COMMENT | By Amos Wekesa | After reading The Daily Monitor yesterday and seeing Justice Stephen Kavuma back, I told a business friend of mine that we urgently need to form a task force that will educate Ugandan politicians, civil servant basics of investment while one can.
If we don’t do the above, we should prepare ourselves for refugee status in less than 15 years from now and I don’t need to be a prophet to tell that.
Our borrowing as a nation is sinking us deep and yet we are majorly funding consumption not growth. Our agriculture is growing at 4% per annum and our population growth is at 3.5% which means we are barely feeding ourselves. Unemployment is soon reaching danger zone.
Our national debt stands at Sh37 trillion and we shall borrow about Sh15 trillion this financial year, of which Sh10 trillion will go into servicing debt. URA will probably collect Sh14 trillion this financial year as part of the Sh29 trillion needed to run Uganda.
The public sector generally speaking is clueless of the dangers ahead hence and has no idea in the area of creating jobs. The public sector has both opposition and the ruling. You can’t tell me all these public officers support NRM….Nedda.
Teaching these people about financial management and investment will see people like Kavuma retire.
The reason these people fear retiring is that they can’t survive on their own for more than a year. They live lives of pomp, and pomp is very expensive.
Many of the people in the public offices assume government money is actually free money. There is nothing like free money in this world.
These people in public offices have brand new cars every two years, have people opening doors for them, fly business class every time they travel without offering value back and they get used to used it.
As a businessman, I have never owned a brand new car, no one opens the doors for me etc. because it’s very hard earned money…..and if I entertain pomp, I can easily be trapped in debt.