The Minister for ICT and National Guidance, Dr. Chris Baryomunsi has suggested that in order to ensure effective service delivery and perfect monitoring, the entire office of the Prime Minister needs to be reviewed and restructured.
The Kinkizi County East lawmaker gave his views on Wednesday while interacting with journalists in Kampala at the headquarters of the Ministry of Information Communication Technology and National Guidance where he said many Ugandans think the office of the Prime Minister is full of corrupt people which is wrong. However, he revealed that the office is overwhelmed with huge work.
He cited that OPM is encompassing a lot of entities which require serious monitoring and supervision and yet the office has few officers to manage serious supervision.
“The current case of Karamoja iron sheets leaves us true lessons on how to handle government properties and resources. However that aside, the whole office of the Prime Minister needs to be reviewed and restructured because it is huge and has very many departments, therefore a single Permanent Secretary and a few accounting officers face huge work to supervise,” he said.
Dr Baryomunsi explained that OPM itself is supposed to supervise, advise and monitor ministries however within it, there are also fully fragged ministries such as; the Ministry of Relief and Disaster Preparedness, and the Ministry for General Duties. It also has affirmative programs under which there is the Ministry of Karamoja, Luweero Triangle, Teso Affairs, Bunyoro Affairs, and Northern Uganda which makes it huge to be monitored by a few officers.
“I think the government needs to look at how to restructure the whole Office of Prime Minister probably to separate the implementation from coordination and monitoring because they are all fused within one structure may be that could be part of the problem not because the office is full of corrupt officers there. But maybe the supervision and monitoring of a huge structure create problems and an inability to do proper supervision. Those are the areas the government should look at to streamline the number of functions,” he said.
The Office of the Prime Minister for the past one and half decades has always had cases of corruption involving officers within. Currently, it is headed by Robinah Nabbanja who has been the Prime Minister since 21 June 2021.
A few months in the office, Nabbanja was humiliated at Kasese when she discovered that an assortment of relief items that were to be donated to flood victims was maximumly sub-standard. She ordered government officials to return the items to Kampala.
Currently, the same office is facing another huge scandal of iron sheets meant for the Karamoja sub-region. So far Mary Goretti Kitutu the minister responsible for Karamoja Affairs is facing two counts of causing loss of public property and one count of conspiracy to defraud.
Other two ministers; Amos Lugoloobi (State Minister for Finance and Planning) and Agnes Nandutu (State Minister in charge of Karamoja) have been arrested and charged with dealing with suspected property contrary to section 21A (1) of the Anti-Corruption Act 2009.
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