President Yoweri Museveni has unveiled a new 20-point development agenda, emphasizing his promise of turning Uganda into a middle income country within the next four years.
At yesterday’s cabinet briefing held at State House Entebbe, the president is said to have listed 18 action priority points that he wants his new government to concentrate on in the next five years.
However, before cabinet adopted his “new” plan, ministers added two points on his list of priorities: the need to support the water sector so as to enable the widening of safe water coverage and the need to intensify resource mobilisation as a strategy for fulfilling the agreed upon priorities.
At the inaugural cabinet meeting last week, the president had listed 15-priotity points, prioritizing the need to aggressively look for investments and listed corruption as the second issue that needs to be addressed in order to drive Uganda a middle income country.
However, during the second cabinet meeting the president added three more points and the minister added two before he officially unveiled his “new” 20-point plan for Uganda and for the first time promised to hold periodical meetings with ministers and technocrats in the various dockets to assess progress, focusing on specific deliverables and indicators he listed.
The three points added by the president are; improving government communication; the need to support the judiciary with all the human and financial resources so as to improve the justice system and the fight against crime and then, the issue of urban physical planning.
According to a statement by Information and ICT Minister, Frank Tumwebaze , The president stressed that organised urban planning is not only good for the environment, tourism but a great enabler for job creation through organised urban trade.
A statement released by Information and ICT minister also confirmed president’s 20-point programme, repeating some of the things the President had promised to work 30 years ago. For instance, in his revised 10-point programme of 2012- the 10 key bottlenecks, the president had promised zero tolerance to corruption, improving education to refine human resource, modernising agriculture, job creation among others. Some of these priorities were also part of the president’s old 10-point programme.
Under the ICT sector, Mr Tumwebaze said, in the medium term, “the President wants the Ministry of ICT to start and build a strong department of electronics that will ensure assembling of computers among other electronics.” “The president wants to see responsible and disciplined media reporting that is not injurious to the image of Uganda and tasked government agencies to always communicate timely and factually about government work and thus the reason he merged the communication agencies into one ministry for easy coordination.
He also stressed was the need for developing technical capacity in the field of electronics to do intelligent monitoring both by modern IT systems and knowledgeable Electronic engineers whose skill and capacity he directs the ministry of ICT to build.
Story By Yasiin Mugerwa
