President Museveni has commissioned the Uganda Support to Municipal Infrastructure Development (USMID)- funded roads in Mbale City.
During the launch, Museveni said that government is now focused on diversifying a multi-modal transport system.
“We are now talking about the roads which we are working on but the big effort which we are going to make is the railway because the traffic on the road now is not needed,” he said.
“We are now going to develop the railway system and also the pipeline from Kenya and Tanzania so that the oil is not transported via roads. The cargo also is not supposed to be on the road, it should be on the railway. The roads should be used by passengers and light cargo. Then we have air travel and water travel. We need to diversify the multi-modal transport system.”
He also implored the leaders to mobilise all Uganda to join the money economy to create wealth.
“Whatever the National Resistance Movement (NRM) does, is deliberate and we follow our proverb here of “one by one makes a bundle”. This is the NRM, if you were to listen, we would move because we told you start with the base which is the population and the majority of the people are in agriculture. Wake up those people so that they join the money economy where every household is earning money,” he said.
“At Independence only 9 percent of the homesteads were in the money economy. What sort of a country is that where you have 91 percent of the homesteads boycotting money? How will you live in a modern society without money?” he further wondered.
He explained that since inception, the NRM has been preaching wealth creation, with an aim of transforming the lives of Ugandans.
“That’s why when we came, after stabilization, from 1986 I started moving around telling people to use the prevailing peace to create prosperity and in 1996, we put all this in the Manifesto for that Election, bonna bagagawale. In the rural areas the kugagawala is through commercial agriculture,” he noted.
“Now we have moved but we have not done so as we would have done. After involving the army and all that, now the people in the money economy are 67 percent, 33 percent are still boycotting money.”
The president further urged that if leaders empower all Ugandans to join the money economy, the purchasing power will go up, thus enabling the country to achieve the much-desired socio-economic transformation.
“You leaders should be clear that rural transformation is crucial for urban transformation because it will equip the rural areas with the purchasing power who will then come and purchase from your shops and all that. Make sure that all the homesteads join the money economy through agriculture by using PDM, then other people can go to Emyooga and services.”
The Minister of State for Urban Development, Kania Obiga congratulated Mbale for attaining a city status and for successfully implementing the USMID project for a decade.
“The coun