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WIDENING TAX BASE: President Museveni delivering new year’s speech Tuesday |
Countrymen and women, greetings to all of you. I am glad many of you had a Merry Christmas and I am sure the millions of you will have a happy New Year.
The more I listen, once in a while, to the scores of private radio stations, whenever I have time, the more I read the two English daily papers, the more convinced I become that the strategic challenges of Uganda, nay the strategic challenges of the whole of the African Continent, are, up to now, not properly understood by many elements in the elite.
The National Resistance Movement has already scored tremendous achievements by partially addressing some of these strategic goals although the international and regional environments are not always right.
The good rate of annual growth of 6.5% of GDP for the last 16 years, the dramatic rise of enrolment in the primary schools, the decline of Infant Mortality rate from 122 to 81 in every 1,000 born alive (unfortunately there has been a lapse on the part!
of the Local Governments and the Ministry of Health in this area), the decline of Aids prevalence rate from 30% to 6% are proof enough that there has been a partial addressing of the strategic challenges. I should not forget to mention the huge boom of construction in all towns of Uganda.
What are these strategic challenges? Let me restate them again, they are the following:
tTransforming our society from a pre-industrial to an industrial one. This means that more of the labour force should not be in the agriculture or the public service but should be in industries and services (Banking, Insurance, Transport, Professional services, hotels, etc). The comparative figures are as follows at the moment: Uganda, Malaysia and United Kingdom, accordingly (See Table 1).
It means that more people should live in the urban areas than those who live in the rural areas. There should be less infant mortality in Uganda; less illiteracy.
The comparative figures a!
re the following in these areas. For cooking and lighting our people should use electricity instead of firewood.
More and more people should use water-borne toilet systems instead of using latrines or worse the bush. More Ugandans should drink piped water. This is what transforming society, partially, means. This is what modernising society means.
t Following from the first challenge (just stated above), other challenges follow. We must provide more and more non-government, non-primordial agriculture and employment opportunities.
In other words, we must attract more factories into Uganda; more hotels; more banks; more entertainment opportunities; more professional services (lawyers, accounting and auditing, doctors, private schools, etc etc) to mention some. In short, we must attract more factories and more services.
What do we need to do that? We need to make it easy for the factories to come into Uganda. We need to provide serviced land to t!
hem. We need to quicken the licensing. There is no need to delay licensing a factory or hotel for more than a month.
Everything, including the environmental impact assessment needs to be done quickly and finished. Anybody who delays this process is an enemy of our peoples’ future.
It is these factories, hotels and other service companies that will employ our school and university leavers. Factories, more service companies. This is the way forward; this is the future; not Revenue Authority or Civil Service. The whole of the Public Service is currently (See Table 2).:-
t By attracting more factories and more service companies, apart from creating employment, more goods and services will be produced. Some of these will be taxed. Therefore, the government revenue base will be wider.
The government will have more taxes. By government having more taxes, it will pay higher salaries to its employees, will construct more tarmac roads, will provide pipe!
d water to everybody, will modernise the railway system so that our goods can be transported quicker and cheaper, will, in addition to UPE, provide free education in the secondary schools and subsidized education in universities and will build more power stations on the Nile and its tributaries if there are no private companies to do so.
t Therefore, by widening the tax base as mentioned above, we should be able to fund infrastructure development. Infrastructure is a sine qua non of other forms of development. Even attracting more factories and service companies depends a lot on good infrastructure - roads, telephones, piped water, railways etc.
t However, it is pointless to produce in factories or bring service companies into the country if there is no market. Who will use the hotels you build? When I addressed parliament on the 3rd June 2002, I dealt with the issue of market at great length. Movement cadres should read that speech and propagate its message,!
please. In that speech, in summary, I pointed out that the internal market is small for three reasons: first, the population of Uganda is small (25 million people compared to 1.2 billion of China); secondly, this population is 85% rural and rural people, because of subsistence agriculture, do not buy from each other because they produce the same products; it is only the 15% purchases;thirdly, since most are unemployed (because of absence of factories and service companies), they have little or no incomes and their purchasing power is, therefore, low.
The regional market (African) is paralysed by excessive political fragmentation. Africa, in spite of its population of 800 million people, is so fragmented politically that it is not a united market the various treaties notwithstanding. Then, until recently, we have been shut out of the international market by the parasitism of the western countries, which talk of free trade but practice protectionism. Therefore, the fi!
fth greatest strategic challenge is market integration in Africa and market access internationally - while our own internal market metamorphoses.
tThe sixth strategic challenge is human resource development - education and health for all. Without educated and skilled workforce, you cannot man factories or service companies. We have already made a good beginning on this with UPE, Universal immunisation and expanding university education.
t The seventh strategic challenge is building a state: the army, police, judiciary, parliament, and the executive with a skilled and mission oriented civil service. Such a state will ensure stability and rule of law so that the other six strategic targets are pursued in peace and justice. We are making every effort to build the army. We have been having discussions with our partners - the donors so as to have a convergence of views. The parliament, especially movement supporters, need to thoroughly grasp these strategic challe!
nges and support them promptly so as not to lose time and opportunities.
The executive, especially the ministers, must understand these goals and be cohesive and consistent about them. the days of populist politicians just looking for power are gone.
Support the strategic as identified by the movement in its various documents including my election Manifestoes. The civil service must completely change their role.
Their primary role is to execute the seven strategic goals of the movement when it is in power. The government budgeting and licensing procedures must reflect this.
The judiciary must change. The unprofessional bias of elements therein of some of its elements must stop. The corruption by some elements must stop. In the last 17 years I have been appointing judges without vetting as they were recommended to me by the judicial service commission.
Was I wrong to do so? My wish was to have a non-partisan, corruption free and profess!
ional judiciary. If my stance was wrong, it is not too late to change. In the coming calendar year I will appoint a judicial commission of inquiry manned, partly by foreign commonwealth judges to inquire into the judiciary. I am also looking at proposing constitutional amendments to ensure that the judiciary does not become a millstone around the neck of Ugandans in their forward march and transformation such as the one I am referring to above.
These are the seven strategic tasks that I would commend to the movement cadres and supporters as well as other Ugandans to study, master and propagate instead of endlessly wasting Ugandans time with peripheral issues that are not the core of Africa’s problem.
It is now 40 years since Independence for most African countries. How is it that almost all Black African countries are backward (except in some respects, South Africa) irrespective of their recent history: Socialist or capitalist; multiparty or single party; a p!
eaceful post-independence 40 years of a turbulent; pro-East or pro-West in the past? Uganda, which had such a turbulent history and which still has many problems is much better, under the NRM, than many African countries.
Why? Radio Uganda, in particular, as well as UTV must do more serious work on this issue-making Ugandans discover their real interests rather than pushing interests of power hungry politicians, opportunists or the ones of foreigners.
There are short-term problems such as the rear-guard actions of the reactionaries we overthrew in cocktail with regional terrorists, adventurers and opportunists by sending terrorists into Uganda from Sudan and Congo.
We have waged a protracted struggle against these backward forces. We defeated many of them and negotiated with others. Only the Kony’s gangs are remaining outside the constitutional framework. In April, this year we launched a massive attack against them in the Sudan, with no objection fro!
m the Sudan government that previously backed them. We have achieved a lot in the last eight months. I will give an update on the details in the next two weeks in the media.
Nevertheless, it suffices to inform for now that Kony gangs are greatly weakened. They had press ganged about 2,500 boys and girls as slave soldiers, by the time we started the offensive in April 2002.
My estimate of those remaining now is about 500 youths with rifles. Hundreds others have been liberated. More importantly, we have completely uprooted the bandits from their permanent bases in the Sudan.
In Uganda, they have no bases. They have nomadic bands. We are working methodically to corner each of these bands and eliminate them. more important is to capture or kill the rebel leaders. So far we have killed the following rebel leaders:-
l Lt. Col. Lumumba
l Maj. J. Lawoko
l Maj. Okello Laguru
l Capt. Okot Ogik
l Capt. Wod Paco and many others.
Among !
other aims, the rebels wanted to close Karuma road, Gulu-Karuma road and other big roads. Although some bad ambushes occurred on these roads, including Karuma road, evidently the roads have not been closed because of the vigilance of the army.
The rebels recently have been fleeing towards the Sudan border. Wherever they go, we are with them. they also can no longer use certain forest zones such as Wicheri, Zoka, Opok, Zambia swamps etc, because we have put permanent zonal units.
It is only in zonal areas where the army leaders have not yet permanent zonal units that experience rebel infiltration. These are areas like Latwala, Kadomela, Adodi etc. the army leaders have been instructed that this oversight must not reoccur.
We have shown the bandits that there is no area in Southern Sudan where the UPDF cannot go; Agoro mountains, Imatong mountains, Isale mountains, Kit valley etc. we have done all this in the rainy months of this year. We are now enteri!
ng the dry season.
I am sure of decisive results just as we finished ADF by killing Cobra at the end of 2000. The situation of our protracted battle with these criminals is entering a decisive and excellent phase. I am sure of good results. I have also been hearing of scheming of Besigye and the traitors Kyakabale and Mande.
I want to assure you all that in case these gentlemen start any new problems; we have got an adequate contingency plan to deal with them at the same time as we deal with Kony. Hitherto, we have been dealing with the regional security problems depending on limited mobilisation. Even when we were in Congo, we maintained a peace team posture because that conflict was essentially a small conflict; so was our limited conflict with the Sudan. However, I want all Ugandans to know that we have the entire infrastructure to carry out large-scale mobilisation in case of need.
Therefore, those scheming against peace in Uganda will, inevitably!
, fail. We may lose lives, money and development time, but we shall not lose the mission of defending the sovereignty of Uganda and Uganda’s constitution.
Finally, the option of peace exists for the Kony bandits. Let them do what I told them to do: go to the borderline and engage in talks with the Government Negotiating Team led by the Rt. Hon. Eriya Kategaya. Short of that I will pursue them until the end. 2003 will definitely be the year of peace in Uganda whatever the goings-on in the region.
Salutations to all of you. Strategic challenges and peace. That is the slogan of 2003.
31.12.2002.
Gulu
Published on: Thursday, 2nd January, 2003 |
