About 70% of Uganda’s budget was spent on procurement and contracts some of which cash should find its way in your pocket and yet it doesn’t. Why that? Because the biggest contracts are taken by foreigners and these are free to repatriate these amounts of money back to their countries. “Meaning that Ugandans get these small contracts.” Said, Benson Turamye – ED, Public Procurement Authority. But there are attempts to ruin in this scenario giving preference to Ugandans. First, any government contract involving textiles must buy here first. “Because like now, the army, Police, and Prisons are buying from Jinja from Nyanza.”

Other ringed fence areas included electrical cables and some essential medicines. Additionally, contacts in the road sector 45 billion and below are reserved for Ugandans, 10 billion and below for other works, 1 billion for goods and stationery and up to 100 million shillings for none consultant services like security and cleaning. But even when Ugandans decided to take on the foreign contractors, there was still preference given. “A foreigner has bid say 100 billion and a Ugandan is at 105 billion and it is a works contract. We give a preference of 7% if he is within 7% and above the foreign company in terms of price, we said we would rather spend additional more within 7% and award to a local provider.” Commission agents or brokers are the headed for procurement entities. And these, the PPDA said would be sorted with the E-Procurement system which was in the offing.