Open letter to the Minister for Ethics and Integrity

Your visit showed us you were serving someone’s vested interests but not the interests of the people of Kalaki

COMMENT | JULIUS ODEKE | Dear Hon Rose Lily Akello, minister in charge Ethics and Integrity, on behalf of the people of Kalaki District, I commend you for the efforts you are undertaking to ensure that Uganda is a corrupt-free country and particularly local governments.

You visited Kalaki district on May 14, on a fact-finding mission and the objective of your mission of interacting with the key technical staff with an aim of helping us to know our weaknesses on financial accountability as a district is commendable. But it publicly showed to us that you were serving someone’s vested interests but not the interests of the people of Kalaki and Uganda at large.

For that, I hereby write to you to express our deep dismay in the manner in which you were hell bent to shame and humiliate the Chief Administrative Officer of Kalaki and other heads of department without reliable information implicating them.

As a district, we deemed your actions as guided ones. For they have led to fear among technical staff in the district as you and your team drove in with over 100 cars.

As a local government, we only have five vehicles that are on the road with an ambulance donated by a political leader. I want to believe that you are aware that equipment donated by political leaders, much as we welcome them, tend to serve specific variables and are meant to influence the voting patterns among the beneficiaries.

How I wish, you had come to donate to us some vehicles, your visit to Kalaki would have added value. For it would have eased the movement of the technical staff at the district to the communities hence service delivery. But that did not happen.

Your visit to Kalaki was a national exercise that we in Kalaki highly welcome because it helps local governments to be on the right path when utilising public funds to serve our people who are the taxpayers. But your conduct as a minister forced us to query the sole objective of your visit as you kept moving out answering phone calls.

I am aware of various institutions having various practices. For us in Kalaki District Local Government, the practice is, while on official duty, all phones should be either on silent or switched off to avoid external interference. But we did not see that from you – a person who was on national duty.

Instead, every other minute you kept answering a phone call. This, to-date, has forced us to think that you were being guided by a political leader with vested interests in seeing that our district technical officers are ashamed including the District Chairperson.

Being a four-year-old district, we may have issues that border corruption just like any other district or a public institution in Uganda and even parliament where you work but we seem to have other underlying issues outside corruption that you ought to have put into consideration.

One, in Kalaki, we have three tribes; the Kumam, Iteso and Langi that live and work there. And some leaders have taken it as one of their tools to fight some leaders.

In your opening remarks, you clearly stated that your leg-off to Kalaki followed a tip-off from a whistleblower which may be true. But the sixty-million dollar question is: “Who is that whistleblower?” Don’t be surprised that your whistle blower is a person who is not satisfied with the District Leadership politically or is in the other camp.

As a district, we have seen political leaders who want to safeguard their positions while tainting the names of others before the right thinking members of the community mudsling their opponents’ names that they are leading a bunch of corrupt people. Yet the intention behind it is to spoil the names of their opponents.

This, therefore, makes us the technical staff to suffer at the expense of political fights. I don’t know whether you did some due diligence on that. Doing due diligence on pertinent matters at hand, amounts to “service beyond self-interest.”

In management science, we have the stewardship theory with its major tenets that sets a stage for further discussion. Your visit to Kalaki therefore, has set a stage for us to examine ourselves as the technical people to establish where we went wrong with a possibility of correcting them to ensure proper service delivery.

Needful to note is that, this theory helps human beings to know the people who have vested interests in Kalaki politically and those who ask money from our officers so that we can avoid them for the good of the public.

It should be noted therefore that the stewardship theory relies on a model that describes people as self-actualising and other serving rather than self-interested and self-serving.

We are cognisant of the fact that, when we are accountable like the way you have tasked and guided us genuinely; the stewardship theory assumes people will also subsume personal interests to those of the principal, thus placing higher utility on the organisational goals than on individual goals.

Also because the goals of individuals are presumed to already be aligned with those of owners and or the organisation, stewardship theory assumes that the use of formal controls such as monitoring of public institutions and how projects are implemented helps us to detect the unnecessary and potentially counterproductive egos of self-interested individuals.

Which we have learnt a big lesson. So, next time, you are highly invited but come when not guided by people who have vested interests in our district.

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Julius Odeke is a Communication Officer, Kalaki District Local Government