President Museveni has officially opened the ruling NRM national delegates conference at Kololo independence grounds.
The two-day delegates conference started with endorsing Museveni as the party national chairman and presidential flagbearers for the forthcoming general elections.
The conference also endorsed Al Hajji Moses Kigongo as the first vice chairperson of the NRM.
Speaking during the opening ceremony, President Museveni emphasized the need for creation of wealth by Ugandans.
“ You spend most of the time talking of roads and so on. Yes, they are important, a tarmac road, a hospital and school are good since they serve all of us but at night, you don’t sleep on the road, hospital or in the school but go back to your own house,” Museveni said.
“When you go back you confront problems in your house like poverty, lack of food and lack of jobs. Therefore, we are saying, mine is better than ours. Wealth is key. Separate development from wealth.”
The NRM national chairman said whereas development benefits a group, wealth is for an individual.
He asked Ugandans to vouch more for wealth than development which he says can come but make no sense when people don’t have wealth.
“Wealth is found in commercial agriculture, manufacturing, services like boda bodas, hotels, tourism and ICT among others. I want leaders to be clear about this and if you do this, things will be easy for the country and as you leaders.”
Growth of economy
The president said going forward, the target is growing the economy 10 times to $500 billion in the next 15 years.
He explained that by 1962, Uganda was island economy with only 9% of the homesteads in the money economy, as the rest were involved in subsistence production.
According to Museveni, when his NRM came to power in 1986, the process of changing the tides started, by widening the scope of cash crops to ensure maize, sugarcanes, cassava, milk, beef , bananas, fruits and vegetable are sold for cash by Ugandans in what he termed as a phase of diversification.
He said the country would later go into a phase of value addition, noting that the country is under the phase of knowledge economy, giving the example of electric vehicles like Kiira EV assembled in Uganda.
“Because of these phases, the economy has grown from $3.9billion to $66billion dollars. It has expanded 17 times and this is where we are. That’s why we are saying we need to enter a new phase. We want the economy to change completely from $66bn to $500 billion in the next few years. We are now a lower middle-income country and now targeting high middle-income country in the next few years.”
“Therefore, the next phase is to make this jump from lower middle income to upper middle income to move towards becoming a modern society. A modern society means that you depend on the products of the brain and skills of the hand rather than muscles. Instead of using hoes, you shift to using tractors. Instead of our daughters going to well to pick water, it is brought by pipes. Instead of girls to cook with fire, they use electricity.”
