The Minister of Public Service, Wilson Muruli Mukasa, has told Parliament that government is financially constrained and cannot afford to increase teachers’ salaries as demanded by striking members of the Uganda National Teachers’ Union (UNATU).
Appearing before Parliament’s Committee on Local Government Muruli revealed that Uganda is currently able to finance only 31 percent of its national budget using locally generated revenue.
The rest, he said, comes from loans and grants extended by development partners.
“Currently, really, we can only raise 31% of our budget. The rest is raised through loans, through development partners, and so on. You can see how vulnerable we are as a country,” Muruli explained.
He stressed that government has resolved never to finance public sector wages through external borrowing, insisting that salaries must strictly be covered by domestic revenue.
“At least it has been agreed internally that for paying our workers, we must not raise loans from development partners. We must pay our workers from the revenue that we generate internally and that revenue at most must not be more than 35% of the domestically generated revenue,” the minister said.
The minister’s remarks come at a time when UNATU members have laid down tools, protesting government’s failure to fulfil a 2019 commitment to harmonize and enhance teachers’ salaries.
Muruli revealed that while arts and humanities teachers had earlier engaged with government and agreed not to strike, UNATU insisted on industrial action.
“So if we are raising only 31%, then we cannot actually afford,” Muruli told MPs.
“That’s why we decided to raise salaries gradually. I am just giving a background so that you can appreciate why we cannot meet the demand of the teachers at this moment. Be patient, because you may think that we are just acting arbitrarily or we have no feeling and we are not sensible. We are not insensitive to the problem of teachers.”
Muruli’s submission highlights the growing tension between government’s fiscal limitations and the swelling demands of public servants, particularly in the education sector where strikes continue to disrupt learning across the country.
