By Mulengera Reporters
On Tuesday, the Public Service Minister Gen Katumba Wamala appeared before the Parliamentary Committee on Public Service & Local Governments. He was accompanied by a large delegation of technocrats who were led by the PS Catherine Birakwate Musingwire.
During the meeting, the discussion was focused mainly on the staffing crisis in local governments upcountry to the extent that hospitals and schools are worst affected. Extension services was also referenced and the same applied to the Local Government Minister Balaam Barugahara’s anti-corruption operations which committee members (led by their chairman Edmund Herbert Ariko) protested as highhanded and for contravening rules of natural justice.
Regarding the staffing crisis, it was revealed that for instance at Arua Regional Referral Hospital, which serves the entire West Nile region, each of the intern doctors deployed there works for 36 hours before getting chance to rest. The work is simply too much yet the facility has very few doctors and other health workers.
Terego Woman MP Rose Obiga (NRM), who is renowned for being very outspoken and fearless when it comes to home matters, spat fire and castigated Katumba Wamala (barely 6 months at the Wandegeya-based Ministry) and Musingwire for merely looking on and doing nothing when the entire West Nile sub region continues being marginalized and deprived of its fair share of the national cake.
Obiga, who is also the Vice Chairperson for West Nile Parliamentary Group and also a former district councilor before becoming MP in 2021, demanded to know why her native region doesn’t’ have a single Permanent Secretary heading any government ministry (yet they have many highly and eligible educated persons). She called this clear conspiracy against West Nile. She asserted that there are many West Nilers who are seasoned and well qualified for such jobs but they are always disregarded. “We don’t even have an Under Secretary. What did the 14m people of West Nile do to deserve all this exclusion?” roared Obiga as Katumba Wamala and Musingwire uneasily turned in their seats.
The truth is they too are innocent and Obiga was asking the right question to the wrong persons. Indeed, the duo was and is clueless because the power to make people PSs or Under Secretaries lies with the President or the Head Public Service Lucy Nakyobe who has to closely work with Hajji Yunnus Kakande to make such deployments. Obiga said they appreciate the fact their own Victor Bua is serving as a powerful Commission in charge of Compensation and head of one of the departments at the Public Service Ministry but that simply isn’t enough. They deserve much more.
Before narrating the plight of suffering pensioners who often get deleted from the payroll without explanation and district engineers and economists of West Nile who had for decades stagnated on one rank without being promoted, Obiga also enumerated several names of sons and daughters of West Nile who are such good economists to the extent that the Finance Ministry occasionally calls on them to come and do some work at the headquarters in Kampala.
“We have many of them in Obongi and Adjumani and Fred is one such example. He is such a good economist who I wonder why the Finance Ministry only calls upon him to do some temporary work instead of elevating and deploying him in Kampala. We are demanding for regional balancing and we aren’t asking for too much,” asserted Obiga renowned for taking no prisoners when it comes to being there for West Nile.
Besides defending LG councilors’ right to be paid much more than the current monthly remuneration of Shs250,000 (whose PAYE imposition she also vigorously opposed), Obiga also called out Katumba Wamala and Musingwire for failing or refusing to prioritize the adequate staffing of Arua Regional Referral Hospital which she said is fatally understaffed yet it serves a large population of people-namely the 14m West Nilers and tens of thousands of refugees and normal humans from the nearby DRC and South Sudan.
She said that, being a freely accessible people-person, she daily gets phone calls from exhausted interns, doctors, nurses and other categories of health workers crying to her about the extent to which they are being overworked in order to attend to such big patient numbers. “The last one to call me a few days ago was an intern student from Kabale but who currently is deployed to work at Arua Regional Referral Hospital. He told me ‘Honorable I’m dying of fatigue after working and attending to patients for 36 hours without any rest.’ Such young men are dying of work not because their seniors are absent. They too are on duty but the work is simply too much.”
Perhaps having realized he wasn’t empowered enough to adequately respond to the alleged marginalization of West Nile, Gen Katumba Wamala (who isn’t an elected leader) and PS Musingwire answered all the other questions but offered no response to Rose Obiga’s controversial questions regarding exclusion of West Nile from lucrative positions in Uganda’s public and civil service. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
