Prime
President Museveni has no moral authority to criticise World Bank
Ms Doreen Nyanjura Omutatina
What you need to know:
When the Bill Clinton administration was showering him with pet names like the “beacon of hope” and the “The new breed of African leaders” we never heard the anti-imperialistic rhetoric that we are hearing today.
President Museveni’s missive against the World Bank was not St Paul’s denunciation of the Bank’s pharisaical hypocrisy. His reversion to the stale Marxist/ nationalistic rhetoric that he observes more in words than works was public posturing. Privately, he will be prostrating before these same “imperialists”.
An inquiry into the economic trajectory of the NRM government will show that his assertions about the NRM revolution being a struggle between the line of socio-economic transformation and national independence on the one hand and the line of perpetual dependence and neo colonialism on the other will show that Museveni has always been in the camp of perpetual dependence and neocolonialism.
During the divesture of the Uganda Commercial Bank, these two economic tendencies arose. Within the technocrats, there was the Nationalist camp led by Ezra Suruma that opposed the privatisation of the bank. There were also the collaborators led by the late Emmanuel Tumusiime-Mutebile who had the audacity to state publicly that even though Parliament was vehemently opposed to the divesture, the bank would be sold anyway.
Museveni threw his weight behind the Mutebile group arguing that the bank had to be sold to foreigners to bolster investor (read Imperial) confidence. On September 30, 2001, he wrote a letter to the Governor of the Central Bank, Tumusiime-Mutebile saying: “I have received resolutions passed by Parliament regarding the privatisation of Uganda Commercial Bank. The resolution does not change my long-held view that UCB should be sold as soon as possible…”
Museveni has danced himself lame in implementing the Structural Adjustment Programmes authored by the very institutions and Western governments that he loves to castigate,
When the Bill Clinton administration was showering him with pet names like the “beacon of hope” and the “The new breed of African leaders” we never heard the anti-imperialistic rhetoric that we are hearing today.
Most importantly, other than castigating the “neocolonial civil servants”, the President has not come out to tell the country what concrete action plan the government is going to take to fill the finance gap caused by the withholding of the World Bank funds. Almost all major infrastructure projects like roads are co-financed by donors.
Secondly, since Museveni has realised that loans and aid from imperial agencies like the World Bank may be anathema to our development, will his government take the bold and patriotic step of terminating its relationship with institutions like IMF that fall in the same category like the “disgusting” World Bank?
Doreen Nyanjura Omutatina, deputy lord mayor.
