The new cabinet is a real "fundamental change"

By Kavuma Kaggwa

I thank His Excellency President Yoweri Museveni for the Cabinet reshuffle he made recently. It is a real “fundamental change” and we hope the ministers who have been left in their ministries, and the new ones, will work smartly to achieve the country’s goal of modern economic development.

I will focus mainly on the ministries of Tourism, Trade and Industry, Health, Primary Education and Agriculture. I will first of all thank the outgoing Minister for Finance Maria Kiwanuka for her excellent performance in that ministry. Kiwanuka should be highly commended for streamlining the entire system of the Ministry of Finance to the level where the new Minister, Matia Kasaija, has found it and I wish him success between now and 2016.

The President has done well to leave the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife in the hands of the able and hardworking Minister, Maria Mutagamba.

I read in the newspapers recently that her ministry has been allocated more than sh4b for expansion, publicity and promotion.

Right now because of the political stability in the country, both the tourism and hotels industry is growing. The country needs well qualified manpower to run the industry. In line with that, I would like to suggest that the tourism ministry should build and own a hotels and tourism training college somewhere in Entebbe or Munyonyo or Busabala on the shores of Lake Victoria.

The Kabaka of Buganda Ssabasajja Ronald MuwendaMutebi II has plenty of land in Busabala. Negotiations can be carried out between the ministry and the Buganda Land Board for the College to be built there. The college can be under joint ownership between the two parties.

The Kenyans are far ahead of us because they have Kenya Utalii College at Ruaraka, outside Nairobi on Thika road. The college was started just after Independence during the reign of Kenya’s founding father President Jomo Kenyatta. It has produced hundreds of qualified people who are working in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa.

With the modernising and enlarging Entebbe Airport which the Government recently announced, we must make Uganda a superior tourist destination. Remember Uganda has far too much to offer in form of tourist attractions which other countries do not have.

People’s Welfare Fund

Recently the NRM Members of Parliament held a weeklong retreat in Kyankwanzi, where they passed many resolutions concerning the future of Uganda. They have held several retreats since the 2011 general elections but none of them has ever thought of requesting the Government to set up a “people’s welfare fund” to help the poor when they fall sick with complicated diseases which cannot be treated or cured here in Uganda.

Many times I have seen Ugandans who get complicated diseases appearing on Bukedde TV or in the newspapers appealing to people to help them to raise a big amount of money and go for specialised surgery overseas. If one fails to raise that money, then the end result is death!!

This is now the time for the NRM Government to set up a people welfare fund managed by a qualified medical doctor, to help poor Ugandan when they get into this problem.

The NRM Government should reciprocate to the ordinary people for the support it has received from them all these years since 1986. There is a saying – “live and let live” which the NRM should not forget.

Hospitals

The new Minister for Health, EliodaTumwesigye and his deputy Dr Chris Baryomunsi, have a formidable task ahead of them. They have to come out with the plan to modernise all the Government hospitals throughout the country.

Sometime last year, I saw a picture of Kitagata Hospital in Western Uganda, on one of the TV stations and that hospital was completely dilapidated, despite the fact that Western Uganda is the area where most of the NRM leaders come from.

The Minister for Health should devote the first one month in Eastern Uganda to find out the exact conditions and requirements of the hospitals of that region. The second month he should be in Northern Uganda and carryout a thorough study of the health requirements in that region.

The third month should be divided between Buganda and Western regions. So many hospitals in these two regions are in deplorable conditions. Kawolo Hospital on the Kampala / Jinja Highway and Kayunga Hospital in Bugerere – Kayunga District need urgent rehabilitation with modern equipment.

There are three sub counties:-Sabaddu Ntenjeru, Nakisunga I and SabagaboNgogwe in Kyaggwe County, Mukono District, which do not have even a single Government hospital. The Government should build at least two hospitals in that area. This is the Lake Victoria area where the Government earns a lot of Revenue from the Fish Industry and the area is densely populated.

Agriculture:

Uganda is an agricultural country. When Makerere University was founded in 1922 it was also meant to produce agricultural officers to work in every sub county in the country supervising and advising the peasant farmers as well as big farmers, to produce a lot of coffee, matooke, cotton, beans, cassava, ground nuts, maize and other cash crops.

I personally saw many of those agricultural officers in Kyaggwe in the 1940s and 1950s and during the years following Independence. Today I do not see any. The question now is, what has happened?

I request the new Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries, Tress Buchanayandi to look into this matter and revive the old system which worked very well.

The minister should do everything possible to revive this ministry and bring it back to life because people think that it has been succeeded by NAADS which has also numerous problems. Right now Ugandans do not seem to know whether there is Ministry of Agriculture.

It is good that his Deputy Vincent Ssempijja is a native of Buddu County, Masaka, an agricultural area.

Fishing

I came from Kyaggwe the Lake area and I have heard so many people including LCV Mukono Lukooya Mukoome, who say that the lake is now heavily depleted. This is how to massive fishing all the year round, all the way from Samia Bugwe in Busia to Mutukula in Kooki County Rakai district.

There is a suggestion from various people including Lukooya that fishing should be stopped for at least three to four months to allow fish to increase.

Lukooya said that sometime in 2013 they implemented a ban on fishing for four months and at the end of it the fish had tremendously increased. He said that besides the first which is exported, right now many people who fail to do something tangible elsewhere to earn a living, resort to fishing in Lake Victoria.

Trade and Industry

The Minister for Trade and Industry should now establish a policy concerning the distribution of goods from the manufacturers or factories down to the consumers. The present system does not benefit or leaves out the ordinary people because the manufacturer is also the distributor down to the retail shops in the country. This system is not good and should be changed.

The ministry should adopt a new system whereby a wholesale goes to the factory to buy the goods and stores them and wait for the retailers to go and buy from him.

The retailer or a group of retailers can very easily organise their own transport to collect the goods from the wholesaler. If this system is adopted here in Uganda it will be very good to the ordinary people because it benefits an extremely big number of them. The Kenyan Government adopted this system many years ago and it is working extremely well.

The appointment of J.C. Muyingo as Minister of State for Primary Education is extremely good and the President should be thanked for this.

Dr. Muyingo is an expert on Primary Education and the country has full confidence in him that he will overhaul and streamline the entire Primary Education system and bring it “back to life”.

Almost every week you see on the television, primary schools all over the country, which are in terribly dilapidated conditions.

In some districts pupils sit under trees to study. Teachers are also not happy because they are underpaid and many of them walk long distances from their homes to the schools.

In some areas the school buildings are almost collapsing and others have open roofs since a strong wind blew them off. Judging from what Dr. Muyingo has done to modernise his own private schools, this country has full confidence in him that he will modernise the private schools in Eastern, Northern, Western and Buganda.

Finally Ugandans expect the ministers, old and new, to seriously implement the policies and development plans of their respective ministries without giving us vague reasons and unnecessary excuses.

The writer is an elder from Kyaggwe in Mukono District