Museveni graduates poverty fighters

from New Vision

By Henry Mukasa

PRESIDENT Yoweri Museveni has challenged local leaders to identify viable enterprises for funding under the micro-finance scheme to end poverty.

“The biggest problem causing poverty in Uganda is wrong enterprise selection. What do you decide to do, what do you decide to grow and how much will it earn you? Select the enterprise correctly and the rest will be added to you,” Museveni said.

He urged sub-country chiefs to work with MPs, LC3 chairpersons and the community to select enterprises, community information systems, form cooperative societies and establish marketing cooperatives.

Museveni said: “Enterprise selection is the disease here. People just select what to grow… katunkuma, ntula (egg plant), a sugarcane there… When you go to the gardens, they are botanical units to show what can grow there. I am not a botanist.”

The President was passing out 352 district commercial officers, sub-county chiefs and town clerks from 51 districts who completed a one-month course in economic management and transformation at the National Leadership Institute, Kyankwanzi.

The course equipped them with skills that will enable them to implement the Bonna Bagaggawale (prosperity for all) programme.

Museveni lamented that even where infrastructure necessary for production exists, the wanachi still live in abject poverty.

He said although West Nile has a tarmac road, “You see poverty, grass houses next to a tarmac road.”

“Budadiri got electricity in 1955 but up-to now they are still in budambi (poverty). Nagongera got electricity in 1955 but when you go there, power is only in the TTC.

Those Badama are just doing their things,” Museveni said to laughter.

He warned leaders that delivery on set targets is a must: “I have been polite but I am losing politeness. I no longer want to pamper people who don’t perform.”

micro-finance minister Salim Saleh described the trainees as change agents. He was optimistic that the programme would lift Uganda from the Third World to the First World.