IGG’s audit is a sham

Not so long ago, it was announced by the Inspector General of Government (IGG), Ms Beti Olive Kamya, that plans are underway to adopt a lifestyle audit to catch corrupt public officials with their proverbial pants down.

The IGG said her vision is to reverse the massive theft in public offices by making citizens aware the government loses a wow-inducing Shs20 trillion per year to corruption, and thereby reveal who is responsible for this shortfall.

She said corruption needs to be given a face, yet this would only be possible if corruption were not multi-faceted.

Before we address ourselves to the IGG’s naiveté, we must concede that lifestyle audits are accountability tools used to detect and prevent corruption; especially when a corrupt official has a champagne lifestyle on a crude waragi budget.

That said, corruption is like the air we breathe and nobody who is being honest with themselves will claim to have been left unpolluted by it.

So, in light of our shared corruptibility, this audit could easily be used as a handy weapon in blackballing internal dissenters in the system that happen to have, or have had, their fingers in the cookie jar.

Thus, the regime can use legitimate means to pursue illegitimate ends by using this audit to punish those dissenting bureaucrats who, like the rest of us, are not immune to corruption. 

In this vein, government can witch-hunt those who have run afoul of the NRM in similar manner to when Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge was used to punish Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia who were not sufficiently pro-Stalinist. 

Stalin’s purge eliminated real and potential political rivals of his regime and sent millions of alleged “enemies of the people” to death camps in the 1930s.

Again, the IGG appears to have a narrow understanding of what constitutes corruption. 

Illegitimate private gain is just the tip of the iceberg, for corruption is a hydra-headed monster with many forms. 

Cronyism, nepotism, patronage and the misuse of power for repression of political opponents and general police brutality are some of these forms.

To compound matters, all these forms define the politics of Uganda. 

In this context, I suspect the IGG, who is a politician, has seized upon the political opportunities attendant in this audit to increase bureaucratic policymaking towards political consensus.  

For she knows we all claim to hate corruption, especially when it benefits others instead of ourselves. 

This consensus, unfortunately, will lead to Executive unilateralism as bureaucratic agencies are politicised towards circumventing legislative and juridical checks by appealing to our righteous indignation on the subject of corruption. 

This politicised bureaucracy will raise normative issues about democratic accountability when unelected officials, such as the IGG, seek political ends instead of administrative means in agenda setting and policymaking simply because the executive seeks to become more imperial. 

All things considered, however, the best way to audit lifestyle is by not auditing at all. 

To be sure, the populist nature of this audit will reduce it to an Fr-audit. That’s because one cannot audit a nightmare into a dream. 

Rather, the correct line, as the President would say, is to dismantle the neo-patrimonial system engendering corruption as a subsystem. 

In its place, the State should promote patriotic synergies by right-sizing the scale of government, depoliticising the armed forces and ensuring that the rules of political engagement do not allow power to have a life of its own.  

With the structure of our political dispensation being thus changed, the superstructure must consist of the understanding that corruption is a pig which cannot be dolled up by the lipstick of any audit.

Mr Matogo is a professional copywriter  

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