Why should govt create parallel ad hoc systems?

An intelligence report submitted to President Museveni detailing government’s wasteful expenditure and also scrutinising expenditures of ministries and government agencies in the 2016/2017 Budget, which highlighted astronomical wasteful spending on non-essential issues, is a wakeup call. The report pointed out that most wasteful expenditures were on consultancy, travel, welfare and entertainment, and workshops.
The report is in response to President Museveni’s directive demanding information on how much money ministries and agencies were costing government. The findings come to illustrate how the country’s meagre resources have not been sparingly and properly allocated for the benefit of all through creating other parallel state enterprises.

The intelligence report also discovered that a lot of money is spent on duplicated or overlapping functions between the traditional ministries and created agencies. The overlapping functions can be seen, for instance, with ministry of Works working alongside Uganda National Roads Authority, an agency established to handle roads infrastructure, where it should have been operationalised as a department under the Works ministry.
Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries has several independent Authorities with different budgets. For example, there is the National Agricultural Advisory Services (Naads), National Agricultural Research Organisation and Uganda Coffee Development Authority - all performing roles that fall under the Agriculture ministry. This is duplication of roles.

State House Health Monitoring Unit should have been a department under the Ministry of Health. However, it is supervised elsewhere, also with a separate budget. This causes financial haemorrhage to an almost over expended economy struggling to cope with civil servants’ demands for pay raise. The disparity in salaries earned by workers under the new state-created enterprises causes disharmony and wastes government revenues.

Worse still, employees in the new State enterprises get more than three times in salaries than that earned by workers under the traditional civil service. This has created two problems - a sense of disquiet among the poorly remunerated, and mistrust and poor working relations between the two entities amid a huge government expenditure whose burdens falls on the taxpayer. Therefore, we should commend the President’s directive, but also hasten to add that the report should not gather dust in State House. The President should direct as he did that the recommendations in the report be implemented to curtail the huge government expenditure and to also allow the country run under properly instituted structures and systems.