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Creative managers do magic with numbers, they just don’t build roads

Saturday August 22 2015

Uganda’s public managers have over the years developed a culture of creativity that basically boggles the mind.

Over the past eight years, roads have been allocated the largest share of the national budget. And, sure enough, the recently instituted judicial commission of inquiry into the Uganda National Roads Authority’s affairs has in barely a month provided a huge cache of examples of creative financial management by UNRA’s managers.

For example, the initial skeleton staff who started off the authority eight years ago had a high sense of self-sacrifice and avoided employing too many people — to avoid over-staffing, you understand.

So, one administrator doubled as procurement manager when a lot of purchasing had to be done, thereby saving on the salary for the procurement department. He also brought on board some very creative contractors indeed.

There was this consultant who provided valuation services to the authority and was so frugal that he never rented an office and operated from his briefcase as he valued land worth hundreds of billions of shillings where a road was going to pass, for compensating claimants.

He further saved time by not dealing with physical claimants and instead created most claimants on his laptop and collected their payments on their behalf, thus saving them transport costs. That was on the Kaiso-Tonya road intended to open up the oil fields of western Uganda.

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As UNRA staff acquired valuation skills from the consultant, they displayed a heightened level of innovativeness when dealing with the new express highway being constructed from Kampala city to Entebbe airport.

Here, they created claimants for real land. There was a tiny plot for which 15 title deed certificates were issued, and billions of shillings paid out in compensation.

The authority thus helped spread its creativity to other government departments, in this case the land registry. For why register 15 titles for 15 plots when one plot can do for all the 15 titles needed to process 15 payments?

As they were processing payments for the Entebbe expressway, they devised ways of spreading equity and creating more landowners, in the interest of social justice presumably. So some public lands, particularly in protected wetlands and forest reserves, were issued with titles in real people’s names, thereby creating a few new landlords who were paid billions in compensation.

UNRA staff also showed creativity in preventing overuse of weighbridge equipment. All over the country, they let three-quarters or so of overloaded trucks bypass the weighbridges, thereby increasing their lifespan by not overworking them.

On the Kawempe-Kafu road that connects the capital to northern Uganda, the creative staff hired a ghost supervising company that earned several million dollars without wasting anybody’s time on the ground. Work that was supposed to last 18 months thus took 120 months.

If they had brought in a physical company, it would probably have taken 240 months as they would have kept on distracting the road builders.

It takes unassuming heroes to make such phenomenal organisations actually work. In UNRA, these were the midlevel managers who kept avoiding promotion, which would have taken them away from working in the sun and disrupted their creativity.  

Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International Fellow for development journalism. E-mail: [email protected]

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