‘Africans Backward, Not Donors’

By Vision ReporterPRESIDENT Yoweri Museveni did not call the donors ‘backward’ in his Tarehe Sita speech at Bombo Barracks on Wednesday.A letter from Senior Presidential Adviser on the Media, John Nagenda, yesterday said the President’s speech “while expressing his impatience with certain aspects of the way donors can sometimes give unsympathetic advice, is best understood by what he said about sections of our own societies”. Nagenda's letter gave the actual transcript of Museveni’s speech as stating, “but the real help we need is to transform the backward society. I hear Africans do not want to be called backward but they are! For me I call them backward, they can fight me if they want. “They are backward because they are pre-industrial. Anybody who is depending on muscle power and not intellectual power, is backward. The way to move our societies from backwardness through an industrial phase is markets.”Museveni therefore never referred to the donors as ‘backward’ as reported in some sections of the media yesterday.The President was addressing the soldiers at the military headquarters in Bombo on the 21st Tarehe Sita annivesary of the founding of the National Resistance Army, now Uganda People’s Defence Forces.Ends