Government reforms: Those who want to go to heaven must be willing to die

It is the classic case of setting off for Good Intentionville, going over the speed limit on Mission Creep Avenue, swerving into an electric pole on Moral Hazard Street, and ending up in surgery at Unintended Consequences Hospital.
In 1991, the government, its post-war tax administration as efficient as fetching water in a laundry basket, and with the advice of the World Bank and the IMF, decided to set up the Uganda Revenue Authority.

The folks in the Finance ministry (or was it still Commerce?) were seen as having slow feet and long fingers. The solution proposed was to hire younger (hopefully) more honest ones (preference going to those fluent in faith, finance and, in some cases, family) and pay them better.
Tax collections rose, but it’s not clear whether due to better paid staff, investments in technology and anti-smuggling operations, the rising tide of overall economic growth, or a combination of some or all of the above.

What followed, in no particular order: There was a mad scramble, often via the back-door, for the high-paying URA jobs; many of the ‘born-again’ recruits acquired expensive tastes (apparently man cannot live on bread without unsalted butter!) that not even their salaries could pay for – watched as older civil servants were retrenched with only the shirts on their backs – and scrambled to feather their nests.

By 2002, a judicial commission of inquiry into corruption at URA had to be conducted to understand what the hell the country had just seen.
For all its dramatic revelations, the inquiry was all hat and no cattle. The lesson – about how not to go about making government more efficient – was lost in the noise. But by then mission creep had set in starting, in 1993, with the Uganda Investment Authority. Whatever the question, setting up an authority was the answer.

It has taken us more than two decades to learn what is essentially a very simple lesson: To increase the productivity of a workforce, you give them the right skills and tools and align compensation to the market and output. You do not hire a parallel team, give it more resources, pay it better, and ask it to do essentially the same job.
Cabinet’s decision to scrap or merge some of the alphabet soup of public agencies that have emerged over the last 30 years should be the beginning, not the end, of a conversation about the size and efficacy of government.

Some of the proposed mergers are commonsensical; will precipitation refuse to precipitate if the meteorological authority is folded back into the ministry? Is the Tsetse Fly Armed Brigade quietly but menacingly watching our every move to see if we have the guts to scrap the Uganda Trypanosomiasis Control Council? But cost-cutting, as an end in itself, is not a strategy, but evidence of a failed one. So while we are cutting our losses, let’s do at least three more things:

First, let us expand the cost-cutting to other parts of government, including the size of Parliament, administrative units and political appointees and spend the money on retooling and reskilling young people for the jobs of the future. Robotics over RDCs.
Second, let us sell, outsource or put some of the agencies under review into the trusteeship of private and civil society groups that genuinely care about them. The National Library of Uganda, orphaned in the Education ministry, could be dusted over and handed to book lovers to run in the public interest. Ditto the National Theatre, National Museum and others.

Third, some of the agencies should, instead of being folded back into government, be cut free from their moorings and allowed to sail into the sea of private competition. For instance, instead of UNRA duplicating the Work’s ministry job of handing out contracts, why not capitalise it and spin it off to compete for and build our roads since it has engineers who should know a good road when they see one?
If we made a mistake spinning it off in the first place collapsing it back in merely takes us back 10 years. How about looking 10 years ahead and setting it up to compete for projects in South Sudan or DR Congo? If it can’t pay its bills in five years it sinks – we’d still have the ministry to dole out contracts!

Insanity is claiming government-backed companies cannot do business. Beyond insanity is government-backed agencies giving business to companies backed by foreign governments. This is one of those crises we should not waste. Those who want to go to heaven must be willing to die.

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and a poor man’s freedom fighter. [email protected]
Twitter: @Kalinaki.