Photo: YouTube

Gen. Museveni has attempted, once again, to explain the high cost of living in the country currently. And has only succeeded in showing us how clueless he is.

Speaking during the end of year national thanksgiving service at State House, Entebbe yesterday, Gen. Museveni explained that the high cost of living emanates from the problem of petroleum shortages occasioned by the war in Ukraine and the clash of civilisations, so to speak, between the West and Russia.

“There’s oil but the Western countries stopped it to punish Russia and in turn you fellows get affected. Now because of that, it affected the transport here. The bananas, although they are grown here, they need to be transported from the village to here, the prices went up,” Gen. Museveni said.

After offering us the usual platitudes, he offered no solution nor reprieve. Instead, he smiled in confirmation to Robert Bloch’s quote: “The man who can smile when things go wrong has thought of someone else he can blame it on.”

We all know that money for solving this problem is salted away to offshore accounts Mobutu-style, while Ugandans wallow in their own poverty.

Even those used to oppressing Ugandans are oppressed.

The average Police officer working for the Uganda Police Force shares a 4-by-3-meter (13-by-10-foot) one-room home built by themselves himself out of corrugated iron sheets with a spouse, several children and members of his/her extended family!

It is such a ramshackle affair that when it rains, the house leaks and reduces such a domicile into a receptacle of endless misery as raw sewage, which runs from the poorly constructed shared bathroom and all around, where similar crowded homes exist.

To relieve the situation, the Museveni junta recently said it would construct new homes for the long-suffering police officer, some of whom have been known to sleep in graveyards, by teaching the said officer how to sleep in “organized housing”!

Sure, this might sound funny to you, but there’s a catch. The cost of the training is likely to be quadruple the cost of the “new” housing!

If you don’t think this is possible, then consider what former presidential candidate Joseph Kabuleta once revealed when speaking of the White Elephant, the Parish Development Model (PDM).

PDM is a Ponzi poverty alleviation scheme into which the government has injected shs490 billion.

While in the Tooro sub-region, mid this year, Kabuleta equated PDM to Operation Wealth Creation and Bonna Bagaggawale, which he correctly said are failed programs.

“They are using Shs3. 3 billion to train people on how to use Shs500 million. I don’t think it is going to be any different from the other failed government programs. It’s just a new one, a new kid on the block which is doomed to fail.”

There, you see, there has been evidence in the past that this regime is simply out to create programs which have no legs so that some fat cat can enjoy the stolen loot meant for the same programs at the expense of financially flailing Ugandans.

Kabuleta is currently in jail for speaking one too many truths and many other Ugandans, including this columnist, have been gagged by the Computer Misuse Act.

This Act, which is fiat in all but name, has ensured that when such villainy is conducted by the Museveni junta, Ugandans cannot dare speak about it lest they end up like Kakwenza, Stella Nyanzi or worse.

However, as journalists and writers, we have a bounden duty to say what we say without prejudice or fear because this is our country and politics, as General Charles de Gaulle once said, are far too serious a matter to be left to politicians. Especially if those politicians are toadies of the Museveni junta.