Nakawa West Member of Parliament, Joel Ssenyonyi has watered down president Yoweri Museveni’s national address to mere ‘falsehood’.
The president said, during the State of the Nation address on Tuesday that Uganda has just not yet been officially declared, but already reached the middle income status.
Museveni said, “You can see that the size of the economy, when compared to the population that is always growing fast, has continued to grow and we have arrived at the boundary point as far as the middle income status is concerned.”
However, the MP while appearing on NTV on Wednesday morning described the president’s middle-income status talk as a joke. He asserted that it’s a big lie.
“Our economy has been plunging in the last five months and all of a sudden you (President Museveni) tell us that we have achieved middle-income status, I want to know the magic that has caused us to achieve middle-income status,” Ssenyonyi stressed.
“Museveni promised us middle-income status by 2020, it came and passed and the excuse was COVID-19,” the National Unity Platform (NUP) spokesperson added.
Disappointed, Ssenyonyi expressed that the opposition feel that little has been done about the current state of affairs. He said, “Each time Mr Museveni speaks, we expect to hear some kind of a remedy but nothing comes out of it. He keeps on saying we are on our own, we should go and eat cassava.”
“We seem to be very obsessed with foreign investors, they come here and we give them land, tax holidays and of late we are guaranteeing them money. An investor is the one that gives money but we are the ones giving them money.”
According to Ssenyonyi, Uganda should measure its wealth by the poverty levels, people’s ability to access health care, efficaciousness of the countries education for young people and people’s purchasing power parity.
