Leveraging District Service Commissions to Enhance Local/Urban Government Management in Uganda

Abstract

The success of decentralised governance, since its rebirth in the late 1980s, required the localisation of the Public Service Commission (DSC), through the DSC, as a means to effectively actualise administrative decentralisation. To constitute the DSC, demands approval of the local/urban council upon recommendation by the executive committee. However, there remains a constant dissatisfaction from every stakeholder regarding the impartiality and efficient operations of the DSCs across the country. This study employs a systematic literature review methodology grounded in the PRISMA framework to analyse 60 scholarly papers concerning DSCs and Local Governments in Uganda. The outcomes reveal that the quality of service, including human resource functions, delivered has little or no relevance to the socio-economic needs of communities they claim to serve. Also, DSCs have lost confidence among the communities they ought to serve, attributed to the missing link between DSCs and effective local/urban government management, as well as systemic corruption. Therefore, Uganda continues to perceive DSCs as politically-driven local/urban structures. Access to employment for local applicants appears to be muddled with a number of challenges throughout the country. There is thus a need for deliberate interventions to reduce socio-political biases engulfing the local/urban government recruitment process. A number of factors inhibiting the DSCs from executing their role appear to be widespread, and most of which are evolving around the issue of high levels of unemployment, which, unfortunately, have global and regional roots. Given the few job openings, it is highly impractical to think of a fair process since everyone is interested in having their close members get employed. In a bid to insulate DSC from political dominance, the members should not be appointed by the district executive committees but by the public service commission, seeing that it serves as an extension of it at the lower level.