Lawmakers on Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Thursday quizzed officials of Ministry of Works on why they hire out private architects to design their buildings, yet the Ministry has staff on payroll as architects.
The officials from the Ministry of Works had been summoned to respond to queries raised in the December 2019 audit report that highlighted that although the Ministry budgeted to spend Shs2.7Bn to support to computerized driving permit, only Shs2.3Bn was released but the Ministry never achieved the target.
Winstone Katusabe, the Commissioner of Transport and Road Safety at the Ministry of Works and Transport told Parliament that the funds were for construction of office premises for computerized driving permits, currently undertaken by Face Technologies, where the contractor is renting premises at Kyambogo.
He said that initially, there were plans to construct offices at Uganda Transport License Board, but these were dropped and changed to Uganda Railway Corporation, a decision that saw Ministry pay an additional cost for change in designs.
Katusabe explained, the decision to acquire new offices was in fulfillment of recommendations from Parliament and the change in location led to cost variance of about Shs192Mn.
It was then that James Waluswaka (Bunyole West) asked the officials why they hire out such services, “Ministry of Works is full of engineers, how do you give consultants to design buildings which you can design for yourself?”
Waiswa Bageya, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Works explained that although the Ministry has a department for public structures which has quantity surveyors, architectures.
“But the internal capacity is still low but we are moving towards that direction that eventually we can be able to do those plans ourselves. The problem emanates from structural adjustments. When we went through restructuring, they said the ministry let these activities be privatized and the Ministry can only be there for policy guidance and supervision that is why our capacity was eroded,” said Bageya.
Samson Bagonza, Chief Engineer at Ministry of Works clarified that the absence capacity is not in terms of experience but in terms of number noting, “The structure we have in that department, you may find they don’t have more than ten architects at ourselves. We provide technical services to entire government. So you may find one architect is involved in supervision of five projects. If you say you bring some of this project in house, it will suffer, you will be overstretched and affect efficiency.”
However, Nandala Mafabi, Chairperson PAC said the Ministers of Works should have fought hard to retain the old structure of engineers, that would have acted as model in Government.
He said, “Your supervisors should have said this is our own babies, let us sit on it and work on it. You would use all the knowledge and cut on expenses, it would be one of the examples why you need internal capacity in government.”
