[UAH] Poor Museveni, money couldn’t buy him love
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12:08 PM |
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A war has broken out in the Busoga Kingdom, where President Yoweri Museveni gave a sack of money to the youth recently.
The war of words involves groups of young people from different parts of the region. They are arguing over who is and who is not entitled to a share of the loot.
Apparently the chairman of the Busoga Youth Forum who was handed the sack of cash does not support the idea of "everybody" getting "something," which is exactly what his constituents want.
The issue has created a stalemate. As harsh words continue to fly from all corners of the kingdom, the president, who must have left the area thinking his act of generosity would be universally appreciated, has come in for attack by youth groups who fault him for disregarding them when they are the ones who wrote proposals for income-generating projects and submitted them to State House for funding.
Meanwhile, in Kampala, one can still hear people hissing in indignation each time the subject comes up for discussion. Among the capital's Luganda speakers, two questions are being asked: Omusajja abadde ki (what has happened to that man)? Tulaga wa (where are we going)?
Well, in case you haven't guessed yet, the subtext is whether the president has finally lost it. And now the former vice-president and newly self-declared prospective presidential candidate in 2016, Professor Gilbert Bukenya, has weighed in.
He has criticised his former boss for dishing out large sums to individuals rather than channelling them into health facilities, which, if they had the necessary inputs, he says, would ensure people are healthy and able to pull themselves out of poverty by working.
Foreigners who know Uganda well must be wondering what all the fuss is about, given that the Busoga episode was not the first time President Museveni was throwing money around.
It is hardly uncommon to see him handing out wads of the stuff in brown manila envelopes. Well, the fuss is not really about the money as such; it is about the amount involved and the manner in which it was handed out — in a sack, suggesting it was a huge amount that could have instead been spent on something for the benefit of everybody.
Something in these arguments and in the public expressions of anger suggests we Ugandans don't know how our government works.
President Museveni presides over a government that is big on policy formulation and writing excellent policy documents, but hopeless at policy implementation.
Indeed, from time to time, a few Ugandans can be heard boasting emptily, often in reaction to reports of our own government's failures, about how "Rwanda is doing so well because they implement our policies." Museveni watchers harbour few doubts about the goodness of his intentions in almost every sphere, and agree that he is often let down by the dysfunction of the system he runs — which, ironically, he has done a great deal to render yet more dysfunctional.
There are several examples to illustrate this. Whenever he fails to get things done through a government ministry or department, he does not push the people concerned to do their work.
Instead, he creates a special unit, usually in the Office of the President or State House, to fill the gap. Usually the gap is never really filled, to which he reacts by creating yet another unit, initiative, or programme.
The consequence is an accumulation of dysfunctional entities, which he may eventually abandon altogether, although few, very few, are disbanded or scrapped. His handing out of cash is a manifestation of the failure by different programmes, initiatives and units created over the years to fight poverty, to do their job.
Only recently, he was heard railing against the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS), an initiative that has eaten up billions of shillings and produced very little by way of results in the form of poverty eradication among farmers. In despair, he mooted the idea of scrapping it and handing the money to Members of Parliament, hardly the most accountable people where money is concerned, to take it directly to the farmers.
In lugging sacks of cash around and handing them to the poor, Museveni probably deserves more pity than abuse. We may not like the idea of some people taking our money for free in the name of poverty reduction. However, if we understood why it was being given to them, we could begin to think of how best to deal with the problem, perhaps by voting for someone else next time.
Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: fgmutebi@yahoo.com
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