If you live in Uganda you must be awash with the term 'ghosts', as constantly reported in the media. This is a term coined in the press to mean the stealth corrupt system by which government officials swindle public money to private enterprise, by presenting non-existent cooked figures and inflating payroll numbers, from schools to hospitals to civil servants to the military.
Read it as published in The New Vision
The comparison of this practice to a disembodied soul of the dead is as disturbing as it highlights the gravity of the problem. These 'ghost' scams have become a national disgrace and a menace to the institutions where they happen -yet they are completely avoidable.
The problem of ghost soldiers, ghost teachers, ghost students, paymasters disappearing with sacks full of employee salaries, and all those corruption scandals that use 'ghost' as a getaway can be solved using technology. I may not be the first to mention this, but I want to give insights into how it would work.
Organizations that have many people in them, like the army, schools, hospitals and so on can 'computerize' their information processes to monitor the information handling processes.
Digitalizing the processes involved in handling information can deal a blow to the corrupt officials in the system because it enables software functions to be embedded under every process, as checks and balances, and secure every step of the way, thus taking it out of the hands of the officials.
So, how do u Computerize? First, you must have computers in the organisation, some of them connected to the internet. The plan is to have all working data captured electronically and stored in a corporate database.
When you have all working data in this platform, you can leverage many controls -on who accesses or change which information, when, how and for what specific purpose. This can enforce accountability on all processes since there is no denying that you did not insert another name or figure when you are the only person with security clearance to a particular database. Top level management can have their specific information 'views' according to their roles in the organisation, granted data access privileges according to this role.
The objective is to stop any one from doing anything -without being monitored. Even when data is illegally changed, the evidence will be there, logged somewhere in the database audit, as to who, how and what time the data was changed, even keeping a listing of the new and old data separately. The electronic system can even be designed to trigger off e-mail alerts to the concerned authority or sending instant messages on mobile phones.
Once the organization has this kind of information infrastructure, it can set the template for other organizations with which it transacts business -to share information electronically across a broad spectrum of systems. In this age no one should be made to 'wait' for information, when u can just press a button and it is received at the other end of the world. It is a matter of laying down the technology infrastructure for software applications to be deployed for such purposes.
Computerizing the information processes gives organizations the power to work faster, perform better and remain in business. It also quickens implementing necessary changes that would normally take centuries (no pun intended) in manual environments.
I simply cannot explain the power of computerizing your working environment in one go but believe me -it is not the same as you've been doing. A careful investment therefore, in the technology infrastructures and systems can erase the history of 'ghosts' from the face of our nation and bring about some breakthroughs in fight against corruption -to delay is, now the crime.
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