Prayers Can’t Work in Stamping Out Corruption- PS Ggoobi

The Permanent Secretary and Secretary to the Treasury Ramathan Ggoobi has said prayers alone can’t work in the fight against corruption, a vice which continues to stagnate economic growth and service delivery in the country.

Ggoobi noted that anti-corruption strategies such as naming and shaming corrupt individuals in the country have too failed to yield progress largely due to protection from corrupt individual friends and their relatives.

“Naming and shaming don’t work because those who are corrupt are there to dissolve those who are supposed to name them. That’s why sometimes when they arrest the corrupt, people line up in the court, and when they release them, people lift them like they have won medals,” said Ggoobi.

Ggoobi told journalists that to address the challenges of corruption, the government have come up with a raft of strategies that work better than prayers.

He highlighted that the government is already instituting a strong budgeting system, ensuring heightened performance audits and digitizing the government systems.

Ggoobi noted that digitizing government systems will help minimize the physical cash presence in offices, which has long had corruption tendencies. He said progress was already being made in digitizing the government's procurement processes, a key area of government spending which remains prone to corruption.

“When the people pick the money from the system to pay the contractor, that contractor who builds a hospital, corruption happens between the accounting officer and the supplier. That’s the gap that we need to work out so that no cash is withdrawn,” said Ggoobi.

Ggoobi boasted that the country’s economic progress wasn’t due to prayers or good luck but good management.

According to Ggoobi, the country’s economy increased significantly in the past two years registering a total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 53.6 million US Dollars by the end of June this year with the growth rate standing at 6.1 percent, the highest in the East African Region and the world.

He also noted that inflation which had reached double digits of 10.7 percent in October 2023 had been reduced significantly to 2.9 percent with the government’s focus remaining committed to ensuring inflation doesn’t rise beyond 5 percent.

Lawrence Semakula, the Accountant General noted that major reforms in automating the government systems helped to improve financial accountability, transparency and service delivery across the various sectors.

“Before we did these reforms, it was only maybe the head of accounts and the accounting officer who would know how much money had been sent to their account. But now everybody, head of department, you know. So from budgeting to releases, to accounting, to auditing, everything is done on the system and everything is automated” he said.

Semakula noted that the government has heard concerns arising from statutory reports and audits on the weakness of asset management which is now being addressed by the soon-to-be-completed electronic government procurement system. 

He says that once completed, the automation of the procurement processes will eliminate the challenges in the procurement processes and help to create a good financial management system.

According to the 2021 Inspectorate of Government report on the cost of corruption in Uganda on procurement and budgeting an estimated 614 billion shillings was lost to corruption in procurement in 2019 alone. This is almost two percent of the total national government spending in 2019.

The Transparency International Global Corruption Index report of 2023 indicates Uganda scored 26 percent, the same score it earned in 2022 placing the country among the top 30 corrupt countries in the world and fourth in the East Africa region.