{UAH} Pojim/WBK: Lukwago is back, all because NRM is addicted to large donor loans - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/Lukwago-back-because-NRM-is-addicted-to-large-donor-loans/-/434750/2577232/-/1p9hi9/-/index.html

Lukwago is back, all because NRM is addicted to large donor loans - Comment

For the past three decades, President Yoweri Museveni's political opponents and outright enemies have tried different approaches to dislodge his NRM government from power, without any success.

Neither the ballot nor the bullet could shake the NRM administration, now getting ready to enter its fourth uninterrupted decade in power. Elections, coup plots, rebel insurgencies and street protests have all left the NRM unshaken. It looked as if the NRM would be in power for a long while, since none of the known approaches to removing a government from power can budge it.

But recently, a couple of days to Christmas, the NRM finally confirmed that it has a peculiar ailment that, if targeted, can bring it down like a house of cards.

NRM's fatal affliction is an addiction far more debilitating than long exposure to narcotics — an fondness for easy loans that can deal the party a quick fatal blow if anyone is ready to deliver it.

Anyone with an elementary knowledge of Uganda's politics knows that the only person NRM hates more than an army doctor called Kizza Besigye is a constitutional lawyer named Elias Lukwago, who was elected Lord Mayor of Kampala four years ago, but was forced out of office by the NRM government through the courts of law.

Now as parliament was holding its last sitting before breaking for Christmas, the top NRM leadership hurriedly committed itself to restoring Lukwago to the mayoral office by next February. This move must have been harder than giving your daughter's hand in marriage to your most despised enemy. But it happened.

The NRM leadership did it just to save a $170 million loan from a foreign donor.

Apparently, the deadline for parliament's approval for taking the loan was just hours away but there weren't enough NRM MPs in the house, and for once the opposition was in the majority.

The opposition did not waste the opportunity and said they would approve the loan request if the government committed itself to reinstating Lukwago as mayor.

Prime Minister Ruhakana Rugunda accepted but the opposition doubted his clout, and made him consult someone higher than him — you can guess who — and he returned with the commitment.

Lukwago will therefore not only return to office but also receive the accumulated salaries he had missed for the year he has been locked out. Obviously, when it comes to grabbing the next loan, government gasps like a desperate addict when its next fix is delayed.

Whoever addicted the NRM government to living beyond its means and become an impulsive borrower must have had the coldest, calculating heart. After all, Uganda government does not need to borrow a cent to function properly. Several years ago, its foreign debt of about four billion dollars was forgiven following an Oxfam led campaign. The borrowing resumed and surpassed its old levels, approaching six billion now.

Warnings by experts that we have reached the safety limit of borrowing as a ratio of GDP have been ignored. The revenue authority will collect ten trillion shillings this financial year, and some four trillion will be stolen. Then the government will borrow about two trillion from foreign sources.

A rational planner would insist on reducing the theft and eliminating borrowing. But a desperate addict cannot be a rational planner — he does anything for the next shot, as has been seen in the Lukwago case.

Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International Fellow for development journalism. E-mail: buwembo@gmail.com

Lukwago is back, all because NRM is addicted to large donor loans - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke
http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/Lukwago-back-because-NRM-is-addicted-to-large-donor-loans/-/434750/2577232/-/1p9hi9/-/index.html‎

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