Pakwach: Shs 900M Built 10 Metres of a Road

Balaam Barugahara appearing before Local Government Committee of Parliament on Tuesday.

The Minister of Local Government Balaam Barugahara has told the Parliamentary Committee on Local Government that a road contractor in Pakwach District had spent nearly an entire Shs900 million budget on just 10 metres of a one-kilometre low-cost surface road, in one of several graft cases he cited while briefing lawmakers.

Barugahara, who led ministry officials before the committee chaired by Mukono Municipality MP Betty Nambooze on Tuesday, recounted a recent field inspection in the West Nile district.

“This weekend I went to Pakwach, where government budgeted for 900 million to do one kilometre of low surface, cheap surface road. I found the engineer had done 10 metres, but he had used all the money. He had only 12 million left. When I asked him, where is the money, he said money, money, money, money, money,” Barugahara told the committee.

The minister said the case illustrated a broader failure of oversight structures already in place at district level, and questioned how such losses continued despite the existence of multiple accountability offices.

“I said, now we have all these systems. You have a CFO, you have a CAO, you have RDC, you have this all. For heaven’s sake, for how long are we going to lose money under impunity? When people act with impunity, take them on,” he said. “If you remain making reports and putting them in parliament that we act, the auditor general has made several reports. No action taken.”

Barugahara also raised concern about how quickly suspects in corruption cases were able to secure their freedom once matters reached court, arguing that this undermined the deterrent effect of arrests made under his ministry’s ongoing anti-corruption drive.

“The corrupt are smart. They will run and get a good law firm to defend them. The people we arrested, I will read for your summary of a few people that we have arrested who have appeared in anti-corruption court. They did not spend two weeks. They have not spent two weeks in Luzira prison. They have been given bail,” he said.

The Pakwach case is the latest in a string of similar findings the minister has revealed since being appointed to the docket in May.

In a series of inspection tours, Balaam and his junior State Minister for Local Government Justine Nameere have visited districts including Moyo, Maracha, Mbale, Isingiro, Sembabule, Mitooma, Mbarara City, Fort Portal and Masaka.

The campaign has already resulted in several local government staff being placed under interdiction.

However, Nambooze questioned whether the minister’s field-based, high-profile approach amounted to a sustainable solution, arguing that it was pulling national institutions into work that should be handled locally.

“This intervention, we don’t see how it can be a permanent model. This problem is compounded by the fact that Parliament together with other national bodies fighting corruption, both formally and informally; the IGG, State House Anti-Corruption Unit, Police, DPP all have had to step in to do work that should ordinarily be handled at the district level,” Nambooze said.

She argued that the reliance on national bodies to resolve issues that should be caught locally amounted to duplication that ran counter to the spirit of decentralisation.

“We are now using national resources to chase what the district public accounts committees, the local government committees, and internal auditors should have flagged, queried and resolved in their own districts. That is duplication. That is expensive. That is not decentralization. We cannot centralize enforcement and claim to decentralize service delivery,” she said. “The result is that we weaken the very institutions, Chapter 11 and Rule 188 expect to work and then spend money to do their job from Kampala.”

While President Museveni has publicly endorsed the minister’s approach, praising him alongside Nameere for taking action against corruption at the grassroots, critics within Parliament have increasingly questioned whether the ministry’s inspection-driven model can replace district-level accountability systems.