Will Prime Minister Robinah Nabbanja’s model of approach to Covid 19 of sending money to people’s mobile money accounts work? Which People? How did Kenya do it to succeed? Last time government distributed food but millions never got food, which was of course accounted for.
May be the Kakumiro District model of approach to Covid 19 will work. Kakumiro leaders have appealed to its people to contribute money to help relieve its overstretched and overstrained health facilities. However long the district waits for Central Government intervention, it may never help or the intervention could be as ineffective as it has been elsewhere. Decentralisation is ineffective too during this phase of Covid 19, and has been so before, undermined by the Centre. For example, when a district collects money it has to send all of it to the Centre, and then the Centre decides how much to send back to the District, often peanuts. Kakumiro will suffer this fate.
We have learnt that a lot of money was saved from foreign travels last year, and a lot more is being saved this year. However, there is no evidence that the money saved is being invested in health. Yet the number of Covid 19 victims in both rural and urban areas is rising supersonically. It is likely that the supersonic rise will manifest beyond July. Meanwhile, poverty, hunger and stress are constantly knocking at our doors.
As I have intimated before, poverty, hunger and stress will kill us before Covid 19 does. But of course Covid 19 is generating poverty, hunger and stress in a complex way. It goes without saying that Covid 19 will overcome a poor, hungry, stressed and weak body more easily. Yet our health services are at their worst.
I insist. Let Parliament meet by Zoom to rethink the recently passed national budget, which allocated a lot of money to addressing physical instability and insignificant money amount of money to addressing Covid 19 mediated instability.
Meanwhile, Government should also rethink the vaccine from China (Oris it India) which it has been encouraging people to be vaccinated with. That vaccine seems not to have helped bring down infections and deaths in India, where it has been resourced from. Government, instead of waiting for what the President said was Uganda’s own vaccine, should quickly release money from other non-essential budgets in the National budget and acquire Johnson Johnson, which has worked in USA, and now the country is open again.
We are in a very, very unstable situation, not physical, but unphysical. Our development is being unwound a thousand times. Every resource is needed to fight Covid 19 to save the most important resource from destruction: People.
Question: Has the Uganda Government handled Covid 19 threat meaningfully and effectively?
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