Minister Musasizi Monitors Government Projects, commissions Maternal Health Equipment 

By Wilfred Arinda Nshekantebirwe 

He could have sent someone else. He could have requested for a report, read the figures, and moved on to the next item on a schedule that has barely paused since he walked into the Finance Ministry three weeks ago. Instead, Hon Henry Musasizi drove to Rubanda District himself, and that, in Uganda’s governance landscape, is worth paying attention to.

The Minister of Finance, Planning and Economic Development arrived in Rubanda accompanied by Rubanda West Member of Parliament Hon. Bruce Balaaba and Rubanda Woman MP Hon. Evelyne Ninsiima Kikafunda, to monitor government projects being implemented across the district. The monitoring exercise took him through Kaara Health Centre II, Ikumba Health Centre III, and Bucheere Health Centre III in Ikumba Sub-county, where he also participated in the commissioning of maternal health equipment under an initiative spearheaded by Hon. Kikafunda to support mothers who deliver at Health Centre IIs and IIIs across Rubanda District.

The commissioning of the maternal equipment was significant in its own right. Maternal health at the lower levels of Uganda’s health system remains one of the country’s most urgent unfinished business. For women in rural Rubanda, a Health Centre II or III is often the only realistic option when labour begins, the referral hospital too far, the road too long, the cost of transport too high. Equipment that makes those facilities capable of handling deliveries safely is not a bureaucratic achievement. It is a lifeline. Hon. Kikafunda’s initiative in driving that equipment to the doorstep of those facilities deserves recognition, and the presence of the Finance Minister at the commissioning lent it the weight of national attention.

But it is Hon Musasizi’s presence itself, the fact of it, the choice behind it, that gives this visit its deeper significance.

A Finance Minister sits at the apex of Uganda’s public resource management. Every shilling that leaves the Treasury toward a road, a school, a health centre, or a water source passes through the framework his Ministry controls. The budget is made in Kampala. The allocations are decided in Kampala. The approvals are signed in Kampala. And far too often, the accountability stops in Kampala too,  in reports that arrive on desks, in figures that look clean on spreadsheets, in project completion certificates that say one thing while the reality on the ground says another.

Hon Musasizi travelling to Rubanda to monitor projects personally is a statement about where he believes accountability must reach. It is a Finance Minister saying, with his feet, that the chain of responsibility he oversees does not end when money is disbursed. It ends, if it ends at all,  when the project that money was meant to build is actually standing, functioning, and serving the people it was designed to serve.

This matters enormously in the context of what Hon Musasizi has been saying since day one in office. He has told his Ministry team that the culture must shift from spending money to enforcing results. He has told Parliament that MPs must go to their constituencies and verify with their own eyes whether budgeted funds are producing value for money. He has told the World Bank that a 32 percent disbursement rate is unacceptable. He has told government-owned banks that their purpose is not balance sheet performance but the transformation of people’s lives. Every one of those statements carries more credibility when the man making them is willing to get in a vehicle and drive to a sub-county health centre to see for himself what is happening.

There is also a political dimension to this visit that should not be overlooked. Musasizi is the MP for Rubanda County East. However, he goes beyond to Rubanda West. He belives in unity.  Rubanda District leaders are one. A united leadership means development.

A Finance Minister who champions a $500 billion economy target and a tenfold growth strategy from the boardrooms of Kampala but never appears in the villages where that growth is supposed to reach risks becoming exactly what Uganda’s governance culture has too often produced, big vision, distant implementation. Musasizi in Rubanda is the antidote to that risk. It is a Finance Minister closing the distance between the budget and the beneficiary, between the policy and the person, between the number on the spreadsheet and the mother who delivers safely because the right equipment was there when she needed it.

That is what made this visit significant. Not the commissioning ceremony. Not the speeches. Not the photographs. The significance was in the decision, made by a Minister with a packed schedule, a demanding new brief, and no shortage of pressing matters in Kampala, to show up in Rubanda anyway, because showing up is what accountability looks like when it is real.

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