By : Frank Byaruhanga, Communication practitioner
Minister of Local Government Hon. Balaam Barugahara Ateenyi moves from one district to another with a team of officials, police officers and investigators from the State House Anti-Corruption Unit. He walks into health centers and schools without warning, counts the students present, measures unfinished buildings, bridges, and asks hard questions about money that was supposed to reach the people.
Community people gather. Some cheer. Others watch in uneasy silence. What Hon. Balaam is doing feels familiar to many who have watched civil society organizations and media houses try the same thing for years, only to find themselves under attack. Yet this time the effort carries the weight of government authority.
The excitement, however, sits beside a deeper unease. Citizens know that community meetings have been held before, officials have been interdicted for a few days, and yet the millions and billions lost to corruption have rarely returned.
Medicines still disappear even when Resident District Commissioners and District Internal Security Officers are nearby. Teachers still improvise with cassava chalk. Health centres still run short of basic drugs.
The government that once fought to liberate the people is now widely seen as one that also loots them. Against this backdrop, Balaam’s campaign is both a promise and a test of whether visible action can finally grow into something lasting.
Year after year the Auditor General’s reports have painted a sobering picture of how much public money slips away. Estimates cited by the Inspectorate of Government and repeated in official discussions place the annual cost of corruption at roughly 9.144 trillion shillings. That sum is large enough to cover a significant share of the national budget and could, if recovered, transform the very schools and Hospitals that Hon. Balaam now inspects.
The Auditor General’s own annual accounts do not always reduce the problem to a single headline figure, yet they consistently reveal the same pattern: large volumes of unaccounted expenditure, irregular payments, diverted funds, unfinished projects that have already been paid for, and domestic arrears that keep growing.
In a recent report the value of unfunded invoices alone stood at more than eleven trillion shillings by the close of the financial year. Non-performing receivables, questionable certifications and misclassified spending appear again and again. These are not abstract numbers. They explain why a health center may have only Panadol and condoms on the shelves, why a school may lack chalk, and why roads collapse after a single rainy season.
Uganda already has clear laws for dealing with people accused of corruption. The Anti-Corruption Act of 2009, later amended, defines the offences carefully. It covers bribery, embezzlement, abuse of office, causing financial loss, and fraudulent dealing with public property. The Act applies to both public servants and private individuals who deal with government money. It also allows courts to confiscate property obtained through corruption. Alongside it stand the Inspectorate of Government Act, the Leadership Code Act, the Penal Code, and the Anti-Money Laundering Act.
When an official is suspected, the process begins with investigation. The Inspectorate of Government, an independent body created by the Constitution, has the power to investigate, to order searches, to seize documents, and to direct arrests. Police officers may also arrest a suspect if they have reasonable grounds to believe an offence has been committed.
Under the Criminal Procedure Code, a person who is arrested must be brought before a court within a reasonable time, usually within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The right to bail is protected by the Constitution, though courts balance that right against the risk that the accused might interfere with witnesses or flee. Serious cases go to the Anti-Corruption Court of the High Court. If convicted, the person faces imprisonment, fines, and the possible loss of property acquired through the crime.
In theory the system is orderly and fair. In practice it often moves slowly, and high-level cases frequently stall.
Hon. Balaam’s approach is more immediate and public. He and his colleagues conduct open field audits of government projects and programmes. They visit construction sites, schools and health centres, compare records with reality, and invite local people to speak. When they find ghost workers on a payroll, inflated pupil numbers that attract more money than the school deserves, or a toilet block built without a pit at a cost of tens of millions of shillings, they order arrests on the spot. The arrests are carried out by police in the presence of other agencies.
The minister insists that the action is lawful, that the purpose is both to gather information and to deter others, and that the suspects will later face proper investigation and possible charges. The method is dramatic and sometimes controversial.
The political setting in which this campaign unfolds is complicated. Uganda’s system of decentralization was meant to bring services closer to the people, but it has also created many opportunities for patronage and quiet theft.
Political corruption, the large-scale use of public resources to maintain power and reward allies, remains the most stubborn form of the problem. Campaigns against petty and mid-level graft often succeed for a season, yet the deeper networks that protect the powerful stay intact.
Civil society groups and journalists who once published exposés found themselves under pressure. The same government that now supports Hon. Balaam’s efforts has at times treated independent anti-corruption work with suspicion. Still, Hon Balaam says, the President backed the current drive, strengthened the minister’s security and signaling that the campaign has political cover. Whether that support will extend to cases that touch the highest levels of power is the question that hangs over everything.
There is really good in what is happening. When a minister walks into a school and discovers that half the reported pupils do not exist, money that would have been wasted can be redirected. When ghost workers are removed from a health center payroll, the remaining staff may finally receive proper support.
Public rallies give ordinary citizens a chance to speak about roads that wash away after the first rains or hospitals that have no medicine. The attention can force local officials to work harder, at least while the spotlight is on them. Over time, if the recovered funds are properly tracked and if convictions follow the arrests, public trust can begin to grow.
Service delivery can improve. Young people watching the process may learn that stealing from the public is no longer risk-free. In the best case, the campaign could help shift a culture that has come to accept shortages and missing funds as normal.
For the effort to endure and deepen over the next five years, it must move beyond the drama of public arrests and become a steady, institutional habit that directly confronts the scale of loss revealed by the Auditor General. In the first year the field audits should expand from eastern Uganda into every region, but they must be paired with rapid, transparent follow-through. Every interdiction should lead within weeks to a clear investigation report published for the public. Recovered money should be returned to the same schools, and roads from which it was stolen, so that citizens can see the direct benefit of reclaiming even a fraction of the estimated nine trillion shillings lost each year.
Digital payroll and enrolment systems already under discussion must be completed and linked nationwide, making ghost workers and inflated numbers far harder to invent.
District service commissions, procurement committees and parish development structures need continuous independent audits rather than occasional visits. The Inspectorate of Government and the Auditor General must receive reliable funding and genuine operational independence so that cases involving senior political figures are not quietly shelved.
Courts handling corruption matters should be given extra capacity to clear the backlog, ensuring that trials conclude within months rather than years. Whistle-blowers who report wrongdoing must be protected in practice, not only on paper, so that ordinary teachers, nurses and engineers feel safe enough to speak. The goal must be measurable reduction in the irregularities that appear year after year in the Auditor General’s reports.
In the fourth and fifth years the campaign should no longer depend on the energy of one or two ministers. Local government councils, community monitoring groups and civil society should be trained and resourced to conduct their own regular checks, with findings feeding into a national online dashboard that any citizen can consult.
Political financing rules need tightening so that the pressure to raise money for elections does not continually push officials toward corruption. Asset declarations by leaders must be verified and made public in a usable form. Most importantly, the culture of acceptance must be challenged in schools and workplaces until the next generation regards the disappearance of public money as abnormal rather than inevitable. If even a significant portion of the annual multi-trillion-shilling leakage can be stopped, the difference will be felt in every classroom and every health center.
If these steps are taken, the Uganda of 2031 could look noticeably different. Health centres would more often have the medicines they are budgeted to receive. Teachers would work with proper materials instead of improvised substitutes. Roads and school buildings would last longer because contracts are monitored and substandard work is punished.
Public trust, though still cautious, would rest on evidence of recovered funds and completed prosecutions rather than on temporary excitement. Political corruption would not vanish, but it would face higher costs and greater public scrutiny. The decentralized system would begin to deliver the services it was designed to provide, and the phrase “our government is poor” would lose some of its bitter familiarity.
Without these steady, unglamorous changes, the present campaign risks becoming another memory of hopeful noise that faded when the cameras left. The laws already exist. The Auditor General’s reports continue to quantify the scale of the problem. The public desire for accountability is clear. The next five years will show whether Uganda chooses to turn that desire into a durable practice that begins to reclaim the trillions lost each year, or allows the old patterns of interdiction without recovery, and spectacle without system change, to reassert themselves.
For now, the people are watching, measuring the difference between today’s excitement and the quieter, more demanding work that must follow if the promise is to become reality.
