President Yoweri Museveni has said that in the fight to eradicate household poverty, the National Resistance Movement has always and will continue to target the poorest of the poor in society because it is useless to have a small fraction of rich people in a sea of largely poor people in Uganda.
Addressing a public rally in Nyakagyeme Sub-County of Rujumbura County, Rukungiri District in South Western Uganda, the President said that in the fight against household poverty, the National Resistance Movement leadership need to borrow a leaf from the NRA/M methods of work during the liberation war and how it worked with peasants and the ordinary wananchi who were not the most powerful or the elite to liberate the country.
President Museveni who gave a start-up capital of Shs.110 million to 5 local Savings and Credit Cooperative Organizations (SACCOs) – Nyakagyeme Development SACCO, Nyakagyeme Youth SACCO, Nyakagyeme Boda-Boda SACCO, Boona Bageigahare Development Group and Matooke Traders’ SACCO to whom he donated a lorry to help transport their produce to the market – said that the fight against poverty has to be at the graassroot level targeting the most poor and vulnerable in society.
“We can’t continue like this with a small fraction of rich people surrounded by a large population of poor people in a rich country like Uganda,” he said.
“I started this advocacy as early as 1967 in the Nyabushozi area and I was misunderstood and branded a communist by the leaders in Ankole at the time because I was fighting for the poor. They even told me that society was arranged that way that there must the rich and the poor,” he added.
“But that did not stop my campaign against poverty in Nyabushozi and the area today is a living testimony where the majority of the households have overcome household poverty,” he observed.
President Museveni said that for the rural population to overcome poverty, they need to adapt to commercial profit oriented agriculture as opposed to subsistence agriculture and avoid land fragmentation that is propelled by primitive inheritance rites that, he noted, has seen the country loose most of her valuable agricultural land.
