Dr. Charles Ayume, the youthful MP for Koboko Municipality, has joined the long list of fearless ruling NRM party MPs who have been registering their resentment towards the generosity with which President Museveni and his entire Executive have lately been treating Roko Construction Ltd.
Whereas a significant number of MPs registered their anger during the Tuesday debate as the FY2024/2025 Budget was being reconsidered, Dr. Ayume vented his anger last night on X/formerly Twitter where he castigated the Executive for being so insensitive and poor at prioritization.
He expressed shock and consternation as to why squeezing out Shs300bn for his Roko Construction friends had turned out to be a more pressing priority for the President than millions of ordinary poor Ugandans who will miss out on improved quality of schools, health services, hospitals and the 77 ambulances for which Shs27bn had been allocated initially before the big man from Rwakitura weighed in and forced Parliament to alter everything. The reallocation by Parliament, through its Budget Committee, had also availed another Shs17bn for the fueling and maintenance of the 77 ambulances which would be sent out and deployed at government health facilities in 77 constituencies.
Dr. Ayume was, until recently, the Chairperson for the Health Sectoral Committee of Parliament and does understand the needs of Uganda’s public health sector more than anyone else. It’s for the same reason that it’s not hard to understand his pain at the Executive’s decision to take away the Shs44bn additional cash which the MPs had added onto what had already been allocated to amplify the delivery of health services.
In his tweet, Dr. Ayume made it clear that fewer hospitals and health centers would be delivered and accomplished under the FY2024/25 because of the President’s decision to push back and do away with all the reallocation and pro-poor interventions which the Budget Committee had improvised and come up with.
Quite understandably, Dr. Ayume’s social media rant did attract a lot of debate and response from other social media users, remarkably including the PSST Ramathan Goobi. The PSST, directly responding, downplayed Dr. Ayume’s claims. He made it clear that under the FY2024/2025, only Shs57bn (which is still not little money in a country majority of whose citizens are poverty-stricken and struggling to afford basic things such as buying pain killers) and not Shs300bn as had been depicted by a group of disgruntled MPs led by Semujju Nganda during the Tuesday debate.
Goobi further explained that President Museveni wasn’t merely giving Roko Construction money out of the blue. He explained that it was Ayume and other MPs who passed a resolution in July 2022 allowing or permitting the Executive to acquire and buy or pay for shares in the then struggling Roko Construction Ltd which, he says, by far remains the biggest construction company in Uganda.
Goobi explained that the Company needed a hand and recapitalization because hundreds of Ugandans would lose jobs if it was allowed to collapse. He added that the company had pending construction contracts worth Shs1.4trn including the extension of Parliamentary Buildings in Kampala. That if it was allowed to fail, all these would be in jeopardy.
Goobi added that once it’s resuscitated, Roko Construction will complete the jobs above and create even more employment opportunities and also carry on as a going concern. That this way, URA will also be able to keep collecting taxes from this same company. The PSST also sought to inform Dr. Ayume and the like-minded that once the situation stabilizes, Roko will buy back the preferential shares which the GoU had taken up so that these billions the MPs are ranting about are returned back to the national coffers.
Goobi also asserted that, besides the Shs43bn for the ambulances which Ayume ranted about, there is a lot of other money already provided in the FY2024/2025 budget to finance the provision of health and educational services including the purchase of hundreds of ambulances. He believes the Roko situation has been blown out of proportion and that there is no cause for alarm in the population and also among Members of Parliament like Ayume and others. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [whatsapp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
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