400 new sub-counties, town councils have no leaders, money

Hundreds of new sub-counties and municipalities have run for a year without elected leadership and government funding and are at risk of repeating the feat next financial year unless the budget is revised to provide for them.
Parliament has directed that the Executive finds Shs29.8b to run 198 new sub-counties and Shs80.6b to run 203 town councils that were created and became operational effective July 1, 2018.
Early last year, Col Tom Butime, the minister of Local Government, issued instruments creating 198 sub-counties and 203 town councils across the country. However, no money was provided for their wages and non-wage expenditures, leaving them as just appendages of the units out of which they were carved.
According to the report of the parliamentary Committee on Public Service and Local Government, the new administrative units have been running without funds and adequate staff, which has hindered the delivery of services. The reason the government has always given for creating new local government units is to take services closer to the people.

New troubles
While tabling the report in Parliament on Thursday, Aringa North MP Godfrey Onzima, the committee chairperson, said failure to fully finance the new units has caused a lot of problems.
The government only released Shs5b as start-up fund for 100 town councils, which money the Local Government State Minister, Ms Jennifer Namuyangu, said at the time “was too little”.
The MPs in their report said some of these town councils and sub-counties that became operational in the current financial year have had to rely on their mother administrative units for resources and staff to operate, which has created conflicts.

“Often times they are neglected in terms of development by the mother units since they are perceived to be independent. The political leaders from such new units are treated with suspicion and pressured to go to their newly created areas. Some of these newly created units are already receiving some funds but without political and administrative staff in place,” the report noted.
Parliament adopted the report with the committee recommendation that the government meets its obligation and allocate Shs110.4b to fund the operations of the said town councils and sub-counties in the next financial year.

Early last year, Finance minister Matia Kasaija, during an interview with Daily Monitor, warned against the bonanza of creating new administrative units, saying he had nowhere to get the money to make them run in the 2018/19 Budget.
“I do not think there is money budgeted for that programme. I don’t think these units can work next year when I have not got the money to fund them and I cannot go to Parliament to ask for a supplementary budget when other sectors are also pulling me,” Mr Kasaija said then.

In an apparent show of lack of coordination between government ministries, the new units were set up to start working by July 1, 2018.

Appearing before the committee about two weeks ago, Mr Butime, said the creation of new administrative units is “demand-driven” by the local population. He asked the MPs to help his ministry by appropriating the money to run them. The funds to run the units had been listed under “unfunded” priorities for next financial year.
Like for the case of the six new districts that started on July 1, 2018, the new town councils and sub-counties have not had elections for their leaders because the Electoral Commission (EC) says it has not been provided with money to organise elections.

Unlike in the new districts where the councillors within the new boundary tentatively elect an interim LC5 chairperson amongst themselves until such a time when the EC organises elections for a substantive chairman, the case is different for the town councils and sub-counties. In the lower units, the LC3 chairperson of the mother administrative unit becomes the interim chairperson of the new one, hence one has to bear the burden of running two lower local governments.
In a mini-survey conducted by this newspaper in the central region in November last year, it was observed that many newly created town councils were struggling to deliver services because of being financially crippled.

The survey revealed that most town councils were operating on a shoe-string budget, while others had limited manpower to execute their work. Others lack operational office space and are sharing offices, while council meetings are being conducted under trees.
The new town councils and sub-counties are spread across the country, with some districts having more than two new administrative units. Kasese, one of Uganda’s remaining largest districts, accounts for two of the 203 new town councils and three of the 198 new sub-counties.

Finance says...
The Ministry of Finance spokesperson, Mr Jimmy Mugunga, yesterday confirmed there is no money to fund the new administrative units in the coming financial year.
“It is true there are no funds provided to operationalise new administrative centres as created by local governments. The ministry had previously explained that massive creation of sub-counties and town councils without due consideration of revenue resource base and other local and central government priorities would bite and have far reaching consequences,” Mr Mugunga said.

He added that the reason the Finance ministry has not provided the said funds is because Cabinet advised a freeze on operationalisation of the new administrative units in lower local governments.
“I am advised that Cabinet allowed a temporary freeze on operationalising the town councils and sub-counties until further notice. In the past financial year and the coming one, no funds have been made available as explained,” he added.

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