Of recent, President Museveni, has been traversing the country inspecting work being done in the business of service delivery.
He has also been busy commissioning new roads, opening new markets, and mobilizing Ugandans to create wealth.
This is commendable work even though some people have branded the president’s work ‘premature political campaigning’.
Whatever the case may be, whatever the president has been doing, he has been doing it without much help from his thousands of well-paid governors. No wonder he has publically expressed his disappointment in government workers who have often let him down by frustrating government programmes.
For example when the president was commissioning some works on Kampala Northern Bypass this week, he said ‘there is nothing as irritating as driving on a bad road’. We agree. While commission the construction of Kanoni-Sembabule-Bukomansimbi-Villa Maria road, he complained about civil servants putting salary increment before construction of roads.
Still in Bukomansimbi, he regretted having granted them a district they have failed to develop. This time the leaders differed by saying that building the infrastructure was a responsibility of the central government.
And while commissioning Tirupati Business Park in Kyebando, the president blamed the backwardness of Uganda and Africa on our inability to see plenty of available opportunities that would help us transform our lives.
So why are we making the above observations? There are many reasons but of greater concern to us is the fact that ours is one of the biggest governments on earth given our population and the state of our economy. The President has shown us that he actually doesn’t need government to build the infrastructure or to build the economy.
After all he has in the past decried the uselessness of his government officials who receive money for development from government and instead steal it for their personal business. Our question is: why does he keep such a huge government which is not helping him develop the country?
You could argue that the so many people he has created jobs for do help him get votes during elections. However, Museveni has shown that he can mobilize votes by himself. Could what we are seeing and hearing these days be a preparation of our minds for the disposal of expired human cargo?
As we enter the election period, a lot of public debate, plus many articles in the media have been using facts and figures to show Ugandans how we have become so heavily indebted – debts acquired against our capacity to pay when our OIL begins to flow. We are unfortunately being told now that even if oil started flowing yesterday, given the plummeted price and the colossal amount of debt, we, the present generation, wouldn’t be able to benefit from the black gold. May be these are just scaremongering!
One thing seems to be certain in all this: the economy is not doing well. because economic production is low for a number of reasons known now to many courtesy of media advancement all over the world including Uganda. But most importantly, we now understand that our big government is just a huge waste. We also know that politics is continuously becoming a worrying hemorrhagic disease on our small economy.
We have no doubt that if we suspended three-quarters of this bloated government for the next three or so years, and the president stopped going around dishing out taxpayers money to people who have not even asked for it, the money saved, including the trillions that are being stolen by those who will have been sent away, would be usefully used to build all the roads, hospitals, schools, help pay salaries for the retained workers and for the required tools for the modernisation of agriculture.
If the world saw our government behave like that, the foreign and local investors who have now been rushing to our neighbours in the region, and in Ethiopia, would have a justification to come and invest in the Pearl Of Africa. As it is, we urgently need to re-invent government because it is progressively becoming unproductive and unattractive.
