We scored highly on promises, says NRM

The Manifesto Implementation Unit is a structure under the Office of the President largely mandated to monitor and track the progress of the manifesto and popularise the findings.

The unit also takes note of the challenges, which are later forwarded to the respective ministries departments and agencies (MDAs) that are responsible for implementation, to take action.

Generally, how do you rate the performance and implementation of the NRM 2016-2021 manifesto compared to the past ones?

I must say that this term ending, the party and government have been able to deliver successfully compared to other terms.

The unit is not responsible for implementation.  Implementation is done by different ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs). For us, we track the performance.

However, I assure you that we are very impressed with the rate of implementation because many of the different commitments were achieved.

What do you attribute that performance to?

First, MDAs gave attention to the manifesto. They endeavoured to refer to the manifesto as far as policy direction is concerned.

The other aspect they had at the back of their minds was that they had to account for work done. Probably, this exerted more pressure in ensuring success.

But I cannot rule out the insistence of the President on making this the Hakuna Mchezo term and the level of commitment was much higher compared to other terms.

There was a high degree of commitment and making sure the manifesto is mainstreamed and looked at as a reference document.

We have also been able to mobilise more resources to support the different projects that we have pledged to execute.

From the review of the NRM manifesto implementation, which ministries performed better than others?

It is difficult to align them in that order, but all I know is that there are sectors where we have invested and the investments are visible.

For example, the road sector, water, and energy sector. There is evidence to show that a lot has been done.

If you dig into the education sector, the different infrastructure that have been achieved through the different support given to the public universities and other tertiary institutions also show that they have also been doing well.

What requires to be done to uplift performance of other sectors?

From the onset, there were flagship projects, which were used as a yardstick for performance. Therefore, there are projects, which were not realised such as Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) under the Ministry of Works, the 18 million hoes pledged to Ugandans in the Ministry of Agriculture, and the commitment to provide pads to school-going children by the Ministry of Education. The challenge was largely the issue of the resource envelope. These are big projects; they require a lot of financing and I think the resources could not match the needs at the moment.

There are several unfulfilled pledges over the years; how is this being handled by your office?

As mentioned before, my office does not implement [manifestos]. What we do is to make sure some of these projects, which are works in progress, spill over the next programmes and plans. For example, the roads we had in the manifesto of 2011-2016 have spilled over and have been implemented under this term of 2016-2021. So, the planning cycle is maintained, but the projects are carried over to the next manifesto.

What is the procedure of following unfulfilled pledges in the manifesto?

Well, the Manifesto Implementation Unit is a public office like any other. It is a question of knowing what exactly you want. We have copies of the manifesto. Now that we have a new manifesto, the question is the availability of these copies to all citizens to know the commitments we are talking about in the next term.

How did Covid-19 affect implementation of NRM’s 2016-2021 manifesto?

Covid-19 was more of an ambush. It came towards the end of the term. It affected the performance in two ways.

[First], most of the projects were being supervised or managed by experts from outside the country and many of them had gone for Christmas and early New Year holidays such as the Chinese. With the international lockdowns, they were not able to travel back, impacting the human resource aspect.

Second, was the resource aspect in a sense that resources had to be diverted as a stop-gap measure to deal with the pandemic.

The priority was now how to save people from this threat that attacked us. Thus, some projects had to suffer some resource cuts [for the government] to be able to deal with the situation that was a threat to life. That is how it impacted the performance of the implementation.

President Museveni recently complained about bureaucracy gridlock in implementation of some government programmes. What is your take on it?

You know government by structure is a bureaucracy. So, I think what we need to do as a government is to revisit the public service structure and see whether the current structure can be able to deliver the implementation plans we have.

I believe there are many other reforms proposed from time to time to deal with this issue of bureaucracy.

We are hearing proposals are coming through such as mergers of certain government agencies to reduce bureaucracy and avoid duplications.  These are all aimed at improving service delivery. So, this will all be dependent on the next government and the kind of decisions they will be taking.