Prime
Govt weak systems led to fraud in UNRA - Muhakanizi
Secretary to the Treasury Keith Muhakanizi
What you need to know:
Justification. The Secretary to the Treasury says road contractors and agency managers took advantage of the state’s weak financial systems to steal money
Kampala.
Secretary to the Treasury Keith Muhakanizi has admitted that government lost colossal sums of money to road contractors as a result of bureaucratic procedures and weaknesses in its legal and financial systems.
Since 2008, government through the Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA) has paid contractors and consultants billions of Shillings resulting from interest accruing from delayed payments, compensations and variation of prices.
Appearing before the commission of inquiry into the alleged mismanagement of UNRA affairs yesterday, Mr Muhakanizi testified that the procedures employed to curb financial irregularities at the government agency were slow and ineffective.
The confession
“I admit that there were weaknesses on our side in terms of supervision of the way money was being spent. There was weakness on our side to wait for the Inspectorate of Government to handle complaints and we also had to wait for Parliament to handle reports by the Auditor General in order to take steps,” he said.
Mr Muhakanizi, who is also the Finance ministry permanent secretary, was responding to concerns from the commission lead counsel, Mr Andrew Kasirye, over the increasing cost of maintaining various road contracts. Flanked by two ministry officials; Kenneth Mugambe (Budget director) and Ms Margaret Kakande (head of Budget monitoring), Mr Muhakanizi said he lacked powers to sanction accounting officers because of lack of relevant laws.
“We did not have enough capacity until we set up the budget implementation and monitoring unit. We discovered that the biggest channel of stealing government money was through cash, we stopped it and directed all payments to be paid through banks but still those officers opened various accounts in banks to defeat the purpose,” he said. He also blamed former UNRA managers for colluding with contractors to delay payments, hence leading to increased cost of road projects. Evidence before the commission indicates that UNRA projects were paid overruns ranging from 60 per cent to 200 per cent.
Documents also show that since 2009, the Attorney General’s reports have shown that flouting of procurement laws, poor contract management, variation of prices and shoddy work in UNRA has cost government billions of shillings.
