By Stephen Lwetutte
LONDON-UNITED KINGDOM/NEWSDAY: It has been long in coming and has been the subject innumerable promises, dreams as well as threats from none other than the one and only visionary, President Yoweri Museveni, for the best part of the 40 years he has lorded it over us. Yet, once he waves his magic wand and declares Uganda a middle income status economy, he does so with a conspicuous absence of fanfare. Even the first ever budget announced in the country as a newly declared middle income status economy hardly mentions the “achievement”, which to all intent and purposes should be a no mean feat, beyond citing mere figures in passing!
On Tuesday 7 June 2022 when delivering the presidential State of the Nation address at Kololo Ceremonial Grounds, President Museveni blurted out what could easily constitute the joke of the year saying: “you remember, the entrance point for the lower-middle-income status, is USD$ 1,036. We have now passed that figure”. You would expect the Head of State to be armed with the latest accurate figures if he chooses convincingly to attempt to volunteer information on a subject matter, but if he is even unaware of the fact that the entry GNI income per capita to qualify for lower middle income status has since been revised upwards to US$1,046 a year ago, who can he hope to convince?
Credible economic sources indicate that Uganda’s GNI income per capita stood at US$774 in 2019 before Covid-19 struck. The most recent available date, 2020, shows the country’s GNI per capita stood at US$800, a modest increment of under 3% (World Bank). You do not have to be an economic wizard to figure out that the entire world economy, even the most resilient economies, was extremely adversely impacted by the global Covid-19 pandemic lockdown.
Uganda, having been among the last countries to fully reopened up, cannot be an exception to have grown a whopping US$246 (30.75%) during lockdown – this is merely a figment of the President’s imagination, if you ask me, unless he can cite one fact that caused such a phenomenal leap in Uganda. Our country sadly remains and will languish in the low income status economy club for as long as the cabal in Kampala stays at the helm.
DOWNLOAD THE BUDGET SPEECHBUDGET 2022-23
Seasoned Museveni watchers will know that the president is no stranger to such outlandish public statements and declarations – from Uganda having the best constitution in the world to holding the most free and democratic elections ever in January 2021, when the world witnessed and documented livestreams beamed globally how opposition members and supporters were being tortured and slaughtered. Like President Putin of Russia, President Museveni either lives in a world of his own completely detached from reality or perched somewhere in cloud cuckoo land.
To say that Ugandans have lost generations in development social capital the entire period Museveni has ruled would be to grossly underestimate the scale and scope of the disaster that befell the country Museveni captured power that January day in 1986 and it will take a brand new crop of leaders further generations to recover the ground lost and embark on meaningful development and nation-building.
With this state of affairs, is it any wonder that Finance Minister, even by his pretty abysmal public standards, refused to take part in lending credence in his budget statement to Museveni’s unadulterated circus about the so-called achieved middle income economy status? Museveni’s once pet subject of hyping up how Uganda was going to fully finance its recurrent budget several years ago, has now quietly given way to again shamelessly blaming past leaders for the current state of the economy.
He has now resorted cooking up figures hoping to serve them to the gullible and naïve sections of our society who consider him the only visionary, often placed next to God. Luckily, a large part of the country now consider him irrelevant to the needs and aspirations of Ugandans, and choose to quietly ignore him and his budgets, to save their lives and hope one day to see a new Uganda.
The 2022/23 budget speech is yet another meaningless ritual in Uganda’s political calendar more for public consumption, cosmetic reasons and a facade as a working document to justify expenditure, but bears absolutely no resemblance to what happens during the fiscal year. It should be and is held in contempt that it deserves.
KEY FIGURES
Shs.9 trillion- allocated to human capital
Shs.7.2 trillion -alocated to security and governance
Shs 274billion-Innovation and Technology
Shs. 418billion-manufacturing
Shs.915.1 billion-Parliament
PAST BUDGETS
2018/2019- SHS.32 TRILLION
2019/2022-SHS40 TRILLION
2020/2021-SHS. 45.5 TRILLION
2021/2022- SHS.44.8 TRILLION
2022/2023- SHS.48 TRILLION
The writer is a Multilingual Human Rights Practitioner, formerly at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International in London for over 20 years and now Legal and Human Rights Consultant.
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