Why Quality Service Delivery Continues to Elude Ugandans and What Can be Done

Ugandans of all walks of life have continued to demand effective and quality services from their government, as one of its cardinal mandates which is to provide quality social services to its citizens, as a way of accounting to them for the trust with their votes and the taxes they pay.

Effective service delivery is a fundamental requirement for any government if it is to meet national needs. Delivering services of high quality is an important pursuit for a government that seeks to create and provide valuable service to and improve the wellbeing of its population.

Failure by any government to provide this to its citizens is a serious betrayal of their TRUST.

It should be noted that service delivery has no universally agreed-upon definition, and the talk of service delivery is pervasive in the political discussions of many people across nations.

However, “service delivery” can be said to be a common phrase used to describe the distribution of basic resources citizens depend on like water, electricity, sanitation, infrastructure, land, and housing.

The government delivers a broad range of services that impact the well-being of individuals and organizations across the country and abroad. These services delivered directly or indirectly to millions of individuals, ranging from issuing passports to answering tax inquiries, to processing claims for taxi returns, provision of healthcare, education, judicial services, protection of civil liberties, employment and provision of a proper working environment to its citizens, etc.

All citizens of a country require the services of the central government at one time or another, and research indicates that they expect high-quality service. At the same time, the government must balance citizens’ service needs with policy requirements and available resources.

For instance, the government of Uganda delivers a broad range of services that have a direct impact on the well-being of individuals and organizations across the country and abroad. The services for individuals are varied, including those that might be received regularly and for an extended period, such as social benefit payments where they exist; those that might be accessed only once, such as applications for passports and residence and citizenship by aliens; or those that might be required periodically, such as renewal of a passport.

Delivering services of high quality is an important pursuit for service providers that seek to create and provide value for money to their clients/citizens. Through the provision of high levels of service quality, government can achieve increased citizens wellbeing and satisfaction, maintain loyalty and therefore long-term relationship with its citizen in terms of voting patterns and deal with dissenting voices.

In order to provide high levels of service quality and therefore improve the wellbeing of its population, government policymakers need to plan the delivery of these services and to ensure the successful implementation of the actual plan with no alteration to the plan. Therefore, good planning and effective implementation of the developed delivery plans are key factors for the Service Delivery System (SDS).

Delivery of quality service matters to everyone in the country, from parliamentarians, politicians, academician, policymakers, public servants and the general public, therefore efforts to improve public sector service delivery must be put at the forefront and supported by every Ugandan as a duty.

Service definition is vital to both service providers and recipients. You need to make sure that you and your clients/citizens are on the same page regarding what to expect or not expect from your service offerings. This includes what your services do and don’t encompass, eligibility, potential limitations, costs, how to get assistance when needed, etc.

It`s very common to hear our people saying government “etuyambe”  — the government should help us even with something very small that the citizens themselves can do but because there was no information regarding what can and cannot be provided, the population will sit back and wait even when they are capable of solving an issue by themselves.

It is also true that the government has tried to deal with the issue of service delivery through various means, like the establishment of a number of agencies to handle specified challenges and projects meant to deliver on quality service. However, this has been hampered by a number of solvable problems though these have not been accorded enough attention.

One of the issues that the government has continued to ignore intentionally or otherwise is the issue of streamlining salaries for all its workers across the board. This needs to be treated as an urgent issue than the preferred piecemeal of enhancing salaries and allowance for specific sectors of government workers, a policy should be fast-tracked to deal with the issue of equal pay in all government, the business where people being paid differently from government agencies and ministries need to STOP. In some ministries an undergraduate is paid between Shs5 and 7million monthly and then in another someone with a master’s degree or even a Ph.D. holder doesn’t even take home Shs2 million a month, yet they are all employed by the same government.

Then there is the issue of allowances, seminars, trainings, workshops, travels abroad etc, where such don’t exist in some government ministries. Therefore, if we should demand that there is provision of quality service by our workers, we need to motivate them enough, otherwise you can’t ‘milk a cow you haven’t fed”. We can’t wait for them to strike to be heard because they will not do it openly; but will strike through abuse of resources and not delivering quality service as required.

We can’t effectively deal with corruption in public service unless we streamline their payments across the spectrum, it should be appreciated that the worst form of corruption takes place at the lower level among the lowest ranking employees, yet these are the fulcrum of the government service delivery. Otherwise we shouldn’t point a finger at them for poor service delivery and corruption.

You will not pay security personnel who works 24hrs peanuts while those who work 8hrs or even less a day go home to sleep with hefty pay and fat allowance at end of the month, and then demand miracles from this poor security person. Remember they shop from the same supermarket, have kids to take to school, also admire holidays and weekend outings, they require good medical care and university education for their children, decent housing and means of transport for their family, they are crying for a decent living for the sacrifice to the nation. They are, after all, the unsung heroes.

We cannot demand from them what is not commensurate with what we give them. What you give should be what you get. Otherwise corruption and poor services to our population is here to stay if we don’t treat this unfortunate injustice in our public service. We should understand when the same personnel hires out his weapon to a wrong element for a quick buck. He is simply “balancing the boat”.

There must also be an effort to establish service standards that can help in assessing whether a government department or agency is meeting its commitments to high-quality service (for example, courteous, prompt, and fair treatment), it should set service standards that reflect its citizens’ needs and service targets to measure the degree to which it expects to meet the standards. And should also communicate its service standards to the recipients/citizens, so that they know what level of service they can expect, and to employees who deliver the service, so they know what the agency expects of them.

Monitoring service performance

This is a sector that is abused or neglected by the government yet it’s very crucial in quality service delivery. To identify service quality issues, the government needs to monitor its performance by comparing actual with expected performance against the set service targets.

The government and its agencies also need to gather information on how satisfied citizens are with the service—through means such as feedback from surveys and from compliments and complaints received. This activity is where most corruption takes place in government due to poor remuneration as indicated above, one is supposed to monitor a billion worth project and yet the subject is aware that a monitoring report may be one’s way of being rewarded or sacked, so they will end up compromising the monitoring team with fat envelopes, to write favorable reports and poor service delivery continues unabated.

Improving service performance

By analyzing the results of monitoring service performance, government should check whether its service is achieving targets and, if not, determine the reason(s). Then it can identify the steps required to improve its service, set priorities for action, and implement the necessary changes.

Improved communication

When it comes to citizens, there’s no such thing as over-communication— they feel more comfortable when they know what’s going on. That said, the amount of communication is not so imperative as the timeliness, context, and its ability to clearly identify the value added to the population. In a world of constant connectivity, your ability to cut through the flood of sub-par information with quality and timely answers can go a long way, there has been laxity on the government part and this vacuum has been filled by speculators and detractors who are seeking to cause mayhem.

Otherwise, citizens will assume the government doesn’t care about their plight and may take any other person’s word for an alternative. Government spokespersons in different ministries and agencies MUST endeavor to always communicate with and to the public about their offerings and own up where they have fallen short and explain why and how things are being handled.

Government employees just like their counterparts in the private sector should know that they are the ‘Brand’, they are the ‘government, they are the ‘Marketers’, they are the ‘Most Visible Element’ in the servicescape and they are the face of government and anything against the expected standards is costly to the government they serve.

There should be an effort to create a service culture in which providing excellent service to the citizens of the country you are supposed to serve is a way of life for every government worker. Illustrate the pivotal role of service employees in creating customer satisfaction and service quality, identify the challenges inherent in boundary-spanning roles, providing examples of strategies for creating citizen-oriented service delivery through hiring the right people, developing employees to deliver service quality, providing needed support systems, and retaining the best service employees.

Service Culture

This is a culture where an appreciation for good service exists, and where giving good service to the citizens who are your clients, is considered a natural way of life and one of the most important norms by everyone in the government agency/ministry.

We can only provide quality service to the citizens when we put the right strategies in place to ensure that the government fulfills its social contract with the citizens of this great country.