Where is the Rationale for Creating Districts?

22 April 2011

editorial

The newly created districts are limping in the implementation of some government projects. According to press reports on Thursday, The Uganda Road Fund has reported that some districts and urban councils are failing to utilise funds allocated to them for roads maintenance and opening up new ones.

The report said the district and urban councils failed to use Shs47 billion disbursed to them in road funds in the last quarter of 2010 alone, out of a budget of Shs116 billion. This report must challenge our calls for more districts.

The creation of more districts has always been justified for creating more job opportunities for Ugandans and downstream service delivery to the grassroots. But the problem is that the old districts from which new ones were curved out are not rendering enough machinery and manpower support to the newly created districts. We must heed the fears of URF that the new districts will continue to fail to utilise the vast sums of money allocated for several similar district and urban council projects.

The case of the newly-created Oyam District, curved out of Apac, is pathetic. Like many of its counterparts, Oyam was ordered to reimburse millions of shillings of untilised road funds to the national Treasury. Reason being the districts had failed to meet its agreed upon performance targets to have its stretches of impassable roads repaired and maintained.

Oyam also failed to work on several more roads earmarked for opening up. And clamours for creation of more districts are not going away soon. Wakiso District councillors only last Friday joined the fray and approved the splitting of the peri-urban district into three separate administrative units. This must be reconsidered.

We cannot tolerate scenarios such as in the 2009/2010 financial year when Shs400 billion remained unused in the government coffers, simply because new districts did not have the machinery and personnel to implement the essential infrastructure for use by our rural citizenry.

We appeal that the government must not be quick to punish the line officials for assumed sabotage of government programmes. We urge the Ministry of Local Government to urgently step in to sort out the mess.

The MoLG must quickly facilitate recruitment in the new districts to fill the much-needed vacancies. In the short-term, the old mother districts must show understanding and share the limited machinery and human resource at their disposal with the new districts.

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