Unaccounted for funds in Greater Masaka region

Greater Masaka districts were also pointed as those that did not account for funds in the just released Auditor general report.

Alebtong district continues to loose funds

From the range of the selected districts from the 2013/2014 auditor generals report a number of districts had outstanding administrative advances.

Abim district administration topped the list with an out standing advance of 233.7 million shillings was followed by Alebtong with a total of 17.4 million shillings. Alebtong town council did not perform well either posting an outstanding advance of 14.6 million shillings.

Agago town council also featured in the list with an advance of 10.8 million shillings while Abim town council was a rather better performer posting an outstanding advance of 7 million shillings

From these selected ditrict with huge outstanding advances is a clear indicator that more needs to be done towards improving financial accountability of all local governmnets in the country. Short of living to this expectation efforts to have services decentralized to the grass root will remain futile.

Auditor General Report reveals misuse of funds in Mbale municipality

Lack of accountability has been cited over and over again as one of the many factors affecting the decentralization programme in Uganda.

The 2013/2014 Auditor general report released on the 31^st of March this Year confirms that local governments continue to fail to account how they spend public funds causing millions of tax payers monies to go to waste.

Take for example Mbale municipality council, the report indicates that over 21 million shillings remained unaccounted for by the time of the audit. The funds could have been used to address my development challenges that the municipality continues to struggle with ranging from poor roads infrastructure, lack of clean water, lack of desk in some schools and poor street lighting among others.

Auditor’s report further showed that despite the existing laws concerning the procurement process, leaders in Mbale flouted the guidelines. According to the report 61.2 million shillings was advanced to various individuals to procure items for construction without being subjected to competitive bidding process contrary to the law.

For a municipality with zillions of development gaps continued misuse of public funds is absolutely unacceptable, 61 million shillings could for instance be used to purchase garbage skips for many residential estates or even facilitating actual garbage collection.

Scrutinizing such important financial reports is paramount to all stakeholders so that people can demand for answers from leaders who are mandated to ensure that public funds are spent towards implementing the intended projects.

It is also important for the electorates to demand for answers from the leaders because they pay for the taxes in order to get better services within their localities, silence among members of the public as the leaders continue to misuse public funds will only make the leaders more complacent on accountability.

Ready to blog

Since i was named an African Centre for Media Excellence local government fellow early this year i have learnt a lot of information that i have been ignoring as a journalist. This experience has enriched my reporting on local government on many fronts. From now on i be sharing so of my reporting here so that the world cam read the progress Uganda is making in terms of decentralization.