Big Interview: Museveni using Parish Development Model to galvanise his base, says Joseph Kabuleta

In February this year, President Museveni launched Parish Development Model (PDM) in Kibuku district, a programme the government is banking on to lift 17.5 million Ugandans in 3.5 million households out of poverty.

However, in an interview with The Nile Post, the National Economic Empowerment Dialogue (NEED) leader and former presidential candidate, Joseph Kabuleta said it is disingenuous, embarrassing and laughable for anyone to think that President Museveni can do anything to make Ugandans rich.

Excerpts below:

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As the fallen Speaker Jacob Oulanyah heads to the journey of no return, how will you remember him?

Jacob Oulanyah was a good man and even the people who might have had issues with him, don’t have issues with him personally. They had issue with the system he was perceived to serve but serving this country as the speaker of Parliament, he was not serving the system, he was serving the people of this country.

Nobody was angry with Oulanyah, I am sure even those people who demonstrated against his treatment abroad, I am sure they were not necessarily demonstrating against Jacob Oulanyah, they were demonstrating against a system that he was seen to be serving, but he was a speaker of Parliament. Parliament is a body that is elected by Ugandans and he was elected by MPs. The reality is I mourn him and actually as a pastor I really prayed for him when he was sick.

You have been traversing the country spreading the message of economic transformation. What is the National Economic Empowerment Dialogue(NEED) all about?

The National Economic Empowerment Dialogue is a social political movement or pressure group that started on 28th September 2021 and whose purpose was to awaken Ugandans to the resource heritage that they have in their places and how rich a country this is and they shouldn’t keep quiet as a few people in leadership are sniffling away all the wealth that belongs to them.

This is to make them understand that there is something wrong with people being very poor amidst a lot of wealth where they stay and that is almost true for every part of the country where you find there is a lot of gold being mined here and there is extreme poverty within the low vicinity.

It is just to get Ugandans understand that these resources do not belong to a select few people, these are national resources.

Why do you think economic empowerment is important to the people of Uganda and how does it affect politics?

As long as people are disempowered, as long as they are extremely poor, as long as they are depending on government handouts given with all sorts of fancy names such as Emyooga, Operation Wealth Creation, and all that, they will always be captives even if Museveni was to go and this mindset remains, whoever takes over will find captive people who are not ready to be liberated.

You cannot get somebody out of poverty unless you change their mindset and actually make them know that ‘you’re not poor, how can you be poor when actually in your village there is a thousand kilos of gold, how is that even possible?’

What is that one thing that can unite Ugandans politically and also socially to remove all those barriers you have mentioned?

This is when we understand the issue of economic empowerment because when you have the same major problem as someone else, suddenly when you understand that the major problems of the Baganda are the major problems of the Acholi. I am not saying the minor problems but I am saying the major problems are the same thing. We have something in common, you are being exploited, I am being exploited, and I don’t want to be exploited, you don’t want to be exploited, now suddenly what tribe you belong ceases to matter, what matters is we have one exploiter. Politics is no longer about leadership. Good leadership actually causes transformation. Museveni has made politicians survivors by making sure that they are always broke.

How are the leaders and the locals at large receiving your messages of economic transformation?

They are receiving it very well. Our ideology was to study leaders who are not in office. We believe they have the ideas but do not have a platform to share those ideas so you need a platform and they have tremendous ideas. There is no ideology in Ugandan politics what so ever none, not NRM.

It’s all about just giving Museveni power, now even the opposition, they come up with their ideology which is removing Museveni from power, they don’t have any clear ideology. So now it’s not about removing Museveni but what do you stand for? We are giving them ideology.

This is a call to the ideology that is pushing economic empowerment and even the mindset I am pushing so that people should be empowered.

Analysts claim that you have failed to dissect this message properly to be understood by the common people. That it is elitist

This is what I was accused of during the campaigns but now that’s what I have been trying to change since we launched {this programme} because we are going down to the common people and we actually connect with people. What matters is what I do for them, do I really care about the lives of people, can I communicate to them? The answer is yes and I am doing that because they have to know how my ideas can affect them. That’s why we made the step of traversing the country and it’s been a success in my opinion in regard to getting our message down to the people and we are changing the conversation not from up but from down to top.

Where did we go wrong as a country in terms of economic transformation?

The truth is we went wrong when Museveni became president. That is the reality. When he removed the cooperative societies which were down to sub counties. There was a system where people produced their coffee, you go measure your coffee and they would just give you note that you brought a hundred kilos of coffee, you go home and then come back and find money in the bank and those people would get from that level to the county level, to the district level then to the regional cooperative societies.

When Museveni was fighting, that system was working and people never feared that they would have taken my coffee without paying me, the money came so they called people and sometimes gave them cash for some people who didn’t have bank accounts. People went to school, people built houses, people bought motor bikes and there was a system for every produce, now a society that does not produce what it consumes is going to fall, it’s going to become broke. All these systems put in place by Obote 1. They survived Amin, they survived Obote 2 actually they were enhanced in Obote 2 but in three years of Museveni’s rule they were all destroyed on purpose. So that’s where we went wrong.

Do you think the recently launched Parish Development Model will help to eradicate poverty in the households through execution of development activities at the parish level?

Anybody who thinks that Museveni can do anything which is aimed at making Ugandans rich is very naive. The reason is to make Ugandans poor because in his mind poor people are the ones that are easily governed and it’s not just him, you go to other countries where the president ruled for over 40 years and then passed power to their sons. Go to a country like Equatorial Guinea, Togo, it’s the same thing, there is wealth but the majority of the population are poor because dictators fear the middle class. Museveni knows that the middle class can make a government change. When you have a thriving middle class, when people have businesses, money, they can change the government.

Let me tell you about the parish development model: it’s a parish political model, there is no development model that has LC 2 chairman, NRM chairman of the village. It’s a political thing. Museveni is just using public money to galvanise his base for his transition. If it was about development, what is the parish development model producing? What are they pushing for?

The president recently said the high price of commodities is caused by the war between Russia and Ukraine. What do you think?

That is something you can only tell to “stupid” people and he expects Ugandans to be “stupid”, when did prices go up? When did the war start? It has been almost a whole month, the prices went up before the war, so the war cannot be the cause, the first thing was trucks that were blocked at the border. So there was a deliberate ploy, let me tell you that there is a system in this country which has been built by Museveni to make sure that no matter how hard you work you will never accumulate money.

Do you intend to register a political party to push your economic movement?

The thing is political parties are for elections, maybe if I have to I may do it around 2025 going to 2026. I have no intention now. The reality is that there are so many political parties but there are only two parties. There is the party of the oppressed and the party of the oppressors. I can just join the list of political parties among the oppressed but the key things are to remove the oppressors.

How do you balance pastoring with politics? Are these two things compatible?

They are very compatible because everybody who gets into politics has some profession they practice or something they are doing. There are lawyers who are in politics, there are other professionals, there are media people who are in politics among others. You can join politics and be a journalist. So there is no overlapping.