By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni has ordered a review of the public service and the republic’s array of state and executive agencies.

The president said in a letter that the goal here is to cut duplication and wastage of resources.

Many have panned Museveni’s directive, noting rightly that he is the one who created the duplicate agencies in the first place. The two areas where probably Museveni himself has lost count of the initiatives he pushed through, are agriculture and poverty reduction.

Since 1996, the chain of his promises on the campaign to “boost” or “modernise” agriculture, and to cut youth unemployment, have ended in the creation of funds to sort these problems out. They have all ended in failure, with the funds “eaten” and programmes run into the ground – by ruling NRM operatives he handpicked.

In the end, as seen in recent months, Museveni has in desperation taken to wheeling jerricans on bicycles to the villages, and using discarded mineral water bottles, to “teach” peasants irrigation.

Despite the derision visited on him, Museveni is right on this one. Between 1988 and 2000, his government carried out a range of civil service, economic, and other reforms that eliminated bureaucracy, downsized government, and unleashed the most exciting period of prosperity of the past 30 years in Uganda.

The bureaucracy has fought back and regrown with a vengeance, helped by Museveni’s own addiction to patronage politics.

Despite its problems, Uganda does not have Kenya and Tanzania’s sprawling parastatal sectors. Still, if Museveni were looking to do another bout of red-tape cutting, he could actually look to Kenya.

Rwanda dealt with this by establishing the Rwanda Development Board, as a one-stop centre for all the travails that entrepreneurs go through to set up and run their businesses. But while that may work for a country the size of Rwanda, it wouldn’t for Uganda.

Kenya took the technology route. It built what came to be known as the “e-Citizen” platform that came into use without fanfare. From passport applications, to driving licences, increasingly all these are done on e-Citizen, and payments are made through M-Pesa without leaving your desk. You can get your new driving licence tab and print it out in less than two minutes.

In the near future, it will be possible to consolidate the services most ordinary citizens need in a single portal, and thus eliminate possibly up to 40 per cent of government departments and a host of state and agencies. There’s no reason why, seeds and fertiliser shouldn’t be distributed through an e-Citizen conduit.

The rest could be sorted out through giving the money the government wastes to universities. Museveni doesn’t have to spend time cutting up mineral water bottles to do irrigation or set up endless Entandikwa (startup) programmes, which are often quickly hijacked by pro-regime leeches.

He can put up a pot of innovation money, and invite universities – and indeed anyone out there who thinks they have a bright idea – to come up with clever solutions. The university or company that wins gets to run the programme.

Otherwise, Museveni will soon find out that there is actually a limit to how much you can reform government. Karl Marx may have been right after all. It’s best that, at some point, the state just withers away.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and Rogue Chiefs. Twitter@cobbo3