HERE’S HOW URA JOBS TRIBALISM REPORT READS LIKE [WESTERNERS ARE IN DOMINANT POSITION ONLY RIVALED BY BAGANDA]

By Mulengera Reporters 

Barely a month ago, Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) Commissioner General Johnson Musinguzi Rujoki led fellow members of top management to interact with Parliament’s much-dreaded Committee of COSASE. The interface lasted for two weeks and these were indeed marathon grilling sessions.

Ironically, it was cordial for most of the time because Musinguzi humbly disarmed the characteristically fire-spitting legislators by being truthful and open-minded each time wrongdoing was implied and pointed out on his part and the entire top management membership.

There was concern as to why of the 8 topmost bosses (Commissioner level), only three weren’t from Western Uganda but Joel Senyonyi ruled that it would be imprudent to require Musinguzi to explain such anomalies since the recruitment decisions at that level are a preserve of the Finance Minister and his superiors in the Governing Board.

The COSASE session of that day was predictably followed with a screaming newspaper headline indicating extreme tribalism in the URA recruitment processes. The COSASE debate that day prompted us at Mulengera News to dig deeper by taking several steps including reviewing and scrutinizing some of the records the Commissioner General submitted to the Committee and our findings is what is being communicated in the subsequent paragraphs hereunder:

DETAILED STORY:

The review of the documentation that was tendered to COSASE reveals that URA has a total of 3,209 staff or employees who are recruited through very transparent and competitive recruitment or hiring processes as contained in the organisation’s Recruitment & Appointment Policy. Deriving from the Authority’s Human Resources Management Manual, the R&A Policy lays out the minimum standards and practices that strictly ought to be adhered to during the recruitment, deployment and promotion of staff across all the departments in the organisation.

All this has to be consistent or compliant with the national labor laws of Uganda the most prominent of which is the Constitution and the Employment Act. Adherence to all these ensures meritocracy, equity, efficiency, competitiveness and transparency each time the URA Governing Board or management makes recruitment, promotion and transfer decisions for their staff. All positions of Manager and above are handled by the Board as the Management is left to handle the supervisor level ones and below.

As a matter of law and prudent practice, all jobs are recruited through open advertising which can be internal or external. In each case, the advert is conspicuously publicised on URA website, social media platforms and social media for not less than 20 days. The Assistant Commissioner HR (operationally) plays a very big role in all these processes which are domiciled under the Corporate Services department under which the HRM division resides.

The URA organisational philosophy and conviction is that recruiting and giving the job to the very best is the only way the Authority can excel at playing its role of raising the contribution of tax to GDP and thereby contributing to Uganda’s economic independence. Aimed at ensuring that URA gets the best talent, the recruitment process is documented to have 9 stages all of which are aimed at quality control and the like.

The 9 stages are as follows: the user department will identify the vacancy (which in most cases results from staff being promoted, transfered or having left and ceased to be URA employees for whatever reason). The identified vacancy is communicated to the top management through the HRM Division which will decide the recruitment method. Next will be designing the advert to reflect the job description before proceeding to publicize it through the newspapers and URA website plus social media platforms.

Those who respond to the advert will be shortlisted before being subjected to competence-based assessments which is followed by oral interviews. At oral interviews, each job slot must have a minimum of 3 candidates competing for it.

Successful candidates will then be subjected to background checks to establish their conduct at their previous work places and once cleared at that stage, they are appointed and onboarded which is inclusive of the rigorous induction they mandatorily undergo to among other things orient them on URA institutional culture, corporate values and objectives.

Besides open competition, which is characterised by vastly publicised job advertisement, the URA Board can authorise headhunting to be used as a recruitment method especially for jobs that require plenty of technical expertise which may be scarce and hard to come by through any other method. The HRM Division gets authorised to search for and hire the employee with the desired skills mix.

There is also secondment which is applicable to employees or staff being solicited from sister GoU agencies with which URA might have MoUs. Such employees are deployed temporarily to facilitate transfer of certain best practices, expertise and knowledge in specialised areas for a specified period. The idea is to support staff at URA to catch up with the desired expertise or given way of doing things.

WHICH TRIBES ARE EATING MORE THAN WHICH ONES?

It’s not a very good thing to begin looking at employees in terms of where they come from but inclusiveness and the provisions of the Equal Opportunities Act require that the recruitment at important public institutions is as inclusive of all Ugandans as possible. This is why, even when COSASE Chairman Joel Senyonyi realised its backward to do so, MPs were allowed by him to ask questions aimed at scrutinising recruitment decisions at URA.

As the MPs observed, there is a history as to why 5 of the 8 Commissioner level bosses come from one region and here we are, trying to dig deeper to make sense of the situation at URA. Of the 3,209 members of staff, 998 are from Buganda or Central region. This comes to 31%. The entire Western region (comprising of Toro, Ankole, Kigezi, Bunyoro and Rwenzori etc) has 1,118 staffers which comes to 36%.

The Eastern region (comprising of Busoga, Bukedi, Bugisu & Teso) has 680 employees at URA out of a total labor force of 3,209 workers. Disadvantaged as always, the Northern region (comprising of Acholi, Lango, West Nile & Karamoja) has 393 staff which comes to 12.2%!

When it comes to gender composition, males constitute 59% (which comes to 1,903) and females 41% which comes to 1,306. The URA senior management comprises of 30 officials 12 of whom are from Western region: 3 from North, 6 from Eastern and 9 from Central or Buganda. At the time the current Commissioner General Musinguzi became URA overall boss in April 2020, the situation was very different and much worse.

The new CG felt this was anomalous and vowed to work with his superiors in the Governing Board to improve on the situation in order to comply with rules of prudent practice and the inclusiveness requirements imposed under the Equal Opportunities Act.

The following is how it looked like at the time Musinguzi became the CG: westerners occupied 12 of the 30 senior management positions. Central had one which has since been enlarged to 9 through external appointments and promotions. Eastern had 4 which has been enlarged to 6 through promotions and external appointments. Northern had one which has since been grown to three through external appointments and promotions.

During the two weeks interface, legislators sitting on COSASE were briefed of the steps being taken to keep progressively addressing this into a much better situation. The Commissioner General implored the legislators to be supportive and remain engaged with the Authority because a better and more inclusive is good not just for him and MPs but the whole country.

It’s very clear from the literature that was submitted to Parliament that 33% of those currently occupying senior management positions at URA have gotten there through Musinguzi-era reforms and internal promotions while the 27% have come through external appointments. The remaining 40% were there before Musinguzi became CG.

When it comes to gender parity in senior management positions, males still dominate like is the case elsewhere in government MDAs. The 17 (or 57%) senior management members are males as females occupy the remaining 13 (or 43%).

All said and done, the HR situation at URA remains far from ideal but with Musinguzi’s determination to keep doing better and addressing the gaps, there is hope things will improve. All the deliberate steps being undertaken are aimed not just at public relations and full compliance with the provisions of the Equal Opportunities Act but also to make more and more talented Ugandans attracted to contributing to the development and transformation of their country through taking up employment at URA whose HR Manual is designed to ensure it remains an equal opportunity employer.

There is also optimism that with more and more revenues being mobilized and collected, the staff structure will be enlarged so as to create more job opportunities and thereby making it possible for more Ugandans to be absorbed for employment at URA regardless of their gender, religion, tribe and ethnicity or even where they hail from.

Westerners and males may appear to be currently outnumbering the rest but the situation was much worse four years ago which is why the very prudent Musinguzi (during the COSASE interface) called on MPs to support his deliberate and well-intentioned reforms and efforts aimed at making the organisation more inclusive of Ugandans from all parts of the country. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [whatsapp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).