District Creation Morotorium/Suspension

lo and behold, I bring you good tidings; that President Yoweri Museven has directed the minister of local government(Adolf Mwesige) to table a motion in parliament withdrawing the earlier proposed 25 new districts!!!????? Which would have brought to a whooping 137 the number of districts in Uganda and yet the minister's own constituency was/is among the 25 would be districts!!!???? And Mr Museveni realizes and admits that Infrastructure and service delivery is more important than turning every county into a district!!! At last, the voice of reason is being heard over sentiment and false pride. 

Fort Portal, the area MP Alex Ruhunda said it was a tug of  war to convince President Yoweri Museveni to impose a moratorium on the creation of new districts after assessing the performance and impact of the districts  which were created over the last decade. The MPs used an anology of a married couple producing more children yet the few or many they already have are suffering from Mal-nutrition and can't have the basic needs.

The cost of soaring public administration has always been too high and actually, an I think that even half of the 112 districts so far created after the NRM government came to power in 1986, ought to be merged and the resources channeled into  real service delivery by buying and equipping third world secondary schools with Laboratory equipment and other gadgets, diagnostic equipment  medicine and recruitment and retention of health workers who are well paid in hospitals. It is actually the bureaucracy that has been benefiting from the district extra-vaganza all along and one wonders why it took so long to see this! The President  is said to have made the observation while meeting district officials from Kanungu who had gone to lobby for the splitting of their very district to get a creation of Kihiihi which was to be cut off from the mother district of kanungu which was itself cut off from Rukungiri district shortly after Joseph kibwetere and his accomplices burnt to death an estimated 1000 belivers waiting for the virgin Mary to witness the end of the world in 2000(sorry I digress) . 

That Kasese was or is to give birth to 2 more districts of Rwenzori and Busongora which would have consumed about 120 Billion UGX to kick start and their demarcations almost certainly  drawn along ethnic lines, yet this money would be better spent on Health, education, roads and general infrastructural development for kasese and Rwenzori region as a whole and provide real services to the people and forge unity in diversity instead of polarizing the country along ethnic lines. How about using the that revenue for providing a cup of Milk for each of our Universal Primary/Secondary Education  pupils or buying sanitary pads for the girl child since it has been proved to be one of the reasons of high girl child absentism and school drop out!!??

Often times, I visit Fort Portal Regional Referral Hospital-FPRRH and I find a note on the X-RAY unit; OUT OF ORDER No FILMS or some other vital component missing, and yet this is a referral hospital serving 7 districts of kasese, Kamwenge, Bundibugyo, Ntoroko, Kyenjojo, Kamwenge and Kabarole. How about procuring such diagnostic equipment for our health units?

One of my all time classic song which was done by Anne Murray titles a Little Good News has lyrics that I like; that how I would love to open a newspaper or tune to tv or radio and the news is that there was no fighting hostility between Israel and her neighbors and that there was no bomb blast in Waziristan, Syria or Afghanistan. A little good news indeed. God is great indeed....Allahu akbaru...Laudeto Yesus Kristus