THE BUTALEJA WOMAN SEAT BI-ELECTION IS FOR CONTINUITY OF NEBANDA TERM AND HER PROGRAMMES

Had it not been the poisoning, Hon. Nebanda would finish her 5 year term as Woman MP for Butaleja. Nebanda stood for the ideal Uganda which any patriotic Uganda MP would stand for. She was able to be on the same side with opposition MPs on matters where common sense dictated that the future of Uganda was a concern of all positive thinking Ugandans. She never got short sighted. There is all the hope that Nebanda's sister will fit in the shoes of her late sister when she wins the forthcoming elections "God rest Nebanda's soul in eternal peace." William Kituuka Kiwanuka

AS CHILDREN GO BACK TO SCHOOL, I WISH TO APPRECIATE THE LATE WILSON SSONKO

In 1973, the Late Wilson Ssonko was Manager of Mityana Tea Estate (at Bakijjulula) under the Mitchell Cotts. The Late was a parent not only for his children but to many of us. I was in Primary Seven at Namutamba Demonstration School with his Late son John Semwanga. In 1976, his other son the Late Joseph Kimbowa was admitted to form one at St. Mary's College Kisubi, when I was in form three. From then on wards, the Late Ssonko made it a point to send a vehicle to collect us from school as well as take us to school, and by the way, the vehicle would collect me from my fathers' place! While in holiday, the late Ssonko would send a vehicle to collect me so that I read with the Late Semwanga and the late Lutaaya! I was encouraged to read more so when i realized that Semwanga was better compared to me at Mathematics (given that he was attending at St. Henry's College Kitovu). Back to school at St. Mary's Kisubi, I was able to get the services of Mr. Malengane who was then teaching us Mathematics. In the games time, solving mathematics problems becaame my sports, and by the time we sat O 'level, I could feature among the best 5 students in the whole S 4 class of about 120 students. It is sad the Lord called Ssonko and three of his sons for whom he toiled so hard to see well educated. I wish to thank the Late Ssonko posthumously for the love and care as well as guidance he gave us. It is such guidance that is helping us to try to push our 'lost leaders' into line as we advocate for good governance. May the Almighty God grant our father the Late Ssonko eternal peace. William Kituuka Kiwanuka

IS THE PROPOSAL FOR GOVERNMENT TO PUT MONEY INTO THE BUDGET FOR CHURCHES TARGETING 2016 ELECTIONS?

I thought I was in dreamland when I heard a news item on radio One that the youthful Minister for youth had told a gathering that Uganda Government would like Church collection strategy using baskets phased out! This is against the background that the 'bubbo' (baskets) keep many from places of worship, hence Government would like to put money into the budget to cater for those collections! What is absurd, is that while some of our leaders go to places of worship, they don't seem to pick a thing there, otherwise, they would not be corrupt and killers of the people through the implementation of programmes that simply impoverish the masses. The question then , is where do such people get the heart for concern that people should be bailed out on collections so that they can turn up in bigger numbers? Like the Government has struggled to create districts even where potential beneficiaries did not need them, this one is another of the similar schemes, may be targeting to get votes come 2016! For those who may not be in the know, all is not well in the Government of Uganda's purse, in fact one needs to be a great brain to make out a better situation if Museveni left tomorrow and he/she has to run Government. The amount Government has to pay in servicing foreign loans, the local debts, that is amount due to suppliers of various services is just incredibly big yet with yawning resources! It is even a greater priority paying better pay to Civil Servants many of whom survive on corruption while others don't even know how they are able to make ends meet. The situation of UPE, USE are some of the priorities Government has to address other than think of helping the collections in Church. William Kituuka Kiwanuka

THE CORRUPT IN UGANDA NEED TO GET THE MESSAGE IN WORLD BANK PRESIDENT'S SPEECH

World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim Speech on Anti-Corruption at the Center for Strategic and International Studies World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim Washington, DC January 30, 2013 “Anti-corruption Efforts in a Global Environment: A Commitment to Act” Colleagues, Friends and Development Partners: It is apt that we meet here at CSIS, where since 1962 the Center has pushed boundaries to find practical solutions to the major, intractable problems of the times. Among these, perhaps none has been more ubiquitous or enduring than the problem of corruption, which is on our agenda for today. Not long ago, it was accepted in many development circles that little could be done about the problem. In the 1990s, such attitudes started to change in response to many factors, including the end of the Cold War and the growth of global NGOs, such as Transparency International. During this period, a growing body of evidence began underscoring that corruption exacts a pernicious toll on development. Research by the Bank and others has demonstrated that there is a negative association between growth and corruption. Corruption acts as a regressive tax, penalizing poorer citizens and smaller firms. It restricts access to services for the more vulnerable citizens and is associated with a lower quality of public services. It is a significant cost for business. By one estimate $20 to $40 billion are stolen from developing countries each year. The World Bank has played an important role in the evolution of the global integrity and good governance agenda ever since Jim Wolfensohn’s “Cancer of Corruption” speech at the Bank’s annual meeting in 1996. For me, Jim’s original words resonate every bit as strongly today as when they were first uttered 16 years ago. Jim said: “Corruption diverts resources from the poor to the rich, increases the cost of running businesses, distorts public expenditures and deters foreign investors…it is a major barrier to sound and equitable development.” I am privileged to have this opportunity to spell out my thoughts as to how the Bank will address issues of anticorruption during my tenure. Let me begin with two caveats. The first is that the anticorruption agenda is an important subset of the broader good governance movement and needs to be viewed within this setting. Few issues are more important for development and shared growth than good governance. Public institutions deliver vital services such as health and education, upon which the poor are particularly dependent. Corruption subverts and undermines all these functions and as such serves as a major impediment to development. It is in this context that combating corruption both has been and will continue to remain one of the Bank’s top priorities. Second, as our recent Governance and Anti-corruption Strategy Update notes, much of the Bank’s work on this agenda is about managing—and not avoiding—risk. We need to be engaged in settings and contexts that do not rank highly on global indices of good governance. We need to be fighting poverty in areas where the legal framework for combating corrupt and illicit behavior is imperfect and institutions of public accountability may not function well, or even exist at all. We need to be encouraging staff to take risks and innovate in the service of development, as long as the risks are carefully thought through up front and managed during implementation. Our response must be swift and decisive when problems emerge—as they inevitably will. Enforcement is important. To give you a sense of the problem, last week we took stock of the World Bank’s investigations into misconduct in its projects. This exercise revealed that we had closed 609 investigations and generated 205 debarments over the past four and a half years. I have asked the relevant units in the Bank to sift through this body of evidence, distill the lessons so that we can better modulate risk to ensure that those insights guide future business decisions. Our willingness to work in difficult situations and an appetite for measured risk should never be confused with a willingness to tolerate corruption in Bank projects and activities. Let me say it loud and clear: When corruption is discovered in our projects and activities, we have zero tolerance for it within the World Bank Group. So where does this leave us? Should we shy away from high-risk interventions and forgo the potentially massive benefits to the poor or should we rather take a calculated risk, design appropriate safeguards and move forward with them? My answer is that we need to take risks for development results but we have to do so with our eyes open and try to mitigate those risks as much as we can. However, sometimes things go wrong and then we need to stand firm. This is what happened in the case of the Padma Bridge Project where insufficient response by the authorities to the evidence of corruption at the time made us terminate a $1.2 billion credit in June last year. I have no intention to preempt things, as legal and other processes have to run their course. Until certain conditions are met to heighten oversight in the project and give assurance that a complete and fair criminal investigation is under way, we cannot consider financing the bridge. I say this knowing how much this bridge means to the people and economy in the southwest of Bangladesh. It is a steel lifeline linking them to opportunity. Open Quotes Public institutions deliver vital services such as health and education, upon which the poor are particularly dependent. Corruption subverts and undermines all these functions and as such serves as a major impediment to development. It is in this context that combating corruption both has been and will continue to remain one of the Bank’s top priorities. Close Quotes Jim Yong Kim World Bank Group President But we have remained engaged in Bangladesh. Our current portfolio includes over 30 projects with commitments of about $4.3 billion. Our lack of tolerance for corruption does not mean that we ignore the larger development picture. Good institutions have systems, checks and rigor to prevent bad things before they happen. The World Bank’s Integrity Vice Presidency trains both World Bank staff and client country counterparts on detecting red flags in public procurement, and we’re in the process of developing software that will help automate these processes. In 2010, the Bank launched the International Corruption Hunters Alliance, with the goal of bringing together the heads of national level anticorruption agencies, prosecutors and auditors so that they could learn from and draw moral support from each other. Senator Leahy addressed the Alliance members at the time, and very pointedly outlined the consequences of failing to stop corruption. He said if we turn a blind eye—in any country—we fail our own citizens, we fail the people of the countries we want to help, we undermine the rule of law domestically and internationally, and we damage our long-term interests. We should learn from governments’ enforcement and prevention measures – Brazil has made some radical interventions to turn drug-infested favelas into safer neighborhoods; in Italy the tax authorities are using an unorthodox approach called Redditometro to expose tax dodgers; in India the government is grappling with an anti-corruption bill. These anticorruption efforts, and the work of Leonard and our Integrity Vice Presidency, are a critical link in a broader chain contributing to good government, integrity and development effectiveness. More broadly, our recent Governance and Anticorruption Strategy, endorsed by the Board unanimously in March 2012, emphasizes six pillars for combating corruption and advancing the cause of good governance. They include: Integrate governance issues more systematically within these instruments; Support capable, transparent country institutions; Focus more sharply on results; Aim to more effectively management of risk; Improve global governance, including ongoing support for important discussions at the level of the G-8 and G-20, as well as initiatives such as the Stolen Assets Recovery (StAR) and Extractive Industry Transparency (EITI) initiatives; and finally Facilitate the implementation of the governance agenda across the scope of Bank operations. Our governance and anticorruption practice needs to be carefully informed by robust data and analysis—capturing more of the “science of delivery” that I have spoken about on many occasions. Our team needs to do a better job of capturing tacit and implicit knowledge about how to conduct governance and public sector reform—particularly in difficult circumstances such as those involving Fragile and Conflict Afflicted States—along with disseminating this knowledge more effectively to our staff and development partners. We need to be focused more upon solving real-world problems than the traditional “best practice” model of institutional development. Let me tell you one short story. I was in Haiti late last year and one of my meetings was with a group of private sector leaders. I know the history of Haiti well, having worked there for many years through an NGO that I co-founded, Partners in Health. In Haiti, there is a long history of crony capitalism, where just a few close to those in power reap nearly all the benefits of trade and business. This is a common and insidious form of corruption. And it can’t be allowed to persist. That’s what I told the group of private sector leaders on that morning – that the economic system of crony capitalism had to be broken open, become more inclusive, and involve women, young people, and entrepreneurs. That has to happen if Haiti is ever going to succeed. Bono came to speak at the World Bank recently, and he called corruption “the biggest killer of them all.” His statement seemed to surprise many people, but corruption is indeed often the slow, silent killer of effective development. When corruption seeps into the social sector, it means that a hospital is built without life-saving equipment or that a school is built without adequate salaries for teachers. It means roads are built without guardrails, or in some cases not built at all. And who pays for this? It is the poor who pay --sometimes with their lives. Corruption steals from the poor. It steals the promise of a brighter future. I am constantly challenging Bank staff to think about “bending the arc” of history. As we all know, the history of corruption is a lengthy one, and bending this arc will not be easy. But please know that a central priority of my tenure at the World Bank Group will be taking forward the corruption-fighting agenda that Jim Wolfensohn so ably articulated during his presidency and adapting it to today’s challenge of shared prosperity and the end of poverty. Thank you very much.

NABAGESERA IS AWARDED 15,000 EUROS FOR PROMOTING GAY RIGHTS IN UGANDA

Details of the article can be accessed at the link below: http://goodgovernancepractice.blogspot.com/2013/02/nabagesera-is-awarded-15000-euros-for.html

BUGANDA INVESTENT BANK (BUGIBA) CAN SAVE UGANDA FROM POVERTY

If I were at all influential or a mover of things in Buganda, I would put all my effort into a successful Buganda Investment Bank (BUGIBA). A well managed Buganda Investment Bank (BUGIBA) is the sustainable strategy to see Buganda and Uganda out of poverty. Buganda does not need to start a Commercial Bank as of now, instead it needs to mobilize capital locally and internationally to see a soundly based investment bank in place. This bank would basically handle big projects that can generate tangible multiplier effects in Buganda and Uganda at large. The starting point is to form a Public Limited Liability Company, where all interested would buy shares. Secondly come up with a very technical and ethical Board as well as management team of experts in the field; and these don't need to be a preserve of Baganda. One area the bank would encourage is the promotion of the growing of plants that can be used in the extraction of Bio-fuels that can substitute Diesel use. It is unfortunate that as of now, industrialization based on Hydro - electric power can not produce goods that can be competitive on World market simply because the cost per watt hour is out of the ordinary! But Bio- fuels can run industries that we can target and have goods competitive on international market, the reason why the bank would take great interest in seeing locals grow plants that can be extracted for bio-fuels, yet, many such plants don't need fertile soils. Buganda needs the existing Commercial banks to help fund the people in their ventures for the produce which would form the raw materials in the agro- processing industrialization; and working together with Busoga region for the start would increase viability of the projects as Busoga has prime land that can greatly boost agro- processing industrialization. So, it would be wrong for Buganda to start a Commercial bank whose impact may not be there given that the existing commercial banks and micro finance institutions can provide the resources the people need to feed the Investment bank which can have tangible multiplier effects in the economy once well managed. The Investment Bank would promote industries which are not generally owned by individuals. A case in point if fruit canning in Masaka. The industrial infrastructure would be put in place through use of support from external source lines of credit and skilled management would be established and the bank would help in the realization of capital to buy off farmer produce, while the farmers would reach out to existing financing channels to be able to produce. When big industrial establishments are opened up countrywide, chances are that these will be the poles of growth of various regions in Uganda, and you can be sure, if right professionals are picked and good supervision network enhanced, then the region and Uganda at large will get the impact of the bank and poverty would gradually be overcome. What is needed as of now is not to rush, but come up with an establishment that will enhance growth that is sustainable in Uganda. The powers that be MUST avoid the experience of Teefe bank. Merely having influential Baganda in any bank establishment cannot ensure success. Competent management with very strict rules can make a difference. William Kituuka Kiwanuka

PRAY THAT UGANDA'S LEADERS DON'T GET HEART ATTACKS

Three more donor nations ask govt to return funds Publish Date: Jan 29, 2013 newvision By Vision Reporter Norway, Sweden and Denmark have followed Ireland’s lead and asked Uganda to return the money which was allegedly misappropriated by government officials. An investigation by the Auditor General found that $13.4m (about sh35b) in aid had been diverted from the northern Uganda reconstruction programme and misappropriated by officials in the Office of the Prime Minister. The principal accountant, Geoffrey Kazinda, has since been interdicted and charged. Scores of other officials have also been interdicted over the scam. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland and Britain froze their aid to Uganda after the scandal was revealed. The AFP reported yesterday that following Ireland’s announcement in November that Uganda had pledged to return four million euros of Irish funds, the three Scandinavian countries have all asked to be reimbursed by the Ugandan Government. AFP said Norway is only asking for a partial refund, since its aid was paid into a special account that made it easier to identify fraudulent transactions. “We have asked to be repaid 23 million Kroner ($4.2m) and we have been promised that we will be refunded,” AFP quoted Astrid Versto, a spokesperson for the Norwegian minister of international development, as saying. Unlike Norway, the other countries had transferred their funds into a joint account, making it harder to trace the money, she added. Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi last year promised that the Government would refund the stolen donor funds. Subsequently, the money from the Irish government was refunded.