{UAH} Allan/Pojim/WBK: Museveni does a Magufuli, Ugandans get all sniffy about it - Comment

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/Museveni-does-a-Magufuli-on-healthcare/434750-3343954-h8wu2oz/index.html

Museveni does a Magufuli, Ugandans get all sniffy about it

It is coming on two weeks since Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni declared his current term of office will be a "no nonsense" one. He made the pronouncement during a retreat bringing together ruling party apparatchiks, Cabinet ministers and senior technocrats.

During this term, he was saying, he will not tolerate people who are not pulling their weight when it comes to service delivery, eliminating corruption from public life, and delivering Uganda to "middle-income status" by the year 2020.

Few believe the three ambitions are achievable, for both technical and political reasons, but that is a story for the future. Suffice it to say that many found the declaration curious, given that it is years since he started vowing to "wage war" on those same people, especially after he defeated the various armed groups that sought to force regime change, whom he had long blamed for distracting him.

Party loyalists, however, seemed energised by this latest message, and took to repeating it all over the place. A common response from sceptical onlookers, though, was, "We have heard all this before."

Within days, however, the president began to show that this time round it wasn't going to be "all bark, no bite." The first victims of the new approach were a bunch of health workers in a government clinic who, according to local residents, were behaving badly towards patients.

Media reports suggested some were not even at work when the president visited, during normal working hours.

Angered by what he had heard and seen, Museveni did a "Magufuli" – he dismissed them on the spot, together with the head of the district's health services. Although in typical Ugandan style the summary dismissal turned out to have been a mere "removal" from their posts so that their superiors could do whatever they chose to do with them, a tough and practical message had been conveyed to all those caught engaging in 'nonsense."

The local people were quoted in the media as celebrating the president's "tough stance" and the subsequent decision by the Uganda People's Defence Forces to send in military health personnel to provide cover as the civilian health authorities figured out what to do.

Ugandans being Ugandans, however, soon enough there was a chorus condemning the president for acting outside the law, possibly orchestrated by the same people who had been dismissing his "no nonsense" declaration as mere talk.

Others rightly decried his treatment of the symptoms as against the disease itself that is ailing the Ugandan health sector, which analysts routinely refer to as "collapsing" or "decaying."

As one commentator after another pointed out, the factors that push health workers to behave badly are legion. At a personal level, they include meagre pay, poor professional supervision or none at all, lack of vehicles and fuel, lack of housing close to where they work, overwork, and limited opportunities for professional advancement in a country where the dilapidated health facilities and systems have not been upgraded for well over half a century.

Add to all this the inadequacy of inputs such as medicines and sundries, the absence or obsolescence of equipment, and the meagre operational budgets that leave facilities unable to pay their utility bills or effect minor repairs to vehicles, equipment, and physical infrastructure. It thus takes superhuman dedication for public sector workers to remain faithful to the ethics of their profession.

These things are well known, not only to health professionals who have to put up with them on a daily basis and researchers who study them, but also to ordinary members of the public who seek care from public facilities and even those who, because they can, have voted with their feet and abandoned the public health system, opting for private provision.

Not too long ago, Members of Parliament even threatened to not approve the budget if the health sector were not allocated more money.

Criticism of President Museveni's palliative solution is therefore largely justified. That said, at least it ignited a public debate in which some necessary light has been shed on the real issues he and his government ought to address.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: fgmutebi@yahoo.com

Museveni does a Magufuli, Ugandans get all sniffy about it - Comment

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/Museveni-does-a-Magufuli-on-healthcare/434750-3343954-h8wu2oz/index.html

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