Museveni appoints regional wealth creation coordinators

President Museveni, who is also the national chairperson for the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party, has appointed a team of 46 people to coordinate his wealth creation campaign across the country.
The President, according to State House sources, appointed a parallel structure containing media coordinators across the four regions to speed up job creation and anti-poverty campaign, especially in the countryside where 68 per cent of Ugandans are still trapped in subsistence farming.

The President is currently traversing the country addressing gatherings in a drive he says is meant to fight poverty, although critics say he has launched re-election campaigns for 2021 well over a year to the launch of official campaigns.
The appointments came at a time when a section of the members of the Central Executive Committee (CEC) of the NRM party and the party’s secretariat are opposed to the move to create parallel structures. It is, however, not clear how the new team will fit into the government’s Operarion Wealth Creation outfit headed by Gen Salim Saleh.
Some Cabinet ministers, officials from the NRM secretariat and a group of the CEC members have criticised the President’s move, which they said undermines the powers and authority of the party organs. But in a Cabinet meeting on Monday, the President defended his decision. Some ministers have since apologised for criticising the chairman’s decisions.
The list of the sub-regional coordinators released by Ms Milly Babirye Babalanda, the personal assistant to NRM national chairman, on Thursday, includes former Kibuku MP Saleh Kamba, Swadik Angupale, a Museveni loyalist who has been at the forefront of popularising the sole candidature project. He is now the media coordinator for West Nile region.

The coordinators, among other things, will be at the forefront of sensitising the locals on the wealth creation drive, coordinate all the activities at regional level, liaising with the district and the national office.
Mr Faruk Kirunda, the spokesperson of the NRM chairman, said the coordinators are people who understand the NRM ideology well, are not political contestant and are party loyalists.

“These are the two youth and an elder per village, a coordinator at the parish, Sub-county, district and sub-regional levels carefully selected and vetted,” Mr Kirunda said, adding: “They are meant to be individuals loyal to the NRM party, knowledgeable of government programmes and not political contenders or agents of political personalities.”
Responding to critics, Mr Kirunda explained that over the years, while a number of interventions have been put in place such as fight against corruption, improved healthcare services and a host of other things, the rural people have largely remained poor, a reason why the party chairman is on a nationwide campaign to alleviate poverty.

“It’s for this reason that the office of the national chairman took up the directive, first as employees of the NRM national chairman’s office in respect to his mandate and secondly, as President of the nation,” Mr Kirunda said, adding that Ms Babalanda, is a political party affairs assistant but also a presidential advisor on political affairs, who falls in both the party and government apparatus.

[email protected]