Fellow WestNilers, Fr. Ruffino suggested that we should have a discussion on what the issues of priority will be for our region in the coming elections. I know almost everything is our region is a problem, including food which used to be in abundance during those days when each homestead had at least two or three granaries to store produce from the gardens. Immediately after the war and and coming back from exile, our homesteads have no granaries and we have seen the suffering of people who now have to buy food from the market. Although part of the problem of scarcity of food in our region is selling of produce by the local farmers in Southern Sudan, we need to have a serious agenda to advocate for food security in West Nile.
1. Food Security becomes in my view an important issue to be address in our region. The loss of soil and soil fertility due to erosion, the depletion of vegetation associated with the labour intensive tobacco production, coupled with population pressure has diminished and exhausted available arable land, resulting in reduced food production. We need to advocate for elimination of tobacco growth in our region and find other ways to improve food production which can have some economic benefit in place of tobacco. Hopefully the recent issues taken against tobacco companies can highly feature in the campaigns to bring the tobacco companies to book. Food security in some has a close association with poverty and unhealthy population. I hope we can all agree that a hungry population is an unproductive population. 2. Energy - (Electricity supply) to me is another serious development factor or contributor which has eluded our region for a long time. Our region has been played as ping pong game by the government for a long time - WENRECOhas failed the region with Intermittent power, Nyagak has not been completed and it looks like it will not be completed in the near future. I heard from the newspapers that there is a discussion with Malaysian company to build yet a new a thermal power plant in West Nile (I am not sure if anything has been mentioned about completing Nyagak). With an already degraded environment in our region, and the dangerous environmental consequences of Thermal power, I wonder if the issue of thermal power is a good idea for our region. Whatever happened to the completion of Nyagak? I would tend to think that the challenges we have experienced in the energy sector should be used as an opportunity to plan to a long term Green Energy concepts. Green Energy would at least help in alleviating some of the environmental consequences we have experienced in our area. I think this issue needs to be addressed with specific time frame, lest we are doomed in our development agenda. I think that a reliable and sufficient energy/power resources is vital and a one of the key drivers of development. 3. Water and sanitation - this is another area of priority which I think we should very seriously consider because most of the water supply in the region is from Boreholes. Our fast growing population equally has significantly increased water demand for both domestic and agricultural use. We are bound experience serious water shortage in the near future as the vagaries of climate change and environmental degradation will dictate on on limited water resources. While we can still get water from boreholes we need to think of conservation ideas of how we can pump and store water from the boreholes into storage tanks so that the supply of water can be properly controlled based on the how much a location uses. Storage water will also offer the opportunity of at least ensuring the treatment of the water before storage so that there is supply of clean water. This will in the end have some health benefits when people consume relatively clean water. We should be aware by now that getting water from the Nile may have a lot of Problems because of the the restrictions from countries like Sudan and Egypt (Nile Basin Agreement) or will require a lot of negotiations which we may have to begin to plan for now if we think of the Nile as a source water supply for our region. The poor sanitation in most of our urban areas is one of the issues that need to be addressed, since the danger of increased population in urban areas without clean water and sanitation always results in the various epidemics we have experienced. 4. Investments in our region is something I think we need to seriously pay attention to. How and what investments can we establish or attract in our area. I am of the view that the flow of our people in to the south is as a result of lack of employment opportunities in our region. There is limited government and NGO employment opportunities, which means we have to think of creating our own employment opportunities for our region. One of the ways I think is to diversify our agricultural economy. This will require good business attracting infrastructure (electricity, clean water and sanitation, good roads, healthy and educated population and capital. Agriculture being the main occupation in our area may need to be reviewed from what are the most suitable crops people can grow with minimum or less intensive labour and gain some reasonable economic benefits, unlike the labour intensive tobacco from which our people are getting poorer and farmers also being cheated by the tobacco companies. I think individually we may not be able to have the capitla for serious investiment, but we as the members on this forum should take the initiative to challenge ourselves to create a capital fund to start some form of investiment. In my humble opinion, if we on this forum contributed at least UG Sh.100,000.00/= each, (I do not know how many members are on the forum), we should at least be able to come up with some capital for some investment. Such a fund if properly invested should provide us with profits and some strength to borrow from banks to begin implementing some of these issues we are waiting for the government to do for us. How long shall we wait for the government to rescue us when our rural people are truly in desperate need. 5. Education and Technology, health, roads and bridges, environment are all other areas of importance which all need to be addressed. While the Fr. Ruffino had suggested that the electorate ask the various political party leaders or representatives about their policy positions, I think our agenda for our regions development must be the forefront regardless of the policy positions of the parties. We must educate the people to demand for the the issues that will reduce the burden on their day to day life from the representatives of the parties who are aspiring to stand in our region how they intend to address these development issues in West Nile. *Note: The suggestion I have made about the contribution is to raise a capital fund which we can use to start an investment and we could also use the capital as a security to negotiate a loan from some of the banks in order to start some of these projects without government help so that we are able to take full control of what exactly we want and how we want to implement what we intend to do. For example, if we had capital we should be able to negotiate some partnership with private energy company to construct 10 Megawatts Solar or Wind power station (I am not sure if this would be sufficient for the whole of West Nile this was just my wild guess, I know we have engineers who would be able to advise on such ) which we can run jointly for an agreed period of time rather than have the government always playing ping pong games with us. * Over to you fellows Vasco Oguzua * *
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