By Mulengera Reporters
It’s coming to mid-February but not less than 400 KCCA staffers (categorized as temporary staff because they have no permanent jobs there) are yet to get their January salary!
The delay has resulted from the fact that the new Executive Director Hajjat Sharifah Buzeki is cautious and fearful about reports she keeps getting that temporary staffs’ scheme has often been used to smuggle ghosts or nonexistent employees onto the KCCA payroll and in the process rip off the taxpayer. Perpetrators happen to be some rogue-minded employees working in the City Authority’s HR Directorate.
Colossal sums of money often get lost via that well-syndicated scheme, through ghost employees or even over payment and under payment of monthly salary. A paymaster or mistress will deliberately pay excess and subsequently ring the recipient staff requiring them to withdraw and bring the money to be sent back to the treasury on grounds it was erroneously paid to them.
In some cases, a payroll master or mistress will deliberately over pay a pensioner on the pension scheme by as much as Shs50m and then ring asking the beneficiary to withdraw the excess money and physically bring it to him or her. Through some whistle blowers, the new ED recently learnt of all this fraudulent and abusive conduct among HR Directorate staff and became cautious.
She was appointed in December and assumed office in the first week of January and was shocked to learn that some of the breaching staff from the HR Directorate were actually already responding to clandestine Police summons to explain themselves about hundreds of millions of shillings that have been stolen under such syndicates targeting both the active staff payroll and the pension scheme at KCCA into which the GoU annually invests roughly Shs15bn.
The syndicate involves accomplices at the Finance Ministry and perpetrators always come together to pay off payroll external auditors who are always deployed to inquire into such payroll and pension scheme anomalies. The external auditors will demand for as much as Shs200m or more in order to omit indicating such glaring fraud findings in their final report going to Parliament.
That way, payroll fraudsters inside KCCA escape the sharp scrutiny and embarrassing televised questioning by COSASE Chairman Medard Segona and PAC Chairman Muwanga Kivumbi whose respective Committees are charged with scrutinizing audit all reports submitted to Parliament.
This time round, as always, the HR Directorate submitted staff receipts deriving from both the permanent and temporary staff payrolls. They believed that she would naively just endorse and sign off the January salaries but instead, Buzeki wrote a note making it clear to the managers at the HR Directorate that she would only approve especially contract staff January salaries after getting a verification report from the internal audit Directorate headed by Canon Bwire at KCCA.
This angered the powerful HR Director Grace Akullo who resides in an opulent palatial residence in the Kyebando Bahai Temple neighborhood. Akullo felt this amounted to challenging her authority as the person supposed to have the last word on payroll matters.
This has actually created bad blood of some sort between Buzeki and the powerful Akullo who has always feuded and had some uneasy work relationship with previous EDs namely Dorothy Kisaka and more recently Frank Rusa Nyakana. This anxiety has only escalated; following insistence by the Finance Ministry top leadership and the Kampala Ministry that the KCCA payroll should be inquired into even more.
The bosses at the KCCA HR Directorate are now counting on the possibility of continuing to cajole the external auditors to treat them leniently as always been the case. In fact, sources say that several staffers, officers and managers from the HR Directorate are facing slow-paced Police criminal investigations which the new ED wants to end in criminal prosecution as the monies involved are colossal.
Herself overwhelmed by the extent of fraud, the HR Director Grace Akullo is understood to have signaled her staff, officers and managers by making it clear that whoever gets implicated will have to personally carry their cross as the defense of corporate responsibility won’t be available. The external auditors, who could have facilitated cover up of some sort, have made things even more complicated by demanding for hundreds of millions of shillings in order to look the other side.
In her case, the workaholic Buzeki (arrives at 6am and works up 9pm) has remained hostile towards the idea of having temporary staffers at all (the lowest earns Shs2m and others as much as Shs15m). But the obstacle she faces is that many of these temporary employees were let in on strong recommendations of powerful people in government on whose toes no one can step and get away with it.
Insisting to end the temporary staff scheme (who KCCA hires out of necessity and not ostentation) could cost Buzeki her job and thereby making her the shortest-serving City Hall ED in the history of KCCA.
Yet as all these possibilities are being weighed and reflected upon, hundreds of KCCA staffers have remained financially deprived to the extent that a lot of them are beginning to lose hope of ever sending their children back to school for the new school term. Imagine doing without the January salary while continuing to be faced with such as an uncertain future! More updates later! (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
