Kampala – Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) want government to institute a mechanism of generating a national price list for goods and services to fight corruption tendencies in public procurement.
The CSOs under their umbrella, the Civil Society Budget Advocacy Group (CSBAG) made the call on Thursday at a press conference held in Kampala to give their perspective on the ministerial policy statements for the FY 2023/2024.
Carol Namagembe the deputy executive director CSBAG said, “We continue to observe that unit costs within government Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) and Local Governments (LGs) vary yet the quality and standards of goods and services are in most cases the same.”
Namagembe noted that the generated national pricelist can be regularly updated, audited, and enforced by the government periodically.
The CSOs also want government to fast-track the rationalisation of Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) to reduce public expenditure.
In 2018, following a directive of the president, Dr. Rukahana Rugunda, the then Prime Minister unveiled plans of rationalizing government MDAs to eliminate the overlapping roles in government. However, four years later, the plan has not been implemented.
Jeff Wadulo, the policy and program Advisor at CSBAG noted that the recurrent costs of running government operations including wages, salaries, interest payments and commitment fees continue to be higher than development expenditure, limiting the resources available for service delivery.
This, he said is worsened by the delayed execution of the 2018 plan to rationalize Government Agencies, Commissions and Authorities as one of the measures for reducing expenditure.
“We call upon parliament to implore the Ministry of Public Service to fast-track the rationalization of MDAS to eliminate redundancies in the medium-term, reduce the cost of running government and improve efficiency in resource management,” he said
Among other issues raised was the insufficient budget allocation to address domestic arrears.
The CSOs appreciated the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development for developing a Strategy to Clear and Prevent Domestic Arrears (June 2021) and the directive by the ministry in FY2023/24 restricting Accounting Officers from accumulating domestic arrears through submitting their draft final accounts to the Accountant General together with the signed Certificates of Outstanding Commitments.
Despite this, however, they say that domestic arrears have continued to increase. For instance, domestic arrears increased from UGX 4.65 trillion in 2021 to UGX 7.55 trillion in 2022 (62 percent increase) as per the 2022 Auditor General report.
Wadulo is concerned that in FY 2023/24 only UGX 200 billion has been budgeted to clear arrears, which is insignificant to reducing domestic arrears stock as reported by the office of the auditor general.
He asked the finance ministry to exercise Sections 79 and 80 of the PFMA, 2015 to penalize and sanction Accounting Officers who subsequently accumulate arrears, in a bid to address the continued accumulation of arrears.
