When an entrepreneur is starting up a new enterprise, he/she starts with skelton staff but when the business is starting to pick momentum, the entrepreneurs may hire a minimum team to meet the available work load.
However, when the business makes a bit more money, there is always need for expansion of the business to take things further.
This is the same context in which we ought to begin to see Uganda National Authority (UNRA), an agency of Government established by UNRA Act of 2006, with the responsibility of maintaining, managing and developing the National road net work on top of also managing Ferry services , among others.
Government has been planning to table a proposal to merge several agencies to mother ministries, UNRA Inclusive, in a bid to curb the public cost which had, as of last year, amounted to 1.3Trillion.
During the colonial administration, the Works Ministry was managing only 692km of paved roads.
However, during the post independence period of between 1962-86, momentum started to pick, and as a country, we had only a total of 1175kms.
Currently, our country is developing and expanding her tentacles with the help of UNRA with a total of more than 4,793KM new paved roads, and maintaining a total of 1,924 KM of existing dilapidated paved roads.
Where is the logic of merging a fully instituted entity, morever managed on tenets of modern management practices like corporate governance?
Wisdom would be that Government trains more staff through capacity building to enable UNRA increase their capacity from paving an average 400km per annum to probably 1000km.
I can testify that H.E the President is aware of this logic and it is the members of parliament who are supposed to rise to the occasion and stop our country and economy from going in a reverse gear.
Opinion by Ben Ssebuguzi
The author is an economist and entrepreneur.
