President Yoweri Museveni has tasked the police to thoroughly investigate cases of corruption highlighted in the auditor general's reports.

While addressing the National Resistance Movement (NRM) Liberation Day celebrations at the Wakitaka Church of Uganda grounds in Jinja city on Friday, Museveni said instead of waiting time in intensive inquiries by parliamentary committees and boardroom dialogues, the police's investigating arms should take centre stage to bring the culprits to book.

His remarks come a few weeks after the auditor general report indicated that corruption was derailing available efforts of ensuring service delivery, coupled with ghost works, among other related evils. Museveni argues that corruption is an indication of political failure, which should be disassembled through legal means, instead of opting for systems, which were unable to deter graft before it happened.

Museveni notes that theft of public funds is a form of criminal behaviour, where prosecution procedures are undertaken and all responsible government agencies should be awakened to this fact.

"We can't do whatever we want to do because the biggest problem we have is corruption. Recently, there was an audit by the auditor general which showed that there were many ghost workers being paid...I saw that the committee of parliament is going to I don't know what. No. Once you're a thief or a criminal, CID will move in and deal with them. If the auditor general has shown that then the next stage should be CID not political because political would have been bypassed by that time," Museveni said.

As has been his norm lately, Museveni also accused countries of using their aid, loans and influence to induce third-world nations into bowing to their demands. Citing the example of Moses Simbwa, who used the Liberation Day celebrations platform to accuse some elements within the opposition of bribing him to parade torture claims against the government, Museveni says that, Uganda is built on strong systems that can't be destroyed by saboteurs.

Simbwa claimed that he was involved in a motor accident before election time but the opposition politicians promised him a pay of Shs 1 million if he 'falsely' accused the government of torture before international media.

Simbwa says that he openly agreed to their dealings, however, following months of living in fear, he reached out to the NRM Liberation Day organizers, who offered him a platform to unravel the truth surrounding his situation.

Museveni further says that several intelligence reports have implicated opposition leaders in allying with Western countries to cripple Uganda's economy and goodwill before the people, but there are plans of exposing them.

"Now what these young people were saying - Ssimbwa and the other one about the opposition, this one we know in the security system and at the right time we're going to expose these bogus groups that they call opposition. They go talk with Europeans to see how to force Uganda to be a puppet of foreign interests. They have been doing it in other African countries and also some of the other third world countries but they don't know how strong the NRM is. Some people announced; 'we're not going to give new loans, new money to Uganda.' We're moving forward, Uganda will grow at even a faster rate than before because the strength we built, we built it by ourselves. If you want to help you help, if you don't want bye-bye," Museveni said. - URN/The Observer

Are we in a crisis? The intricate web of the socio-economic challenges that we are facing today leaves us no room to answer the question any other way but in the affirmative.

As such, it is safe to say that our defining challenge is the ability to create an economic momentum that can sustainably help us put a material dent on poverty.Economic growth is the key through which a society unlocks opportunities, raises living standards and avails mass prosperity. It is more than abstract economic indices.

The fortunes of the citizens rise and fall on economic growth. When it falters, the sick have to put forward a visit to the doctor to the most dire of situations. The young miss out on education for their young minds and hearts. Inability to feed the hungry ultimately leads to malnutrition and a higher disease burden.

While it may be convenient to look back and point fingers, we must realise that the buck-passing will certainly not offer solutions to the people.

If anything, it does not set us apart from those who had the rare honour to preside over the benefit and costs of public policy but decided to increase their instead.

When public policy does not encourage productive capacity of citizens, then you know you are staring at a polity that is headed into an abyss. 

That is why besides the President’s pet projects of avoiding default while raising production, he may also want to focus more seriously on regional integration.

With a population of 238.7 million people, the East African Community provides a market so big that if we are to get our acts right, then a healthy competition which includes, but is not limited to removal of non-tariff barriers, will not only see emergence of thriving industries, but also help us deal with the problem of sovereign debt. 

This is how. Part of the reasons we are now drowning under the heavy weight of the sovereign debt is that our currency has weakened significantly against the dollar; the currency in which the debt was borrowed.

As at June 2024, we will spend 50 per cent more on debt repayment on account of the shilling’s depreciation alone.

If you compare Kenya’s debt situation and its advanced peers like Japan, which the previous administration liked to compare with whenever the debt to GDP ratio debate popped up, you realise that the comparison is of two very disparate scenarios. 

Japan has a huge export portfolio that earns it immense revenue in foreign exchange thus strengthening the Yen against other currencies. Japan, just like America, also pays its debt in its own currency.

If push came to shove, they can print themselves out of debt. The combined EAC economy under a common currency would literally awaken the sleeping economic giant that it is.

Secondly, that currency would stand up to other foreign currencies like the dollar and the pound.

The EAC common currency can then now become the means through which we pay our debts and not the shillings.

Free flow of capital within the community would also incentivise competition as consumers would be looking for high quality goods at affordable prices.

The resultant economic growth would provide the foothold with which to fight some of the seemingly intractable challenges facing the region such as radicalisation, triple planetary crisis and, the mounting disease burden.

A genuinely unified EAC on the economic front would then have the fiscal muscles to undertake major infrastructural projects without draining the close to 20 per cent of the GDP of one particular country in one infrastructural project without the buy in of neighbouring countries, thus rendering the project a white elephant as we did with our SGR.

May the uncertainties of these present times remind us, as citizens of the East Africa region, that we are better together.

We have dragged our feet for too long on the issue of common currency as well as on common market.

May we bring down the walls separating the community and set our people on the path to prosperity. By Kidi Mwaga, The Standard

Every so often, everyone experiences a W H Auden Funeral Blues Moment. Sometimes it is a personal tragedy. But, occasionally, it is a collective wider disaster. 

John Donne (1572–1631) says, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” 

A blow against the mass media vibrates beyond individual media entities. It is a blow against society itself.

It is difficult not to interpret this week’s Kenya government circular restricting State advertising to one media house as an intentional blow against the independent media, for perceived sins.  

Yet, it is a collective tragedy. Nobody; not even the apparent beneficiary, should find any level of comfort in it.

Of course Chinua Achebe writes of collective tragedy in Things Fall Apart, “A proud heart can survive a general failure, because such a tragedy does not prick its pride. It is difficult and more bitter when a man fails alone.”

Universal tragedy, regardless, is a monumental disaster. It reminds us of grief in Auden’s elegy “Stop all the clocks.” Also known as, “Funeral Blues” Stop all the clocks is a portrait of the immensity of collective grief.   

They call upon us to “prevent the dog from barking, with a juicy bone; silence the pianos, and bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.”

We are asked to “let aeroplanes circle, moaning overhead, scribbling the sky with the message, ‘He is dead,’” and to “put crepe bows round the white necks of public doves.”

Even the police are invited to share in this collective grief, by “wearing black cotton gloves.” 

Whatever prompted Auden to write such tragic and pithy verse in the 1930s, it remains relevant, nearly a century later. But it has ominous twists. 

Society’s watchdogs are either silenced with juicy bones or, alternatively, put to death. 

The clocks that should tell us about our times are stopped; the phones silenced. The message must go everywhere, “He is dead.”

But who dies, when the watchdog that is the mass media is put to death? Who should cry? Is it just the perceived beneficiaries from a particular media house, or is it a wider public tragedy? 

You see, advertising is at once the fuel, coolant and oil that keeps the media house running.

To remove it is to place the house on the death row. If, in the process, the State creates a couple of official mouthpieces as the only entities allowed to survive, then society should be very afraid.

All the terrible things unchecked power can do lie in wait. It is the starting whistle for a tragic rat race between the empire and all agents of freedom. But it is a war against freedom itself. In history, the objective has been to remove good governance and scrutiny. 

History demonstrates that the blow will eventually move from one institution to the next, and from one person to the next.

We are reminded of the Nazi torture chambers Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984), reflecting about his tragedy. 

“First they came for socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for trade unionists, and I did not speak out . . . Then they came for Jews... Then they came for me...”

The State may wish to reflect on the democratic gains the country has made over the years and rescind their reversal and negation.

If not, Kenya must with Auden, “Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, pour away the ocean, sweep the wood, for nothing now can ever come to good.”  Dr Muluka is a strategic communications advisor.