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Eamon Gilmore, Irish minister for
foreign affairs and trade.
Photo by: The Labour Party
/ CC BY-ND
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Ireland’s aid to the Ugandan
government remains in limbo, even after the latter returned Monday (Jan. 7)
some €4 million ($5.2 million) in misallocated aid funds uncovered in October.
Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs and
Trade Eamon Gilmore and Minister for Trade and Development Joe Costello did
express satisfaction over the refund, and the reimbursement could help restore
some donor confidence in Uganda, which suffered heavily from the scandal.
Several other donors apart from Ireland froze upon learning of the
embezzlement, including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Denmark, which
has been asking for Uganda to return 5 million
Danish kroner ($860,000) that the European country said were
misappropriated.
Ireland suspended
budget support to the Ugandan government after learning of aid fund
misallocations in a report from Uganda’s auditor-general, and the country is
taking steps to resume some of its work in the East African nation. The aid
funds were meant for a rehabilitation project for the war-torn northern part of
Uganda.
“I have now instructed my officials to
examine options for a possible program of support for the people of Uganda
during 2013,” Gilmore said in a statement.
Aid to the Ugandan government,
however, will remain frozen —
“until we are fully confident that the government has strengthened its internal
financial controls and acted against officials who were implicated in this
fraud,” a spokeswoman for the Department of Foreign Affairs told
The Irish Times.
The incident could spark new calls for
the Irish government to invest more in aid oversight. A hiring freeze on civil
service and salary limits have made it difficult to track aid spending in
developing countries, Department of Foreign Affairs Secretary General David
Cooney told the public accounts committee of the Irish parliament in December.
“When you are managing the kind of
money we are managing in the development program, I have to say I am concerned
we are not able to fill all vacancies we need to fill,” he said, The Irish
Times quoted
him as saying.
The case in Uganda “has been a wake-up
call” and “should not have happened,” he added.
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