INSTITUTIONALISING THE SPARK: Why Uganda Must Move from Anti-Corruption Populism to Cabinet-Level Reform. Balaam’s Campaign has Revealed something Important: Ugandans want to see Government Acting.

By Asuman Kiyingi

Across Uganda’s district headquarters, health centres, schools and roads, a new form of high-visibility government oversight has taken centre stage. Surprise field inspections led by the Minister of Local Government, Balaam Barugahara, alongside the Minister of State, Justine Nameere, have generated intense national debate. Their visits have exposed alleged ghost workers, payroll irregularities, questionable projects, poor construction and failures in service delivery.

For citizens exhausted by abandoned roads, dysfunctional health facilities and entrenched corruption, watching ministers leave their offices, descend on the field and demand answers feels like a long-overdue reckoning.

That public response should not be dismissed. As Vice-President Jessica Alupo recently observed, corruption is experienced most acutely by the ordinary Ugandan when a borehole breaks down, a school roof collapses or a health centre lacks basic medicines. Local government is where the citizen encounters the state most directly; it is therefore where public trust is either built or broken.

Balaam’s campaign has revealed something important: Ugandans want to see government acting. The energy is also spreading. Health Minister Dr Chris Baryomunsi has conducted surprise inspections at regional referral hospitals, while Works Minister Fred Byamukama has stepped up field inspections of infrastructure projects.

The question, therefore, is not whether this energy should be extinguished. It should not. The critical question is: what political architecture can sustain it and turn it into permanent state capacity?

Uganda already possesses a number of institutions charged with fighting corruption. The Inter-Agency Forum against Corruption brings together these public accountability institutions, with the Directorate for Ethics and Integrity serving as its Secretariat. Yet corruption remains deeply entrenched. The Inspectorate of Government has estimated that corruption costs Uganda roughly Shs9–10 trillion a year.

If highly visible ministerial interventions generate more public confidence than an elaborate accountability bureaucracy, the problem is not simply the absence of institutions. It is the failure to make those institutions function as a coherent national system. Uganda should therefore not extinguish Balaam’s spark. It should institutionalise it.

From Political Energy To State Capacity

The controversy surrounding some of the field methods has drawn legitimate warnings from local-government leaders and the legal fraternity. Public arrests, humiliation, prejudgment and disciplinary action without due process can raise serious constitutional and administrative-law concerns, particularly under Articles 28 and 42 of the Constitution. But it is equally important not to confuse unlawful enforcement with lawful inspection.

The Local Governments Act expressly gives the central ministry responsible for local government functions of guidance, inspection, monitoring and coordination. It also empowers authorised inspectors to enter premises, inspect records and investigate matters on their own initiative or following complaints. Those powers are intended to promote accountability, good governance and service delivery.

The problem, therefore, is not that ministers inspect local governments. The problem arises when inspection becomes trial, publicity becomes punishment and political pronouncement substitutes for lawful disciplinary or criminal proceedings.

The distinction matters

A district engineer who once treated an audit query as routine paperwork now knows that government may physically appear at a project site. A health worker accustomed to absenteeism knows that an unannounced inspection is possible. That visibility can have a deterrent effect.

But political energy is not institutional capacity. A campaign driven by individual personalities can expose failures; it cannot, by itself, build a durable accountability system.

The challenge is to convert visibility into systems, fearlessness into policy, and political energy into institutional capacity.

Follow The Money — And Follow It To The Centre

Local government officials found culpable of diversion, fraud or negligence must be held accountable. But Uganda’s corruption problem cannot be solved by policing the administrative periphery while failing to follow the money to its source.

The FY2026/27 Local Government Budget, including Parish Development Model funds, is about Shs8.2 trillion against a national budget of roughly Shs84.4 trillion. Local governments therefore account for less than 10 per cent of the national resource envelope.

Yet some of the country’s largest corruption risks lie beyond district headquarters: major procurement, infrastructure contracts, energy projects, debt-financed programmes, central ministries, classified expenditures, public enterprises and other large transactions where billions of shillings can be lost in a single decision.

The corruption that destroys a district road is tragic. But corruption embedded in a major central procurement contract can destroy dozens of district roads before a single tractor reaches the field.

This is why the current inspection campaign should travel up the accountability chain.

When an inspection uncovers a suspicious payroll, the question should not end with the district officer. Who authorised the payroll? Who verified it? Who failed to act on earlier audit warnings? If a road is badly constructed, who awarded the contract? Who certified the work? Who authorised payment? If a procurement price is inflated, who designed the specifications, who evaluated the bids, who approved the contract and where did the excess money go?

And when the Auditor General’s report identifies serious irregularities, the system should have a defined pathway for action.

That does not mean an audit finding should automatically produce a prosecution or forfeiture. Different institutions have different statutory mandates and evidentiary thresholds. But a serious finding should trigger mandatory consideration for the appropriate next step: procurement review, administrative action, criminal investigation, financial intelligence analysis, referral to the Inspectorate or Leadership Code machinery, or another lawful intervention.

The objective should be simple: nothing significant should disappear between detection and accountability.

Lessons From Matembe’s Tenure

Uganda’s own anti-corruption history offers a sobering lesson about what happens when political will encounters entrenched interests at the centre.

When Dr Miria Matembe became the country’s first Minister for Ethics and Integrity in 1998, heading a docket at full Cabinet level, she sought to use it as a serious political instrument for confronting abuse of power, corruption and the erosion of public integrity.

In her memoir, The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy Betrayed, Matembe recounts not simply individual battles but the gradual erosion and containment of the institutional architecture intended to make ethics and accountability effective. Her account is important because it demonstrates that the weakening of an accountability institution or framework does not necessarily occur through one dramatic abolition. It can occur gradually—through political resistance, conditional lukewarm support, institutional fragmentation, diminished authority and the marginalisation of the very offices expected to confront abuse of power.

Matembe’s eventual departure in 2003 did not end that process. Uganda continues to operate the portfolio under a State Minister in the Office of the President, while underfunding remains a persistent complaint and institutional challenge.

The lesson here is more important than the precise administrative chronology.

It is politically easier to demand integrity from a district officer than to construct institutions capable of demanding it from the political and financial centre.

That is why an anti-corruption strategy confined to inspections of district engineers, teachers, health workers and local officials risks treating symptoms while leaving the larger architecture of patronage and centralised procurement untouched.

Uganda’s anti-corruption institutions have grown in number and sophistication. What has not kept pace is the capacity to make them operate as a single, coordinated and effective accountability chain.

Restore A Full Cabinet Ministry And Strengthen The LAF

This is why Uganda should restore Ethics and Integrity to full Cabinet status. The proposal is not to create another command centre over the Inspectorate of Government, the Auditor General, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Judiciary, the Police, the Leadership Code Tribunal or other independent institutions.

Those institutions must retain their constitutional and statutory independence. The proposal is instead for a dedicated, full Cabinet Ministry for Ethics and Integrity, with an independent budget vote, providing political leadership to the national anti-corruption strategy and strengthening the Secretariat of the Inter-Agency Forum.

This would be coordination without capture. The Minister would not command the IGG, direct the DPP, instruct the Auditor General, interfere with judicial decisions or dictate the outcome of investigations.

Rather, the Minister would ensure that the institutions responsible for different stages of accountability are connected by clear protocols and measurable national objectives.

An audit finding should not languish in an audit report. A procurement red flag should not disappear into a file. A criminal investigation should not become indefinitely dormant. A Leadership Code breach should not remain unresolved. Recovered assets should not disappear from public view.

The IAF should therefore be strengthened into a genuine national coordination mechanism, capable of tracking the movement of serious cases from detection and verification through investigation, prosecution, adjudication and recovery, while leaving each institution to exercise its own statutory powers.

Uganda has already recognised the need for inter-agency coordination. The problem is that coordination without sufficient political weight, institutional capacity and case-tracking mechanisms can become another layer of bureaucracy.

What is required is a Cabinet-level political champion capable of asking, at every stage: What happened to this case? Who has it? What action was taken? What remains outstanding?

Redirecting The Catalyst

This is where the present campaign can become transformative. Balaam Barugahara and his active Cabinet colleagues have demonstrated the political power of visible accountability. Their interventions have shown that government can leave its offices, go to the field and confront failures that citizens have long complained about.

That political energy should not become another temporary campaign. It should become the catalyst for a national accountability architecture.

Indeed, if Government is persuaded that Hon. Balaam Barugahara’s fearlessness, activism and capacity to mobilise public attention are assets in the fight against corruption, there is an obvious way to deploy them beyond the district headquarters. He could be entrusted with the restored Cabinet portfolio for Ethics and Integrity, where that political energy could be brought to bear not merely on local officials but on the entire national accountability chain.

That would not make him a super-Minister. His role would be to provide political leadership and coordination, while the Inspectorate of Government, Auditor General, DPP, Police, Leadership Code Tribunal and other statutory institutions retain their independent mandates.

The same determination displayed at a district health centre should be applied to a central procurement agency. The same urgency brought to an abandoned road should be brought to a multi-billion-shilling infrastructure contract. The same question asked of a missing local worker should be asked of an unexplained payment at the centre.

Where did the money go? Who authorised it? Who benefited? Who knew? Who failed to act? And what happened after the red flag was raised? That is how Uganda can move from spectacle to statecraft.

The goal should not be to create a super-Minister who arrests, prosecutes and punishes. That would merely replace one institutional weakness with another form of executive overreach.

The goal is more ambitious: to create a political and institutional system in which no anti-corruption agency operates in isolation, no serious finding disappears without follow-up, and accountability reaches as confidently into the centre as it does into the districts.

Uganda does not need fewer anti-corruption institutions. It needs institutions that work together, institutions backed by political authority, and an accountability chain that reaches from the village project to the national procurement file. Do not extinguish the spark. Institutionalise it.

The writer is a senior advocate and former Minister