By Stephen Lwetutte
LONDON-UNITED KINGDOM/NEWSDAY:
Ministry of Finance Permanent Secretary Ramathan Goobi was reported over the weekend to have been tweaking and juggling various already meagre government departments budgets to be able to make ends meet. In the end, he was reported to have found some UGX200 billion to play with, having cut here and there. Yet the amount of money the country loses every year in corruption and reckless expenditure is several times that amount – it is in the trillions, and more than enough to balance the budget.
Last year, Colonel Edith Nakalema (at the time at the rank of Lt Col), the Head of the State House Anti-Corruption Unit (SH-ACU) was reported to have estimated that the country lost UGX 2 trillion through corruption. This must be an understatement given the tendency by officialdom to under report such nagging, persistent and embarrassing problems. Also, this figure will almost certainly not include the needlessly extravagant and reckless expenditure okayed by the government, such as remuneration and expenditure on the politico-administrative nomenklatura.
Although there are numerous anti corruption laws and institutions, Mr Museveni patently lacks both the political will and capacity to enforce them and make a significant dent onto corruption the way late President John Pombe Magufuli did in neighbouring Tanzania in a mere five years. This is because he spared no one when it came corruption – with him, you were in trouble regardless of your position or status if you were identified as corrupt.
Moreover, he curbed government expenditure and redirected the resources to public projects. He turned down foreign loans and preferred to source funding from within the country. Uganda has been turned down for loans. The results in Tanzania speak for themselves and don’t require to be hyped and spinned the way President Museveni does about his so-called achievements in Uganda for 35 years.
President Museveni will always reassure the nation, as he did in his latest address on 28 October 2021, how he knows those involved in corruption and was about to pounce on them, but that he was still waiting for evidence to act. You will hear the same statement the next time there is a loud corruption scandal by a well-connected official and things will again go back to normal. That is how corruption has festered in Uganda.
Part of the problem is the classic political dispensation whereby the leader lacks popular legitimacy and has to rely and depend on powerful personalities within the establishment for survival and continued stay in office. He cedes some of his authority and is effectively held hostage, such that he is helpless to act against them lest they turn on him. As a result, a group of ‘untouchables’ who are able to act with impunity arises, and the President is reduced to a paper tiger – talking tough but actually toothless.
A network of mafia-like groups take hold and take root in society that nothing short of an overhaul of the entire political establishment would change things and restore sanity in the country. Mr Museveni, with all the best will in the world, simply has no capacity to end corruption in Uganda. He is a hostage himself.
The courts and mist of the anti-corruption institutions are underfunded and undermanned. The mechanisms to fight corruption are there but they are terribly ineffective and cannot deliver. It is then left to the President to act, but only occasionally does so before matters fizzle out until the culprits emerge after a hiatus, reappointed by the President in different, usually higher profile capacity.
Further below, the honest, hardworking and professional technocrats are left to pick up the pieces. As Dr Ramathan Goobi goes about his job, he will find that it is much easier and probably more pleasant to spew out economic theories than implement them in practice in a country like Uganda. With a sterling academic career behind him, Dr Goobi will probably be a disappointed and a frustrated man only a few months into the role, a poisoned chalice of sorts. If he cannot be effective so as to make a difference, which l cannot see him doing in the current climate, he might never forgive himself for accepting it.
The writer is a Multilingual Human Rights Practitioner, formerly at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International in London for over 20 years and now Legal and Human Rights Consultant.
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