[UAH] Where did over $30 billion in aid to Uganda go?

 

Press release

As darling of the west because it tenaciously clung to the conditionality embedded in socially harmful shock therapy version of stabilization and structural adjustment program that other countries like Chile and Ghana modified to protect the people from excess suffering and environmental degradation, Uganda under NRM government has received over $30 billion in grant (free) money from western development partners for economic, social and environmental development purposes. Uganda was the first country in the world to get debt relief under the HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor Countries) arrangements amounting to $2 billion specifically for investment in education and healthcare.

If you add on grants from NGOs and foundations and soft loans and other loans from multilateral institutions like IMF, World Bank and ADB plus remittances of some $1billion per annum, foreign earning from diversified exports and revenue collected from domestic sources including the regressive VAT, Uganda has enough money to get its people out of the poverty trap. Yet over fifty percent of Ugandans live below the poverty line, over 30 percent of Ugandans go to bed hungry and diseases that had disappeared have returned with a vengeance. Children are dropping out of school in large part for luck of lunch against a decision taken by NEPAD/AU that all children in school should be provided with lunch. President Museveni reported during the last presidential campaign that he had asked the World Bank to study the request and make recommendations. What were the recommendations? And where is the report by the World Bank?  

What we are witnessing is decadence in schools, health facilities, housing especially sprawling urban slums, attire still dominated by used imported and largely temperate apparel unsuitable in a tropical climate and in a country that has first class cotton and factories to process it into finished products. Ugandans still walk barefoot in a country that produces large quantities of hides and skins and exports them in raw form while the shoe factory was closed. Ugandans are starving in a country that exports mountains of nutritious foodstuffs to neighboring countries and beyond to earn foreign currency to cater for the rich including the president's jet and fleets of very expensive vehicles for the president, over 70 ministers, perhaps equal number of presidential advisers, MPs, and heads of districts now over 120 etc.

We appreciate that donors are now demanding an explanation and have withheld funding until acceptable explanation is given. Corrupt officials should be punished and the UN and other intergovernmental bodies should ensure that any Ugandan elected to high office including Security Council, Human Rights Council and General Assembly is cleared of corruption first. That will set a standard for others to follow.

Eric Kashambuzi

Secretary General, UDU

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