Govt must rethink crisis management

As Uganda struggles to cope with the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic and its variants, President Museveni, on June 18  announced a raft of measures with tighter restrictions. The measures will further complicate livelihoods for many who already had been living on the edge for close to two years, owing to prior disruptions.

After March 2020, government attempted to provide safety nets including cash payments for struggling businesses and food distribution to town dwellers (Kampala and Wakiso) that had been identified as the most at risk. In the end, it is widely believed that the businesses that benefited from Covid-19  relief funds may not have necessarily been the most critical to economic recovery, but rather, those of the ‘well-connected’. Neither was the food accessed by those most in need. At the height of this process, operations became random, with criteria appearing to pivot around perimeter walls or their absence. 

With the new Prime Minister announcing to people to not expect food, but cash transfers this time, it should get worse. Cash has worked elsewhere, but in the absence of a means tests and systems for fraud control, this could well be shaping up to be the next ‘ponzi scheme’  by state functionaries.
Uganda’s most vulnerable remain unknown. Our data offers us broad community leads, yet welfare and emergency relief are micro and need to take into account individual profiles. 

Vulnerability assessment is complex and requires good training, scientifically tested tools, and experience. As a technical exercise, assessment cannot just be spontaneous, improvised, and routinely speculative. It involves scientific estimations of need and relative severity to be able to vary interventions to problems. Selection of beneficiaries, if not carefully done, may  adopt systemic biases that can lead to exclusion of more deserving, but weaker or politically less significant ‘others’  in society.

Ugandans are quite vexed when lockdown restrictions place a disproportionate demand on citizens as opposed to foreigners who now appear to enjoy better rights of movement than Ugandans (tourists). This attitude has persisted in our country. Businessmen have a litany of complaints about  tax holidays and incentives to ‘investors’  traditionally segregating Ugandan investors, preferring foreigners that came and often added limited or no value to our economy beyond competing with locals in the informal sector. 

The presidential directive to the Prime Minister and team to find out ways of supporting the ‘vulnerable’ should stretch to cover every citizen because the lockdown is national, not regional or in pockets. And scientific criteria for assessing this vulnerability must be adopted and communicated. Any wonder then that government continues to face cynicism on the part of the population they are trying to protect and have failed to win people’s hearts, reverting instead to relying on military force in the process?

Experts should be appointed and adequately resourced to routinely simulate scenarios and plan for likely emergences. This is to avoid improvising only when disasters and pandemics strike, and then go back to relax as if they will never re-occur. Ad-hoc taskforces (like that on Covid-19) would have a more simplified role, but as it is, they have to advise, sometimes on intervention aspects where they have limited information (and limited competences).  Uganda should urgently adopt a working model for estimating need at community level and use this to inform disaster mitigation and control responses in all areas. While disasters and pandemics are sporadic, evidence elsewhere shows you can prepare better. 

Most comical have been recent reports of NSSF Management announcing mid-term access for patients in ICU. It’s not clear why one would have to first get into ICU to access their savings. Policy on mid-term access should already have been in place, and for a range of scenarios, not just ICU admission. But its also known how much effort NSSF as an Institution put in to block previous mid-term access proposals. Often, bureaucracies like NSSF seem to conveniently forget who the resources they hold really belong to! 

The million dollar question in the country right now should be what value a bloated government and or civil service add to the ordinary Ugandan if they can neither anticipate nor meaningfully mitigate emergencies. In terms of coordination and supervision by Office of the Prime Minister, a behemoth with clout but little impact, serious existential questions for most of these entities must be posed, otherwise, history may keep repeating itself, with the loser predictably being the citizens most in need.
Mr Innocent Nkwasiibwe is CEO at Tripartite Initiative for Resource Governance in Africa