Some lawmakers on Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee have called on Government to scrap off positions of agriculture extension workers over poor service delivery, saying the group is just bloating Government’s payroll with no services being rendered to farmers.
The call was made by Nandala Mafabi (Budadiri West) during an interface with officials from the Ministry of Agriculture who had been summoned to respond to the audit queries raised in the June 2022 Auditor General’s report.
In the report, the auditors raised concern over the lack of performance indicators set to measure the performance of the extension workers despite funds being spent annually on this activity, yet the Ministry of Agriculture is expected to spearhead the implementation of the primary pillar of the Parish Development Model (PDM) known as the Agriculture Value Chain Development that encompasses; agriculture production, storage, processing and marketing.
“Failure to develop performance indicators significantly curtails the overall monitoring and progress of the agriculture value chain activities across the country thereby, limiting the intended impact of the PDM with regards to increasing efficiency, productivity and profitability of the subsistence households,” read in part the Audit report.
Reacting to the findings in the Audit report, Mafabi remarked, “There is no reason why we should have agriculture extension people when we are paying them money and they aren’t doing their work. I ask the accounting officer to recommend to parliament that this should be scrapped because we have agricultural officers being paid as scientists and high money and they aren’t doing work and that is what we call nugatory expenditure and so there is no need for you to go for more recruitment until we do away with already recruited there should be a recommendation that they should go.”
Although Fredrick Angura (Tororo South) didn’t call for the scrapping off of extension workers, he called for improvement in their supervision because of their dismal performance, saying failure to do so would likely impact on the performance of the PDM.
He said, “We have the flagship programme of Parish Development Model and we can’t achieve success in this programme if we relax as far as extension workers is concerned, you need to put your feet firm, the successes of PDM will be reliant on our recruitment of extension workers but also facilitating them. In fact, it should be one key issue.”
David Kasura, Permanent Secretary Ministry of Agriculture in response said that the Directorate of Agricultural Extension Services worked with District Local Government Production Departments and identified key outputs that they should report on with performance indicators and that the DAES is currently updating these indicators in the ongoing development of the National Agricultural Extension Strategy 2022/2023-2025/2026 to include relevant output of the Parish Development Model (PDM).
“The issue of the agriculture extension services is money and it is very difficult to have output indicators when you haven’t given them the facilitation to ensure that these output indicators are carried out,” said Kasura.
