Works Ministry struggles to streamline management of vehicle stickers

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | The Works and Transport Ministry is struggling to streamline the management of vehicle movement stickers issued to essential workers because of the COVID-19 lockdown. This stems from the arrest of various people with forged stickers at checkpoints manned by police.

Security was prompted to mount the impromptu checkpoints when the number of vehicles on city roads suddenly increased compared to the number of stickers issued by the Ministry. The operations also affected people with genuine stickers as they were required to verify it on a portal setup by the National Information and Technology Authority.

It is believed that the ministry printed more than 10,000 stickers that were allocated to several sectors. For purposes of accreditation, the Works Ministry collected the registration details of each vehicle, organization and the driver. During the verification of the stickers, one was required to insert the number of their vehicles.

However, the portal generated more confusion since it returned conflicting information. For example, one of the vehicles registered under the media category returned details of Exim bank. Now, Arnold Mangeni, an official at NITA-U explains that the challenge isn’t with the system but rather the database. Mangeni says that NITA-U just tapped into the database that was generated by the Works Ministry.

“In ICT we have what we call garbage in, garbage out. The Nita system is being monitored and it has nothing wrong. The challenge must be with the database. And we have notified them to work on their database for smooth operations,” said Mangeni.

Fred Enanga, the Police Spokesperson, says because of the numerous challenges they have advised officers at checkpoints to handle each situation accordingly. He explains that where there is confusion the vehicle owner or driver is referred to the Works Ministry to verify the sticker manually.

Susan Katiake, the Works Ministry Spokesperson acknowledges that there were loopholes in the process. She however, says they are currently trying to ‘patch up’ the loopholes so as to streamline the management of the stickers to stop inconveniencing the movement of essential workers.

“For ensuring that our streamlining strategy is safe, I may not tell you what we are doing, “she said. Adding that, “the ministry is also handling all complaints of the vehicle which have been confiscated due to miss-match of information in the database but with genuine stickers.”

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