The ongoing mass restructuring at the Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA) is expected to bring reforms and improve efficiency but the exercise comes with a huge cost to the taxpayer.

The authority seeks to nearly double the staff numbers and put in place a new salary structure that can compete in the market. Besides 80 senior managers who were sacked in June, another 890 staff were given notice of collective termination at the end of September. But the latter were told to reapply as the authority seeks to clean up and build a robust team of 1,736 staff.

Relative to the existing staff, 1,736 is a big number and will take a chunk of tax money, but it is informed by the need to handle most of the work in-house, UNRA executive director Allen Kagina said.

“The wage bill will be higher because we are trying to bring here some of the functions, such as supervision, design of roads and bridges...these were previously outsourced,” Ms Kagina told The EastAfrican.  

At 18.2 per cent of total resource allocations in the 2015/16 budget, translating into Ush3.32 trillion ($910 million), the road transport sector already takes the lion’s share of budget allocations, but Ms Kagina also indicated that UNRA still needs to recruit and retain the best workforce available in the market.

UNRA board of directors chairperson Angela Kiryabwire Kanyima, who signed the notice of comprehensive restructuring on September 29, said although the authority had since its creation in 2008 executed a number of good road projects, it needed to operate like a modern business.

“UNRA has continued to execute its statutory mandate with a lot of inefficiencies, thereby undermining the essential principles of its establishment under Section 3 of the UNRA Act, that is, to operate in an economic, cost-effective and business-like manner,” she wrote.

Speaking to journalists in Kampala on October 5, Ms Kagina also decried the high level of inefficiency at UNRA that was attributed to, among other things, low pay.

“We cannot expect efficiency at UNRA if we pay a good engineer Ush4 million ($1,100) when his peers are earning three of four times more out there in the private sector,” she said.

“Of course we cannot say we will match the private sector salaries, but we will pay well enough to retain good workers.”

For a long time, UNRA was the cause of concern among key donors of the road sector due to a high level of corruption in the award of tenders, staff working with expired contracts and flouting of procurement rules. The most dramatic was the tender awarded to a ghost American company to build the 74km Mukono-Katosi-Nyenga road.

The government gave Eutaw Construction Company Inc. a Ush24.8 billion ($6.8 million) advance payment before discovering that the outfit had issued forged insurance bonds.

Eutaw then illegally subcontracted 100 per cent of the Ush165 billion ($45.4 million) project to Chinese firm Chongqing International, an investigation report revealed.