Museveni seeks debt relief for Uganda

KAMPALA- President Museveni has appealed to external lenders to cancel all Uganda’s debts because of the current global Covid-19 pandemic.

“The external friends, if they are friends at all, should cancel all the multi-lateral and bilateral loans because this problem has been created for Africa by Asia and Europe. This will save our Shs1.3 trillion that we are spending per year to pay loans,” he said yesterday.

Mr Museveni said all new borrowings should support import substitution industries. He said government would offer additional funding to Uganda Development Bank which they can lend to the local entrepreneurs at reasonable interest rates.

The President indicated that the core needs include food, clothes, shelter, defence, the human resource development which include education and health, infrastructure, medicine and spirituality. Mr Museveni said while things like tourism, sports hospitality can be taken into consideration, any instability quickly hits them hard.

“The demand for these nine is not ephemeral; it is durable, it is eternal. Even this crisis cannot affect them fundamentally. Why? It is because they are the most basic needs. The others are additional and optional. The latter, if available, are welcome; if not available, their absence is survivable,” he said.

Mr Museveni said five million families in Uganda, participate in food production, farming 17.2 million acres of the 40 million acres of suitable land in the country. According to him, the country produces five million tonnes of maize; 10 million tonnes of bananas; 1.76 million metric tonnes of beans and other plant protein bearing crops and 218,000 tonnes of Irish potatoes.

Others include 2.5 million metric tonnes of sweet potatoes; 4.1 million metric tonnes of cassava; 392,000 metric tonnes of millet; 6 million metric tonnes of sugarcane that gives 500,000 metric tonnes of sugar; 60 million kilogrammes of processed tea and five million bags of coffee.

He said the country rears 14m head of cattle, 14m goats, 50m chicken, one million sheep and catches 447,000 tonnes of fish.
The President said Uganda spends up to $300 million on imported wheat flour and $4.565 million on imported milk products. Imported shoes, belts, hand-bags, jackets, car seats, and others cost Uganda $328.944 million annually.

Mr Museveni said the country only earns $175.97 million from processed fish in 12 factories. He said with good fishing practice, the country can catch up to 700,000 metric tonnes of fish per annum, instead of the present 470,000 metric tonnes.

Mr Museveni said imported medicines and medical equipment currently take up $383.035 million including veterinary drugs and equipment, agricultural inputs including fertilisers take $38.996million, insecticides, fungicides, rodenticides, herbicides and the like take up to US$121.556 million.

The President said there are 36,285 primary schools both government and private, 5,553 secondary schools, 1,543 technical and tertiary schools and 49 universities. He said this is to boost the human development.

He also said there are 1,079 health centre IIIs, 182 health centre IVs, 53 district hospitals, 14 regional referral hospitals, five (5) national referral hospitals and five (5) super specialised hospitals.

To sustain this, Mr Museveni said all or most of the medicines, vaccines and scholastic materials, must be made here so that importations tops.

Museveni's proposals

• Fund the planting of more maize and beans so that we do not run out of these basic relief foods, given the global crisis.
• Complete the gaps in the cassava industry so that it becomes an alternative source of flour in case maize flour is not enough; besides, we need cassava for starch for medicine, for ethanol, for fuel for stoves and for animal feeds.
• Complete issues with Dr Florence Muranga with bananas and its products such as banana flour, starch, etc, so that we kick out wheat flour that consumes $300million of our foreign exchange.
• Take advantage of the corona-virus crisis by supporting Nytil, Mulwana, UIRI, Prof William Bazeyo, etc., to make the surgical masks, N-95, scrub-suits, rubber gloves, test kits and the vaccines by Prof Vinand Nantulya and Uganda Virus Institute.
• Enable the Quality Chemicals to clear their debts and start making all the drugs we need such as hydroxy-choloroquine and all our other drugs.
• Help Mayuge Sugar to make Industrial grade sugar for Coco-cola and pharmaceutical grade sugar for medicine.
This will save us expenditure of $40.251million per annum.
• Continue down the whole list of our potential in that way using UDB money.
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