How failure of accounting officers to know gov’t workers has contributed to corruption
According to Mukunda, there's a challenge of government rushing to have the loan projects signed before they are ready.
The Executive Director Civil Society Budget Advocacy Group (CSBAG)Julius Mukunda has revealed that corruption in the budget comes in when accounting officers do not know government employees.
While discussing the FY 2024/25 National Budget Framework on Radio One’s Spectrum, Mukunda highlighted that corruption is very complicated, “up to now I have not seen official response from the Government about the missing health centers in Ntungamo; they actually don’t exist. By the way, to budget for a health center, you can’t do it as one individual,”
According to Mukunda, unless government agree and sets aside the standards and price lists, corruption will always be budgeted for, appropriated, passed, and executed.
The other challenge highlighted in his discussion, was the weak planning in Uganda explaining that “if we can’t plan properly as a country, we won’t achieve our targets including NDP III”
Mukunda suggested that government should also focus on better ways of investing Uganda’s resources so as to achieve better results.
“There are better ways to invest our resources to get better results, did we need to buy vehicles for the NAM conference? What will happen when the conference ends, couldn’t we have hired vehicles locally here,” he noted.
Regarding Uganda’s public debt, CSBAG ED revealed that this is taking a toll on the national budget noting that debt obligations are taking an entire half of the budget something that affects government’s ability to deal with future challenges since it won’t have resources.
“Despite the love for agriculture, we are still stagnating at 3% of national budget, tourism allocations are low because the first priority on the national budget is debt servicing,”
He said, “Borrowing wouldn’t be a problem, the question is what are you borrowing to do. Whereas the Americans borrow, they will get 7 $ return on every one dollar, while for us we get a return of 0.7$ for every dollar borrowed.”
According to Mukunda, there’s a challenge of government rushing to have the loan projects signed before they are ready.
Formed in 2004, the Civil Society Budget Advocacy Group aims at bringing together CSOs at national and district levels, to influence Government decisions on resource mobilization and utilization for equitable and sustainable development.
