By Bagarukayo Abdu
If the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) can set a hard annual target for how much tax it must collect and be held accountable for it, then there is no reason every ministry in Uganda cannot operate under the same principle.
Right now, we judge ministries by speeches, budgets and intentions. What we rarely see is a clear, public number that says: this is what you must achieve by June 30, and if you miss it, you will have to explain why. That gap is why too many government programmes drift without urgency and why citizens lose faith that public money is producing real results.
The URA model works because it removes ambiguity. Each financial year, the authority knows exactly how much revenue it is expected to mobilise. That target shapes planning, hiring, enforcement and daily operations. Performance is measured, reported and debated in public.
Ministers should face the same discipline.
The Ministry of Health should have a target number of facilities upgraded and patients receiving treatment within a set time. The Ministry of Education should have a target for classrooms built, textbooks delivered and literacy rates improved. The Ministry of Works and Transport should have kilometres of roads constructed and maintained, not just funds allocated.
When a minister walks into Cabinet, the first question should be simple: Did you hit your target?
Setting targets does not mean reducing governance to spreadsheets. It means giving every ministry a shared language of results that citizens can understand and Parliament can scrutinise.
It forces planning to start from outcomes and work backwards to budgets, instead of starting from budgets and hoping for outcomes.
It also gives ministers the authority they need, because a clear target comes with the expectation that they will be allowed to make the operational decisions required to meet it.
Uganda already has the tools to do this. We have the National Development Plan, we have performance contracts under the Public Service, and we have the Office of the Prime Minister that can monitor delivery.
What is missing is the political will to make those targets public, binding and tied to consequences.
URA did not wait for perfect conditions before being told how much it must collect. It was given the bar, monitored on progress and adjusted as it went. The rest of government can follow the same path for health, education, agriculture and infrastructure.
Citizens are tired of hearing what government intends to do. They want to know what government will deliver, by when, and how we will know it happened.
Ministerial targets make that possible.
If Uganda wants the kind of accountability that drives growth and restores trust, then every ministry needs its own version of the URA target, clear, measurable and impossible to ignore.
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