Since taking charge of the Ministry of Local Government in late May, Mr Balaam Barugahara has disrupted the standard operating procedure of Uganda’s public administration.
Rather than remaining behind a polished desk in Kampala awaiting sanitised administrative briefs, he has taken the ministry directly into the districts. His relentless field inspections, unannounced visits, and direct town-hall engagements have become the defining features of his tenure. To a comfortable political elite, these outings look like disruptive populism. But to ordinary Ugandans who have spent years enduring broken feeder roads, ghost payrolls, and shuttered health units, they represent something far more critical: accountability finally arriving at the last mile.
The results of his field-driven oversight speak for themselves. In Mbale, surprise inspections exposed ghost workers on health centre payrolls and inflated school head counts that were quietly siphoning millions from public coffers every term. Culpable headteachers and district officials were promptly interdicted and handed over to investigative authorities. In Mbarara, he pressed city officials on procurement delays and stalled infrastructure. Across West Nile, in places like Pakwach, citizens turned out with branches and songs-not for photo opportunities, but because a minister was finally asking the hard questions about missing medicine and abandoned classrooms that they had whispered in frustration for years.
In Kassanda, his visits infused a renewed sense of operational urgency among technical officers. Predictably, this hands-on enforcement has drawn intense push back from the chattering classes. Critics dismiss his public arrests and confrontations as “roadside pronouncements” and “humiliation,” labelling his methods unorthodox or undignified. Yet these same commentators rarely ask why learned district engineers, District Health Officers, and District Education Officers allowed local services to rot in the first place while drawing State salaries.
The temporary discomfort of a few administrators facing public scrutiny must never outweigh the daily suffering of citizens whose taxes fund those positions. More importantly, Balaam’s approach has achieved something vital: it has inspired genuine courage in ordinary citizens to stand up and demand what is rightfully theirs.
For the first time in a long while, wananchi see a government official who sides with them against the protected class of negligent district workers.
Rather than trying to castigate the minister into compliance or forcing him back into boardroom quietness, our collective responsibility as leaders, civil society, and local government actors is to support him. An open-minded leader who thrives on field truth can be made infinitely more effective if we feed him foolproof intelligence and actionable data.
We must supply the minister with verified, audit-ready information on district leakages-from land-grabbing schemes and tender board manipulations to substandard road construction. Strengthening his office with structured grassroots intelligence ensures surprise visits transition from reactive fire fighting into systematic, institutionalized clean-up.
Due process must always be respected, and no single minister can undo decades of bureaucratic inertia overnight. But the alternative-elite silence while public services collapse-is unacceptable. Balaam has shown the political will and the openness to listen. Ugandans must now back his urgency with bulletproof facts, ensuring this moment becomes a permanent turnaround for local governance across our nation.