{UAH} WITHOUT CORRUPTION UGANDA WILL CEASE TO BE

Uganda: Punish the Corrupt to Restore Sanity

Tagged:

• Corruption
• East Africa
• Governance
• Legal Affairs
• Uganda

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Photo: Michael Kakumirizi/Daily Monitor

Pension scam suspects Jimmy Lwamafa (right) Kiwanuka Kunsa (2nd right) and Christopher Obey (3rd right) listen as Mr Kiwanuka Kunsa (centre) consults with their lawyers led by counsel Nsubuga Mubiru (3rd left) at the Anti-Corruption Court.

EDITORIAL

On Tuesday, Uganda Debt Network (UDN) launched a report in Kampala with details of unabated corruption scandals in the country. The report describes the fight against corruption as a failure. It attributes this to failure by government to grant the powers to either recover or confiscate property belonging to corrupt officials.

According to a UDN director, the way forward is for the government to constitute a body empowered to oversee the seizure of properties, deliberately strengthened and operationalised to check graft at all levels.

Both the report and its recommendation as already indicated are welcome. Talk, especially by government officials, is that the country is destined to attain a middle-income status by the year 2020. This is a very ambitious projection that requires maximum discipline, especially financial and moral restraint at individual, family, community, institutional, government as well as national levels. Laxity at any turn along the ascendency development path can only set up a fertile ground for national retardation and increased poverty.

To check this, there is need for creation of a very hostile environment for proven culprits of corruption. There should be severe sanctions against the corrupt and this should not just be limited to targeting the concerned individual. Rather, the properties of the corrupt should also be confiscated. But if it involves swindling money, then the culprits should be forced to refund it. There will be great gains if hard punitive actions are visited upon the corrupt in this country. Considering that we are facing major challenges of poor state of hospitals characterised by lack of drugs and poorly motivated health workers; sorry state of schools both in terms of buildings and standards; the ever acute shortage of housing, poor roads, unreliable transport system characterised by impassable roads, among others, there can be no better time to end corruption than now.

Corruption rears its ugly head every time you are confronted with dilapidated structures in public hospitals, when farmers cannot easily access markets to sell their produce due to impassable feeder roads; when the right drugs can't be delivered to the right hospitals at the right time - the reason in some cases patients are served with expired drugs; to mention but a few. So to become a middle-income nation, Uganda can only succeed if it keeps the corruption level very low.

To bring sanity, the government should punish the corrupt and strip them of all their ill-gotten property.

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