By Andrew Irumba
Kampala: There fire at the offices of the Uganda National Roads Authority(UNRA) after senior managers there coming under fire because of the way they handle recruitment of staff for the Authority.
Their troubles come after  the parliamentary Committee on State Authorities and Statutory Enterprises (COSASE) received information that there are a lot of irregularities indulged in by UNRA official whenever they are recruiting. Kawempe South MP Mubarak Munyagwa, who is the Committee Chairperson, says that his committee has information that a number of individuals were recruited for key positions under the guise of headhunting, even when they are not adequately experienced. The practice of Headhunting, also known as Executive Search in Human Resource Management, involves identifying highly-skilled and hard-to-find candidates to fill jobs in an organization. It is usually undertaken to enable the organization to find key people at the management and specialist level with very specific personal and professional skills.
Munyagwa contends that  a number of people obtained specialist jobs at UNRA, even when they did not have any specialty or skills that would give them a niche to take up the jobs.  Speaking during an interface with a team of UNRA officials at Parliament today, Munyagwa said many of the head-hunted staffs are inexperienced while others have a dented record from previous employment engagements.    However, UNRA’s Director Human Resource Jennifer Kaggwa defended the practice of headhunting for staff, saying it is a normal recruitment procedure. She noted that in all instances of headhunting, approval from the Authority Board is sought. However, she was tasked to explain the conditions that warrant headhunting, a task that wasn’t very easy for her to accomplish.    When Kaggwa failed, the Committee turned the UNRA Executive Director Allen Kagina, who was tasked to  to present a comprehensive report on staff recruitment and restructuring process for review, as part of the investigation and she asked for some days to do that.  However, COSASE Vice Chairperson Ibrahim Kasozi noted that it is irregular for an institution to headhunt unqualified people leaving qualified Ugandans out.
