Museveni unveils plan to end Busoga poverty

BUGIRI. President Museveni has announced a number of measures that will include interest-free government loans and more money in special funds targeting the youth and women to tackle the biting poverty in Busoga sub-region and the country.

Mr Museveni told his first rallies in the Busoga sub-region areas of Bugiri and Namutumba that if given a fifth term, the government will increase funding to the women fund from Shs7b to Shs234b, Youth Fund from Shs54b to Shs234b and the Micro-Finance Fund from Shs44b to Shs180b.

This, according to Mr Museveni’s calculations, will translate into Shs2b per district for the youth and another Shs2b per district for the women to tap into and start up poverty eradication projects. Mr Museveni said he experimented with Shs2m per sub-county in Busoga and it had a “big impact” but could not give the details of the success of that particular fund. This cash will be accessed interest-free, with the NRM candidate arguing that impoverished people cannot be subjected to the rigours of collateral as long as members of a saving group have trust that the recipient of the loan will pay back.

“I have told the Minister of Finance that as long as it is a government programme, I do not want to hear things of omusingo [collateral]. The problem we have had is people asking for omusingo. This does not make sense because these are people who do not have much. If you do not have much, where do you get the omusingo. If those people in a group can say that we trust you, then that is the security we want,”Mr Museveni told a rally in Bugiri late Monday evening.

More allocation will also be pumped into the Naads programme with the President also promising a technical school per sub-county to enhance skills of unemployed youth.

With poverty incidence of 33.2 per cent in eastern Uganda against the national average of 32.2 per cent, according to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (Ubos), Busoga sub-region is one of the poorest places in Uganda. The poverty in the area was exacerbated by an outbreak of a jigger infestation in 2013 that left an unspecified number of locals unable to fend for a living.

The Opposition poverty call
The poverty in the area has been a rallying call for the FDC flagbearer Kizza Besigye, who told a rally in Luuka District last month that the sub-region is the “headquarters of poverty in Uganda” because Mr Museveni is assured of support there and has thus ignored issues like tackling unemployment and developing infrastructural systems. Mr Museveni countered this by accusing the Opposition of spreading “lies”, saying when the NRM took power in 1986, it had to first revive a collapsed economy and now has enough resources through taxes to tackle problems such as poverty in Busoga.

In Bukooli Central, the backyard of the Leader of Opposition in Parliament, Mr Wafula Oguttu, the President avoided saying anything about the opposition stalwart.

Mr Oguttu had earlier taken to social media to accuse the NRM of luring unsuspecting voters to Mr Musveni’s rallies by claiming that “youth, women and Sacco money had arrived”.

MUSEVENI’S BUSOGA VOTES

In 2001, Museveni got 572,963 votes out of 1,165, 459 registered voters. His share declined to 452,877 in 2006. He bounced back in 2011, polling 533,084 out of the 1,277,855 registered voters.

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