labour laws and in total disregard of the International Labour Organisation standards to which Uganda is a party.

According to a story published in the Daily Monitor of September 30, 2015, titled, ‘UNRA board sacks all staff’, Ms Kagina said the sacking of the entire staff of UNRA was the climax of a massive restructuring exercise which began with her appointment as executive director of UNRA in April 2015.

According to an official statement, “the board of directors, in a bid to make UNRA a fit-for-purpose authority, has embarked on a comprehensive restructuring and has, with immediate effect, resolved to disband the entire staff of the establishment.”

Board chairperson Angela Kiryabwire Kanyima then assured outgoing UNRA staff that when recruiting new staff, priority would be given to suitable outgoing staff who should reapply before end of December 2015.

As a result of the rot which a judicial commission of inquiry into allegations of mismanagement, abuse of office and corrupt practices in UNRA has unearthed, many Ugandans unwittingly welcomed the drastic action taken by the UNRA board.

The European Union, which has provided billions of shillings to fund road construction in Uganda, rather unwisely welcomed the restructuring of UNRA allegedly as a step to promote efficiency.

The report of the commission of inquiry, which was handed to President Museveni in May, revealed that Ugandan taxpayers lost a whopping and mind-boggling Shs4 trillion in dubious and crooked road deals during the period 2008-2015. It is a classic case of organised crime!

As I argued in this column in October 2014, in contemporary Uganda, what you see and hear is often not what you get. All persons who welcomed the regime’s hasty, unnecessary and extremist actions, allegedly to weed out corruption at UNRA and make the organisation efficient, will sooner or later regret the compliments they expressed.

History repeats itself
The ongoing recruitment exercise undertaken by UNRA reminds me of a restructuring exercise undertaken in Uganda’s public service during the early 1990s. At that time, there was an outcry that the civil service was blotted, corrupt, inefficient and hostile to the NRM regime.

With active and generous support from the World Bank, government decided to restructure the public service to make it lean and efficient. This was done by retrenchment and retooling the public service with modern equipment such as computers. It was a painful exercise for many civil servants.

Whenever the hidden motives of senior government officials were challenged at workshops funded by the World Bank to deceive civil servants, the apologists and agents of structural adjustment policy (SAP) responded by repeating a worn-out slogan that restructuring was not an event, but a process.

Corruption and gross mismanagement at UNRA is neither unique nor an isolated case, but is part and parcel of endemic and systemic corruption in the public sector of Uganda on a humungous scale which has undermined service delivery, but is the enduring legacy of the current regime.

After government retrenched thousands of dedicated and long-serving civil servants for the purpose of achieving the goal of a lean public sector, what followed made a mockery of the exercise. Government proceeded to recruit new officers on a massive scale to replace those who were in many cases dismissed unjustly for reasons which had nothing to do with incompetence or corruption.

To make matters worse, there was gross injustice with regard to the regions from where the new officers were recruited; most of the new recruits came from western Uganda and as a result that region is today overly represented in the public service of Uganda, especially at the senior levels.

What happened to the public service is now being replicated at UNRA. In my opinion, the solution which UNRA board has applied is ill-conceived and will not solve the problem of corruption, fraud, abuse of office and mismanagement at UNRA. It will only succeed in turning UNRA into a job market for the chosen few which is totally unacceptable!
May the Lord have mercy!

Mr Acemah is a political scientist, consultant and a retired career diplomat. [email protected]