Africa-Press – Uganda. Ms Beti Olive Kamya has been exhibiting lots of energy since September when she was sworn in as the new Inspector General of Government (IGG). She committed to being unrelenting in her pursuit of the corrupt.
She also said the IGG’s office will do things a bit differently. She talked of introducing a new dimension to the fight against corruption by paying more attention to detection and prevention as opposed to waiting for the crime to be committed before pouncing on the perpetrators.
This, she said, will be achieved through the introduction of lifestyle audits. Lifestyle audits, also known as lifestyle monitoring or in other cases lifestyle checks, are accountability tools that are often used to detect and prevent corruption. They are usually conducted when one’s outward lifestyle suggests that he/she is spending and living way beyond his/her known income.
Ms Kamya assumed office less than a month after Afro Barometer, a Pan-African non-profit corporation headquartered in Ghana, which periodically carries out national public attitude surveys on democracy, governance, and society, released a report titled ‘Failure or Fatigue? Examining the changing trends in perceived corruption in Uganda’, which revealed that a majority of Ugandans do not believe that all the interventions put in place by the government to be effective or deliver results in the fight against corruption.
Against such a background, seeing Ms Kamya making, as she did on Friday, a courtesy call on the Criminal Investigations and Intelligence Department (CIID) of the Police, with which her office is meant to partner in the fight against corruption and committing to work shoulder to shoulder with them and; committing to drawing the citizenry into the fight against corruption has a good fill to it.
It gives hope that something might finally start happening to combat a vice that is believed to be gobbling up at least Shs20trillion per year.
The problem, though is that Ugandans are all too familiar with big shows of commitment to the fight against corruption, which end in naught.
In December 2019, Mr Museveni led government officials in an anti-corruption walk in Kampala. A few months later, when Transparency International released the Corruption Perceptions Index of 2020, Uganda was 142nd out of 180 countries with a score of 27 percent.
That is why the need for the achievement of results assumes a heightened level of urgency. Ms Kamya’s challenge is twofold. She must not only walk the talk, but also be seen to vigorously walk it. And when she finally does, she must maintain the momentum.
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