President Museveni has picked an old weapon in his old toolbox to solve Uganda’s intractable problems of bloated public sector expenditure and lethargic government service. His prescription: reduce number of civil servants to save resources and improve service delivery. Whereas the President’s viewpoint cursorily sounds logical, the decay in public service cannot be detached from incompetent governance.
A government report shared at the Kyankwanzi Cabinet retreat where Museveni mooted the idea to downsize the civil service showed half of children in UPE schools learn nothing. It was an official admission of a state of hopelessness.
The President has personally championed an unprecedented balkanisation of Uganda, tripling the number of districts he found in 1986 to 117 today. There is plentiful evidence to invalidate the official claims that new districts, such as the 10 new ones coming on board over the next two financial years, are to “bring services closer to the people”.
We ask: Which people? The millions whose children go to school but cannot read or write? Political convenience is in our view at the core of the problems because for every new district, the same public service positions are replicated, piling personnel and costs at the district headquarters. New districts mean new constituencies and new MPs whose number in the 10th Parliament will stand at 458, each on average earning Shs20 million monthly!
If Museveni means business, we argue that the government he superintends should purge unnecessary political appointees and proceed to do commonsense things: deploy more veterinary and agricultural extension or health workers at the sub-counties where they are accessible whenever needed. Animal vaccination or plant spacing should be demonstrated in the field, not on flip charts at a far removed plush hotel where learning is substituted with allowances.
A government that ignores merit, doesn’t punish theft, tolerates waste and rewards incompetence throttles Uganda.
To guarantee quality and productivity, let the government subject civil servants to renewable biennial performance contracts and systematically weed out the mediocre.
Otherwise, civil servants hold specialised skills; initiate and implement government policies; and collectively provide the oxygen on which the government runs.
We, therefore, subscribe to the viewpoint of Dr George Bhoka, a Ugandan scientist with stellar civil service record, that “trimming the civil service only will be counter-productive to improving service delivery so long as there is haemorrhage of resources by bloated and unproductive organs of the government”.
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