The Economic Forum is back. The issue that is on every Ugandan’s lips is corruption. Scandal after scandal, the media are on a daily basis reporting, not millions but billions of shillings of public funds stolen. Here below is the brief story:
The Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets (PPDA) authority, estimates that more than $100 million (Shs. 260 billion) is lost every year in procurement corruption alone.
A recent survey, the East African Bribery Index 2012, by Transparency International, showed that Uganda is the most corrupt country in East Africa. Globally we ranked 143 out of 182 countries surveyed. The lower the rank the more corrupt a country is.
In the last five years, a total of over Shs. 1,026 billion has been stolen from government. And that is just the amount so far known and reported. One would not be entirely wrong to imagine that the unreported loot could probably outweigh the reported. Below is a summary of the biggest scandals we have so far heard about in the last five years.
Read the rest of this entry
Greetings and welcome to the 6TH MUBS Economic Forum discussion. Previous presentations and discussions propelled us to extend productivity enhancement to Commercialization of Agriculture. The topic is: Commercialization of Agriculture as Strategy of Improving Agriculture in the Country
Recurrent blames on food shortages have repeatedly pointed to the subsistence nature of production in the country. Simply put, households are producing less than excess to even sustain themselves over a seasoned period. The distance between two harvest periods has continuously grown so wide for many Ugandan households in terms of food self-sufficiency. While the usual lead suspects to this economic problem are weather instability, reducing land fertility and lack of agricultural inputs, policy analysts on the peripheral have incessantly signaled subsistence farming behavior as the general weakness at all levels.
Read the rest of this entry
On June 8, 2011, a Shs. 9.8 trillion budget was presented to Parliament by Finance Minister Maria Kiwanuka. The budget was framed amid political unrest (walk to work) thanks to inflationary pressures, high fuel and food prices, and an economy chocked by the global financial crisis.
Read the rest of this entry
President Bingu Wa Mutharika of Malawi died on April 5 of a heart attack at the age of 78. His country men, suffering a massive economic and political crisis, seem to have declared good riddance. Some of his rogue allies apparently tried to hold on to power after his death, but democracy prevailed with the installation of the vice president, Joyce Banda, to the presidency. President Banda inherits an acute crisis much of which was Mutharika’s making.
Read the rest of this entry