As mixed reactions on the controversial Kifesi arrests and unconditional releases intensify, Police was also recently slapped with a huge punch on in terms of finances.
According to the 2018/19 Budget Framework Paper, the Force was allocated 514.7 billion shillings out of the required 1.2 trillion earlier requested by the institution.
In a confidential interview with one of the bosses at Ministry of Finance revealed that police budget was chopped not because the state is curtailed with limited funds but because of multiple issues related to monetary discipline.
He says that the institution has overtime failed to fully account for the huge sums of money allocated since a lot of resources meant to run special activities are instead channeled to fund other unrealistic and question missions.
“If I may ask you, what fundamental task do you think police did in the entire 2017? There is a lot to do with operations which events can’t be fully accounted for since in most cases there have been no positive results got from such so called operations. In every country, Police is one of the highly funded departments of Government but we had to chop it for now because there is somewhere we need our police to be and it should begin with them fully accounting for small sums of money before inject more. Do you remember when President said the institution is infiltrated with criminals? We still want to get assurance that the huge money we allocate is never mismanaged.” He told this Website.
However the Uganda Police Force has decried a budget shortfall of 721 billion shillings, saying that it is a threat to the authority’s function.
Institution requires 71.7 billion for the construction of staff quarters, but only 4.6 billion was allocated.
The force also requires 114 billion shillings for Criminal Investigation and Intelligence but only shs 9 billion was allocated, yet still the E-Policing project which requires Shs 203 billion was not allocated any funds.
The Police Chief, Gen kale Kayihura yesterday pleaded with the Parliamentary Committee on Defence and Internal Affairs to consider increasing their budget for easy execution of their tasks.
