Abdu Kiyaga
20 December 2011
In an effort to reduce the amount of money the country loses as a result of corruption, Makerere University's School of Psychology has developed a tool that will help identify corrupt officials.
The questionnaire tool dubbed "Uganda's Standardised Ethics and Integrity Scale", will be used to identify and assess people with acceptable levels of ethics and integrity for positions of responsibility.
"This tool is going to help us detect corruption tendencies within our officials and we are sure this will help solve this menace of corruption that is going on in our institutions," School of Psychology consultant, Mr Steven Ssenyonga, told this newspaper.
According to him, the scale is divided between three parts; part A, measures individual standards of conduct and focuses on components such as corruption, nepotism, confidentiality and time management.
Part B measures the individual's moral standards with specific focus on self-control against forgeries and fraud as well as sexual conduct, while part C measures personal values, value orientations and social acceptance.
Interpretation by experts
The scale in total has 100 items in which one has to get an average mark of 0.3 per discipline to be considered credible for a particular higher position.
The respondent earns a single mark for each question answered correctly.
However, Mr Ssenyonga emphasises that although the questions are easy to answer, they depict personality and results will be interpreted by a panel of trained experts.
The tool has been gradually tested on various personalities in the last 11 years to establish its effectiveness. However, it will further be tested on two other categories.
"One category will comprise priests in seminaries and convents as well as theological colleges, who are assumed to be of higher integrity. The other category will comprise public officers employed by at least 14 district administrations of Uganda and they shall be randomly selected," said Prof. Peter Baguma, the school's dean.
However, the school has called for support from members of the public to enable the project go through its last process. "We need around Shs200 million to complete the validation process, so all stakeholders should help so that we can get through all this," Mr Ssenyonga said.
The tool is expected to be out in the next six months.
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