Poverty to reduce by 10% in one year, Museveni tells UN

Sep 22, 2016

Ending poverty is goal number one of the new 17 Sustainable Development Goals that the UN hopes countries will achieve by 2030.

Halving poverty levels in the country by 2017 is what President Yoweri Museveni has pledged in his speech at the United Nations (UN) Assembly in New York.

Museveni, who was commenting on the General Assembly's theme "The Sustainable Development Goals: a universal push to transform our world," said in the last 12 years, Uganda has reduced the number of people living in poverty from 56% in 2004 to 19% today.

"It is hoped that by 2017, it (poverty) will be reduced to 10%," he said on Tuesday.

Ending poverty is goal number one of the new 17 Sustainable Development Goals that the UN hopes countries will achieve by 2030.

"Even in Africa, a continent with a lot of accumulated disadvantages, 414 millions of people have come out of poverty," Museveni added.

Describing the UN theme on sustainable development goals as "a good topic", Museveni said the goals add "another nail in the coffin" of inequality gaps between the developing world and the developed world.

"This is a good topic.  It adds another nail in the coffin of the old parasitic arrangement where only a small portion of humanity ─ those living in the USA, Canada, Western Europe, Australia and New-Zealand, lived in affluence while the rest of the world lived in abject poverty," he said.  

Museveni added that the lopsided development that shaped the world in the past was characterized by some countries developing at the expense of others.

However, in the new world order, Museveni added, the parasitic logic has been challenged.

"Since 1981- 2010, 380 million and 207 million of people in China and India respectively have come out of poverty," he said.

A similar development strategy is what Museveni is suggesting for Africa, especially Uganda, through exploiting markets and changing the ideological orientation of citizens on wealth creation models.

"The fair and authentic ideology of being "my brother's keeper" in the  Book of Genesis, Chapter 4:9 is the true antidote to this poison. Abandon all forms of chauvinism and the world will be safer for everybody.  In my dialect we say: "Karasha ngabo, imurasha" ─ "the one who shoots arrows at others, should expect arrows to come his way," he said.   

The other bottleneck, which Museveni wants African leaders to address, is the issue of fragmented markets on the continent.

"It is easy to trade with China, India, the USA, Russia, Brazil or Indonesia because they are markets of 1.3 billion, 1.2 billion, 150 million, 200 million and 200 million respectively because they are societies under one political authority each.  We and the others that have fragmented markets, must struggle to rectify this deficiency," he said.

He, however, noted that progress towards rectifying the issue of fragmented markets in Africa, is being tackled through the formation of regional trading zones such as the East African Community (EAC), Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA),  the Southern African Development Community (SADC)  and the  Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS).

Museveni said, the future of Africa is to have an ultimate common market for continent, as leaders agreed during the July African Union summit in Kigali.

"Remember that when I buy what is produced by your factory, I am supporting your prosperity and when you buy what I produce, you are supporting my prosperity," he said.

10 strategic bottlenecks

·     Ideological disorientation;

·     A weak state, especially the army, that needed restructuring;

·     The suppression of the private sector;

·     The underdevelopment of the human resource (lack of education and poor health);

·     The underdevelopment of the infrastructure (the railways, the roads, the electricity, the telephones, piped water, etc);

·     A small internal market;

·     Lack of industrialization;

·     The underdevelopment of the services sector (hotels, banking, transport, insurance, etc.);

·     The underdevelopment of agriculture; and

·     The attack on democracy.

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