The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | Parliament’s decision to revert Uganda Meteorology Authority (UNMA) to the department at the Ministry of Water and Environment has drawn mixed reactions.
Uganda Meteorology Authority will no longer be semi-autonomous once President Museveni assents to the Bill seeking to merge or rationalize government Authorities and Departments.
Some environmentalists and users of meteorology have told URN that MPS seemed blind to the benefits of maintaining meteorology service in a semi-autonomous status or as an Authority.
The Authority has been giving weather information services to the agriculture, aviation, marine, and insurance sectors among others. UNMA’s other consumers include the oil and gas industry, the hydropower sector, commercial, police air wing, and the Uganda Bureau of Statistics.
Some sources have indicated that Parliament seemed to be concerned about issues like how much the Authority has been making and yet weather information services are one of the public good, especially with emerging weather-related calamities.
Uganda National Meteorological Authority was a department of Meteorology under the Ministry of Water and Environment.
Those who worked under it remember that though it had very qualified meteorologists like Stephen Ak Magezi, Phillip Gwage, and Paul Isabirye among others, it was poorly resources financially. There are fears that the services at the institution that is Uganda’s focal point to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will deteriorate to the period before 2012 when the government passed a law to turn it into a semi-autonomous body.
Some of those fears were part of the report submitted to the parliamentary committee on environment and natural resources that advised the House to UNMA as a semi-autonomous body.
“Rationalization will weaken Uganda’s (UNMA’s) compliance with the regional standards for Meteorological Services as required by the World Meteorological Organization,” said one of the reports.
It is emerging that scraping Uganda risks not complying with some of the agreements at the East African Community regarding weather and metrology services.
The EAC Ministerial Council had directed that meteorological services in the EAC should be elevated into Semi-autonomous government entities.
At the time, it had been observed that meteorological services in the EAC were persistent inadequate operational funding thus leading to limited ability to respond effectively to the challenge of climate change. The Department of Meteorology had reduced weather monitoring capability due to the progressive deterioration of the observation networks.
Those were part of the arguments by the then water and Environment Minister, Betty Bigombe at the time when the Bill was being considered for enactment. Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda all have a semi-autonomous status, with Kenya being the latest entrant.
On April 17, it passed the Uganda National Meteorological Authority Amendment Bill as part of the ongoing rationalization of government agencies. The rationalization is aimed at reducing expenditures and eliminating service duplications.
The Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, Chaired by Emmanuel Otaala had recommended that UNMA should be retained as a semi-autonomous entity because of its crucial cuts across several ministries.
“The Committee recommends that as a landlocked country, Uganda should focus more on developing its aviation industry other than taking steps that might stagnate its aviation industrial development,” said the Otaala report.
The Emanuel Otaala Committee observed that UNMA could generate more revenue than its current 18 billion shillings annual budget if user departments for its services like National Water, NFA, and other Government agencies and departments paid for the services.
State Minister of Environment, Beatrice Anywar during the debate that the idea of scraping UNMA of the current status was to avoid the replication of work.
However, Dr. Emmanuel Otaala stressed the specialized role and self-sustainability capacity of the Uganda National Meteorological Authority (UNMA). He highlighted the critical functions of UNMA in weather and climate monitoring, emphasizing that UNMA’s services do not duplicate any other services offered by the ministry.
“The Committee noted that UNMA’s roles are specialised and specific and not duplicated at the Ministry. It is therefore important to retain UNMA as an autonomous institution, while the Ministry focuses on the development of policy,” Otaala read the report.
Members of Parliament rejected a report from the Committee.Professor Elijah Mushemeza, the MP for Sheema County South, raised concerns about the authority’s current financial performance and its effectiveness compared to when it operated as a department.
Government of Uganda through the Ministry Of Water and Environment sector budget funds meteorological services. Other funds include bilateral support, especially through the World Meteorology Organization (WMO) Global Environment Facility (GEF), UNDP, USAID, and WFP among others.
UNMA projects to collect shs20,892,400,000 per year due to improved forecasts that will result from the investments in Radars and improvements in net workstations across the country.
Musa Ecweru, State minister for works, noted that the government is not disbanding meteorology but rather mainstreaming its functions into the ministry to, among other things, cut administrative costs. He said a department, meteorology will continue to perform its duties.
Ibrahim Ssemujju, MP Kira Municipality argued that the report presented before Parliament assumed that the government was doing away with meteorology services. He suggested that some members would even prefer fewer ministries, thus supporting the mainstreaming of the authority.
From his perspective, the concern should be whether the bureaucratic structure of government that led to the creation of such authorities has been addressed. Unfortunately, MPs who endeavored to discuss the implications of mainstreaming UMNA like Dr. Lulume Bayiga were silenced, and soon the “aye” votes in favor of mainstreaming prevailed.
There are concerns regarding the handling of the rationalization legislation process, with MPs seemingly failing to thoroughly scrutinize the presented reports. Media reports suggest instances of bribes being offered to MPs to influence the preservation, merger, or mainstreaming of certain entities.
Regional and International Concerns Ignored
In 2021, Prof. Petteri Taalas, the then Secretary-General of the WMO, wrote to the Minister of Water and Environment warning of the likely effects of not retaining UNMA as a semi-autonomous agency.
“I have the honor to inform you that it is now a global trend for national meteorology and hydrological services to transform into semi-autonomous government agencies for the more efficient and effective delivery of services required,” said part of the letter.
Prof. Taalas cited the 1945 Chicago Convention for International Civil Aviation and therefore noted the retention of UNMA under its current status is seen as pivotal in maintaining enshrined requirements and standards.
As the secretary general, further warned that Uganda needed to prioritize the retention of its UNMA status to safeguard the integrity and reliability of aviation services in Uganda. Failure to do so could have far-reaching implications for air navigation standards and safety across the region.
Besides the WMO, At the African level, Uganda is also bound by resolutions of the African Ministerial Conference on Meteorology, which emphasizes increasing political support and recognition for national meteorological services.
The weather information service started as part of a small colonial service for East Africa in 1929. It was part of the British East African Meteorological Service (BEAMS), to provide meteorological and climatology services to various sectors of the economy.
The focus was mainly on Aviation and later on Agrometeorological research at Namulonge and other research centers. It became the Uganda Department of Meteorology by decree in 1977 from the previous East African Meteorological Department (EAMD) after the collapse of the East African Community (EAC). The Department was affected by political instability 1977 – 1986. In 1995 the government had listed the Department of Meteorology and institutions to be divestiture.
Apart from UNMA, Parliament this week voted to preserve various entities regarding their specialized nature among other reasons these include; the Uganda National Road Authority, Uganda Microfinance Regulatory Authority, Coffee Development Authority, NAADS, NITA-U, Dairy Development Authority, Cotton Development Authority, and the National Forestry Authority.
Other Bills that have been considered by Parliament include the Warehouse Receipt System (Amendment) Bill 2024, the Free Zones (Amendment) Bill 2024, the Uganda Exports Promotions Boards Act (Repeal) Bill 2024, the Uganda Wildlife Conservation Education Centre Act (Repeal) Bill 2024, and the Uganda Wildlife (Amendment) Bill 2024.
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Uganda probably has the most water resources in Africa. But they don’t measure waterflow or river flow so that bridges and such don’t get flooded. In addition, Ugandans have to spend 30% of their water consumption costs on bottled water. In addition, plumbers are not educated on the system required to manage waterborne toilet vacuum. In addition, KCCA spends a quarter of their budget on boosters to pump water up the hill, instead of using water reservoirs. The entire Ugandan approach to water management is wrong. If I were you, I would get retired indigenous Afrikaans-speaking water engineers from South Africa to fix this in a cheap way. They learnt the hard way, because there is not much water in that country.