President Museveni's speech at

Uganda's 57th Independence

Anniversary

H.E. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni

PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF UGANDA
SIRONKO, EASTERN UGANDA
9TH October, 2019

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Your Excellency, Emmerson Mnangagwa, President of the
Republic of Zimbabwe;

The Leaders of the State and Party of Uganda;

Other Dignitaries present;

Ladies and Gentlemen.

As we meet here in Sironko, I would like to use this occasion to

congratulate Ugandans on this occasion of the 57th Anniversary
of Independence. Congratulations all of you.

Secondly, on your behalf, I would like to welcome our brother,

H.E. Mnangagwa, President of the Republic of Zimbabwe, for
agreeing to come and join us on this occasion of our celebrations.
When you have embaga, imbaka (a feast) and a relative comes to
join you in okujaguza, kumwihoyo (celebrations), that act
consolidates the brotherhood and sisterhood. The 1.3billion
people of Africa are, indeed, relatives.

Contrary to the position of the reactionaries, whose spectacles

never see the similarities or linkages among the African people,
the NRM, right from the beginning as a student Movement, saw
the deep linkages and similarities among the African people.

In 1966, when I put all my 3 choices for further studies at the

University of Dar-es-Salaam, I was not just interested in
education. If it was just education, there was the University of
Makerere. Why, then, Dar-es-Salaam? We were looking for
Undugu (brotherhood). When, in 1968, I led a solidarity student
group to the liberated areas of Mozambique, in Cabo Delgado
Province, what were we after? Undugu (brotherhood). Yes, there
are many tribes and clans in Africa. However, all these tribes and
clans, using linguistic classification, are in only four clusters:
the Niger-Congo (Bantu and Kwa groups of languages); the Nilo-
Saharan (the Cushitic groups like the Oromo of Ethiopia, the
Nubians of Sudan and Egypt, the Nilotics, the Nilo-Hamitic, etc.);

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the Afro-Asiatic (Arabic, Tigrinya and Amharic); and the Khoisan
groups of Southern Africa. The whole of Southern Africa is
occupied by, mainly, the Bantu peoples with some Khoisan
groups (the Khoi Khoi, etc).

When you ask the Shona of Zimbabwe what they call woman in
their language, they will tell you: “Mukazi”. What do you
Ugandans call woman in your Bantu dialects? “Mukazi”.

I am happy that both the African Union and, recently, SADC,

have adopted Swahili as an official language. Swahili is a
distillation of a non-sectarian dialect out of the numerous African
dialects (Bantu, Afro-Asiatic, etc.) and even from the non-African
languages. The Swahili word for table, Meeza, is originally from
Portuguese. Even the indigenous dialects like the ones of
Uganda, now use the word “Meeza” for table.

I, therefore, thank H.E. Mnangagwa for agreeing to come and

check on his relatives in the Great Lakes on this occasion of
Uganda’s 57th Independence Anniversary.

Thirdly, I want to use this occasion to extend the condolences of

the Ugandans, again, to Your Excellency, on the death of our
elder and comrade freedom fighter, Mzee Robert Mugabe. Mzee
Mugabe made a historic contribution to the liberation of
Zimbabwe. He spent 10 years in prison on account of that. Stand
for one minute to remember his contribution. May his soul rest in
eternal peace.

During a big portion of these years, Uganda was in turmoil and

was following the reactionary ideologies of sectarianism (religion
and tribe and even race e.g. against the Ugandan Indians), anti-
democracy and neo-colonialism. Since 1986, however, the
patriotic line of the NRM of: Patriotism, Pan-Africanism, Social-
economic transformation and Democracy, gained the upper
hand.

That is how Uganda has been able to build a strong national

Army for the first time in the last 500 years, achieve economic
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recovery and achieve an annual rate of growth of 6.1% per
annum for the last 33 years, in spite of the strategic bottlenecks
that were in place and in spite of our population growing from 14
million people in 1986 to 42 million people now. We have been
achieving these relatively high rates of growth in spite of lack of
electricity, high transport costs from the ocean of US$.3,456 per
40ft container by road instead of US$1,800 per the same
container by rail and in spite of the high cost of money (interest
rates of the exploitative and economy- distorting Banks).

Of course, the cost of labour has been low. We were able to

achieve economic recovery and growth, these strategic
bottlenecks notwithstanding, because some of the sectors do not
need electricity much. These include construction which always
grows at the rate of 12.5% per annum, transport, etc. Since
2006, however, I put my foot down and insisted on putting more
money in transport and electricity. That is how we now have good
tarmac roads from North to South, East to West, North-West to
South-East; North to South-West. We are now also going to start
on the road to the North-East ─ Moroto-Kotido-Kaabong-Kidepo-
South Sudan border. The road from Oraba on the border with
South Sudan to Bunagana-Cyanika on the Rwanda-Congo
borders in the North-South-Westerly direction, is 647miles
(1,042kms). The one from Kidepo valley to Bunagana will be
655miles (1,054kms) via Kampala. Good road transport is good
for passengers but not so good for cargo in terms of costs. The
cheapest form of transport is water, the next cheapest is rail
transport; then, road and air ─ in that order.

Therefore, my strong decision, now that we have abit of money

provided we budget properly emphasizing production ahead of
consumption, is that we concentrate on the three cost pushers:
transport, electricity and the cost of money. The answers for
these cost-pushers are: cargo and even passengers to be
transported by high speed trains; to provide adequate and cheap
electricity for manufacturing and some aspects of services; and
Uganda Development Bank (UDB), capitalized by the government,
providing low-interest loans for manufacturing, hotels, tourism
assets and internal trade for locally manufactured goods. On the
side of agriculture, we need to address the issue of irrigation so
as to stabilize agricultural production and utilize our cooperative

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advantage of abundant fresh water. We are also concentrating on
tarmacking the roads leading to the oil areas to make it possible
for the pipeline to be constructed. The pipeline sections are very
huge. They cannot easily be transported on murram roads. We
are spending this money on the roads for oil because it will
enable oil to be pumped out of the ground and come to the aid of
the economy.

We are also going to build all weather tarmac roads in the major
tourism areas: Kidepo, Bwindi, etc. This is because tourism is
already bringing US$1.5billion in the economy per annum.

The NRM is absolutely sure that with these measures, the

economy of Uganda will grow in double digits. The Ministry of
Finance is estimating the rate of growth of 6.3% for this financial
year. This is on the basis of the present economic base which still
has high electricity costs, high transport costs, etc., etc. What
will happen when these bottlenecks are eliminated? This is what
the economists should focus on ─ a Ugandan economy based on
low-costs of production, not the old economy of Uganda of
minimum recovery but with still high costs of production. That
will soon be the story of yesterday. Given our raw-material base,
we shall have scores of textile, food-processing, wood-processing,
etc., factories. We already have many fish processing factories. All
this is possible, not only on account of the internal efforts
mentioned above but also because of the EAC, COMESA and the
CFTA. You cannot sustainably produce, if somebody does not
buy what you are producing or the market is taking modest
quantities of what you are producing. Therefore, the CFTA is a
matter of life or death for Africa. CFTA will not only absorb the
products of African factories, but it will also enable us to
negotiate credibly with the USA, EU, China, India, Russia, Brazil
or the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nation) countries.
Economic integration under the CFTA is for the prosperity of our
people, the Africans.

In the East African Community, however, in addition to the

efforts under COMESA, the EAC and the CFTA of economic
integration for prosperity, we have been working, eversince the
colonial times, for political integration in order to create a

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strategic centre of gravity for the strategic security and survival of
the African people. In the last 500 years, colonialism caused the
extermination, the domination for a time or the perpetual
domination of a significant portion of the human race: in North
America, the Red Indians; in South and Southern America, the
Incas, the Aztecs; in Australia, the Aborigines. I was happy with
New Zealand when I went there. The immigrant group seemed to
have realized the mistake of exterminating the indigenous people
and they were trying to make amends. Africa, on account of our
strong genes and civilization, we were able to survive the 500
years of assault from Europe in the form of the slave trade,
colonialism and neo-colonialism. Hence, here in East Africa,
since long ago, our elders led by Mwalimu Nyerere determined to
create a powerful centre of gravity in the form of the East African
Federation. In recent years, we revived the struggle for this
dream. Right now, there is a Constitutional Drafting Committee,
with members from all the 6 countries of the EAC working on a
draft constitution for, initially, an East African Confederation, to
be presented to the EAC Summit. This is an effort some of us
have supported for the last 56 years eversince we joined our
elders in the 1960s. Having our celebrations here in Sironko,
highlights the importance of this economic and political
integration.

The future, therefore, is bright. All of you, then, should wake up

and engage in production in the four sectors of: commercial
agriculture, manufacturing, services and ICT. Especially in
agriculture where there are still 68% of the homesteads that are
only working for the stomach and not the pocket (khuholera inda
sili sillingi), those families should wake up and engage in small-
scale commercial agriculture with ekibaro (calculation). With
these, we shall seriously tackle poverty and unemployment.

I thank you, congratulate you, again and wish you good luck.

9th October, 2019 - Sironko