Tag Archives: cannot

Land is life

Fourth appearance on Radio Munansi

Greetings fellow Ugandans and friends

In this session I wish to share with you why in Uganda land is life and cannot be sold or leased to outsiders as is being done by NRM government.

1. Every human being needs land for a house, factory, recreation, garden, final resting place or a combination of all these functions.

2. Thus, every Ugandan whether educated, urban dweller, wage earner or not should have a piece of land. President Museveni stressed this point of land ownership when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 23, 2008. He stated that in Uganda all families own land. This point was well received by the audience.

3. Land ownership is especially vital for those who do not have non-agricultural skills.

4. Based on how an urban area is defined, some 90 percent of Ugandans still derive their livelihood from land.

5. The issue of land occupied the attention of colonial authorities. After serious debate between London and Entebbe taking into consideration the failure of European plantation agriculture in the 1920s, the colonial administration decided that Uganda’s land would be owned and worked virtually by Uganda peasants.

Read the full post
Posted on by

President Museveni’s scary statement should be opposed

President Museveni’s speech delivered at Hoima on June 11, 2010 is very scary indeed. Ugandans and their friends must not allow his scary remarks to be repeated or put into action.

When President Museveni, a head of state and chairman of the ruling party, talked about cutting someone’s head for entering his olubimbi (territory) was he saying, for example, that:

  1. opposition parties cannot aspire to form a government in Uganda with a new president
  2. poor people cannot aspire to become rich
  3. illiterate people cannot aspire to be educated
  4. women cannot aspire to inherit their parents’ properties
  5. women cannot aspire to work outside of the home and earn an income
  6. raw material exporting countries cannot aspire to industrialize?

If our understanding of his message is correct, then President Museveni is advocating a static division of labor or comparative advantage which is very difficult to accept. For example, Uganda cannot and should not accept to remain a producer and exporter of raw materials because we do not want to enter the lubimbi or territory of industrialized countries. This lubimbi concept explains why under Museveni’s leadership Uganda has de-industrialized.

Read the full post
Posted on by

Cover up of Hutu Massacres in Rwanda and DRC since 1990

I have just completed thirty days of listening and hearing stories of people from all walks of life in the Great Lakes Region. I spent three weeks in DRC, one week in Burundi and some hours in Rwanda. I have read quite a lot about the historical relations between Hutu and Tutsi people including the tragedies of 1972 and 1994 in Burundi and Rwanda respectively. Until this visit to the region my contacts had been with the elite from the region and around the world familiar with the history of the region. But I had never had the opportunity to listen and hear the views of the ordinary people. During these thirty days I made every effort to listen in formal and informal meetings (I learnt a lot more in informal meetings with individuals), ask questions, seek clarifications, probe as much as possible and repeat the same questions with different groups in order to get a consensus, noting the differences as well. Like a good medical doctor, I wanted to get to the root cause of the problem.

Read the full post
Posted on by