The Forum for Democratic party’s (FDC’s) former president, Kizza Besigye Kifeffe has held what he calls the state of the people to address. The address was conducted from his home in Kasangati a Kampala suburb on Wednesday, June 3.
While at the address, Kizza Besigye poked holes in the government intervention mechanism to combat the deadly coronavirus.
“They chose to rely on a loan of the British colonial government. The public health act of 1935 even talks about African corners. That time, there were African corners and white corners,” Besigye said.
Besigye also released his own post-COVID-19 recovery plan parallel to the government’s recovery plan. He urged Ugandans to demand for their share from the government on the billions of money received from donor countries.
“The plan that we have is to rally with all the other change seeking people to make an effective demand that our money applies for our needs. That must be unequivocal,” Besigye said.
The International monetary fund (IMF) and several other multinational organizations recently approved the borrowing of trillions to Uganda which is to be used to fund Covid-19 recovery plan of the government.
It is from this fund, that Besigye wants teachers to receive 70% payments of their salaries. Small scale enterprises, farmers and social service workers to also benefit from this fund.
“We want this finance and economic stimulus we are talking about to be primarily or majorly for small entrepreneurs, small farmers that have been vanquished by this pandemic,” Besigye added.
Besigye also wants special attention to be put to on the health sector to improve on a patient per doctor ratio in the event the situation worsens in the future.
“Of the 2500 billion Covid-19 money, the health sector gets 90 to 94 billions but the State House takes 300 billion and for reasons not to be disclosed,” He notes.
Besigye’s address comes just a few hours when the President of Uganda is preparing to have the State of the nation’s address.