President Yoweri Museveni’s ongoing countrywide political assessment and mobilisation for the Parish Development Model (PDM) as NRM’s 2021-26 flagship program is good as it kicks energy, and unearthing pitfalls of policy in wealth creation and rural economic transformation agenda of the last thirty-eight years. Entandikwa, Naads, OWC, Emyooga and now PDM, while correct, genuine, necessary programs that have scored successes, have faced the same problems starting with poor, and often compromised selection of the beneficiaries.
These flagship programs have over the years been riddled by the noncompliance with regulations, set guidelines and standards. The responsible officials often supply substandard inputs and late delivery to farmers when the planting season is running out. There has also been inadequate or irregular funding, and lack of diligent supervision along the value-chain characterised by endemic corruption, yet we haven’t learnt much to correct the malaise.
With all the boastfulness that NRM is an enlightened vanguard mass-party, one would expect its popularly elected leaders at the most critical levels at the village, parish, sub-county, parliamentary constituency and district to put good efforts, but alas. The leaders are often absent to guide the population, except when they too are directly benefiting. Many of them, including ministers, MPs, and other leaders will troupe down to President Museveni’s functions to show cosmetic appearances, cris-crossing the event venue, and elbowing each other for photo opportunities with the president. This is how petty some of them have become, completely devoid of any embarrassments.
With a huge, but unserious and unfocused political bureaucracy, the NRM is still struggling to fine-tune its own policy formulation, implementation, funding, monitoring and supervision to deliver the desired economic outcomes. By the latest official statistics, and our own public admissions, many Ugandans are still trapped in undeniable and evident poverty of want for the common essentials of life.
Although the numbers have gone up, universal education school enrollment and completion rates don’t match up well, literacy and numeracy are disappointing, and critical skills attainment is wanting. Twenty-seven years of implementation of the Universal Primary Education (UPE), no district, most of them led by NRM has bothered to enact a bye-law on education, and as a result, have left laxity and negligence to impede its success.
It is coming to forty good solid years of NRM’s relatively unchallenged hold, and overwhelming dominance in political and public policy space, yet the results of its foremost agenda of socio-economic transformation is mostly mixed, if not evidently disappointing although many NRM leaders will be shy to admit publicly.
It is time that NRM leaders conduct a thorough and sustained self-introspection on many fronts, if we don’t want to end up in the history dung-heap like the Uganda Peoples’s Congress (UPC), KANU (Kenya).and UNIP (Zambia), or where the African National Congress (ANC) (South Africa) seem destined for. For some time now, I have received quiet blowbacks from sections of NRM and government leaders with timid minds, and infertile ideological outlook, afraid that open and frank criticism, although a correct foundations of NRM, is now unhealthy because it exposes the lackluster methods of work.
NRM’s agenda has always been correct, noble, and genuine, but conception, planning, funding, execution, implementation, supervision and monitoring have been half-hazard, inadequate, and sometimes deliberately distorted through abuse and corruption. This abuse has consequently led to mixed results, often much to embarrassments, considering the thirty-eight years of NRM leadership most of which in an unchallenged dominance in policy making and setting its own priorities.
The nascent, but rising chaotic noise of a perennially unserious and ever tiny opposition, both in and outside parliament has in the recent past been able to drown, disorient, derail, and sometimes even defeat NRM’s noble agenda. It is truly hard to comprehend, that which, is left of the NRM, but possibly mainly careerism and selfishness.
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