Performance contracts key to competitiveness

The Minister of Local Government James Musoni has said performance contracts (Imihigo) help accelerate development and makes the country competitive.

Sunday, September 09, 2012
L-R; Local Government Minister James Musoni, Muhanga District Mayor Yvonne Mutakwasuku, Jean du2019Amour Gatera from the Prime Ministeru2019s office and Kicukiro District Mayor Paul Jules Ndamage listen to some one (not in picture) after yesterdayu2019s talk show. T

The Minister of Local Government James Musoni has said performance contracts (Imihigo) help accelerate development and makes the country competitive.Musoni said this yesterday at a town hall meeting to assess the achievements of the 2011-2012 performance contracts and the priorities for 2012- 2013.The Minister noted all the districts performed well in last year’s performance contracts which he attributed to the sprit of hard work and competition.Kicukiro District emerged top performer of the year 2011/2012 in implementing performance contracts, with a 95.5 per cent score.But all the districts scored over 80 per cent. At the meeting, complaints were raised about some local leaders who exert undue pressure on residents to execute the performance contracts and some districts which set simple targets that can easily be accomplished to fetch marks.But the minister dismissed the claims, saying the contracts are people-centred.Addressing the need to focus on good service delivery in next year’s performance contracts, Minister Musoni encouraged all stakeholders to put more effort in projects implementation."We want to adopt a culture of good service, stakeholders who failed to accomplish their duties should do it next year and own performance contracts,” he said.The Mayor of Ruhango Yvonne Mutakwasuku and Kicukiro Mayor Paul Jules Ndamage, said team work led them to accomplish their major projects."We surpassed our targets; for instance we had committed to put street lights on 3 km road network but we lit 15km, and doubled the number of computers given to cell leaders,” said Mutakwasuku."We have a planning team, work together as a team and have an assessment mechanism which helps us to fix the weaknesses,” said Ndamage.