Gen Salim Saleh has boldly looked his brother President Yoweri Museveni and told him to prepare for a day in the near future when he will be presiding over a collapsed economy in the next few months. He says unless Gen Museveni listens and undertakes urgent interventions he is recommending, Uganda will have no economy to write home about in the next 10 months.
Credible sources have revealed.
that the two politically powerful siblings have been holding marathon meetings since the last week of April. Their economic dialogue at these regular meetings has rotated around the ideas Gen Saleh has been conceptualizing and incubating from his private economic think tank comprising of carefully selected economists including Mubs’ Ramathan Goobi and Makerere CoBAMS College Principal Eria Hissali. A blue eyed boy to Makerere VC Prof Barnabas Nawangwe, introverted Hissali has influenced Gen Saleh’s economic ideas and perception more than any other Ugandan economist because, sources say, 75% of the General’s thinking time at his Namunkekera base in Nakaseke district is spent having consultative sessions with him and nobody else.
Uganda Industrial Research Institute (UIRI)’s Prof Charles Kwesiga too has been active at Saleh’s Namunkekera base in Nakaseke district where these discussions have been taking place. Some relevant government technocrats have occasionally been called in. Stanbic Bank top executive for the entire EAC region Patrick Mweheire has regularly been in touch with Gen Saleh too and he is one practicing economist whose views the NRA bush war hero solicits before taking final decisions on anything. Sometimes, Gen Saleh scribbles down his crude ideas and shares them with Mweheire while intently asking “Patrick what do you think? Can any of those ideas work and lead us anywhere?”
Gen Saleh has often respected Patrick Mweheire’s views on which he often bases to alter his own original ideas and thoughts on how the Ugandan economy can be shielded against collapse that he fears is going to result from the continuing COVID19-related lockdown. But, because of the great ideas he keeps getting from his carefully selected economists that he privately remunerates, Gen Salim Saleh hasn’t been entirely pessimistic in his marathon meetings with HE the President. He has always returned to these Presidential discussions with improved options which he insists are the only interventions the GoU must make now (and not next FY) to save the economy from collapsing.
Gen Museveni was initially very hostile to Saleh’s ideas calling them utopian and too crude to work anywhere in the world but the ever worsening COVID19 uncertainties have caused him to keep calling back Gen Saleh who he has several times required to repeat the articulation of his ideas to perhaps check out for his consistency in sticking to those proposals. And the down to earth General from Namukenkera has patiently been repeating his views while articulating them with unprecedented eloquence and consistency which has made many key Museveni advisors that were initially hostile to buy in.
Arguing it’s not necessary to continue sounding sophisticated when more and more citizens are sinking into economic misery and destitution, Gen Saleh has articulated his “common sense and basic economic interventions” to include government finding money to feed at least 2m Ugandans (who risk starvation) for an indefinite period. He profiles these to be adults of working age but have never found any gainful employment since attaining adulthood. He insists these aren’t just in Kampala and Wakiso but across the country. Gen Saleh argues that the ongoing COVID19 lockdown and uncertainty is the best opportunity Gen Museveni to rethink all his economic policies that he says gave yielded nothing but alienation for this category of citizens.
State House sources add that Gen Saleh is also suggesting a grant fund by government to bail out the poor men and women involved in the mobile money business. He estimates that at least 300,000 of people under this category have economically been badly battered by COVID-related hardships and can never become economically active again unless government intervenes and economically restores them by giving them some recapitalization. He thinks his OWC’s mandate can be expanded so that his teams participate in implementation of such interventions.
He is also suggesting that, to effectively boost agricultural production, the GoU must invest good money in procurement of high quality seeds and have them distributed to farmers across Uganda. That farmers too should be supported into farming, agricultural production, fertilizer application, harvesting, processing, value addition and marketing of the produce. He also wants the rate at which Central Bank lends to Commercial banks to be reduced so that commercial banks can be compelled to reorganize their loan portfolios to reduce interest for those with pending loan obligations even after COVID19. He also wants the GoU to contribute some funds for recapitalization of Commercial Banks besides capitalizing all SACCOs and making citizens’ membership to them compulsory so that the very poor (that banks can’t lend to) can also have where to borrow cheaply from.
On the interest payment and debt servicing which is currently taking lots of money from government under the respective budgets (it was over Shs4trn in FY2018/19), Gen Saleh suggests that government should ask the lenders for a waiver on repayment for the next two years so that all that money (in trillions) is saved and used to finance the urgent pro-poor interventions he is proposing. He also suggests strengthening of the local governments in the districts (with less money going to the center) so that more funding goes there because it’s closer to the grass roots where most of his proposed interventions have to be implemented.
Museveni letter showing the extent to which borrowing and interest payment has been constraining the economy
In one of the meetings, a still reluctant Museveni asked Gen Saleh to estimate the cost of his proposed interventions. And the modestly educated General suggested Shs7trn. “Where do we get such money now?” Gen Museveni sternly asked in one of their meetings. Unable to readily answer, Gen Saleh asked for time to first retreat to his Namukenkera abode where he summoned Hissali, Goobi, Kwesiga, Goobi and Mweheire among others. They had marathon meetings which ended into areas of possible realignment in the FY2020/2021 budget being proposed.
In the process, Gen Saleh’s think tank highlighted how Shs5trn could be realized from just reallocating some of the monies the MPs had appropriated for the different sectors under the FY2020/21 budget. “I’m confident we can fundraise here and there to raise the other Shs2trn to make the total of Shs7trn because we need to act remedially and now,” he reportedly asserted. And by the time Gen Saleh was done making this point, an initially reluctant Museveni was fully converted. With key economists on his side, Gen Saleh also reached out and wooed NPA Chairperson Prof Pamela Mbabazi Sabiiti whose organization is by law the GoU think tank on development planning matters.
With NPA solidly behind him, Gen Saleh got the confidence that he could now surmount any finance Ministry or even BoU technocrat that might be hostile to his economic ideas and thereby try to incite Museveni to turn his back on him. He is now also optimistic that his OWC has built sufficient network country wide to be able to galvanize the public opinion without having to coerce anybody to see sense in the interventions he is advocating. At some point, the two brothers reflected on possible resistance from MPs but quickly consensus emerged that it would be politically suicidal and unlikely for any of the legislators to risk opposing such populist interventions on the eve of a major election that 2021 is threatening to be.
Gen Saleh, at whose instigation the Finance Ministry is holding a three day retreat for accounting officers to explain to them need to realign the budget and allow Shs5trn to be taken away, has also proposed interventions aimed at boosting the purchasing power of majority Ugandans because that’s the only way to spur economic activity and business transactions and in the process enable URA to collect more taxes with which service delivery can be deepened.
Credit: news.phxfeeds.com
