Former Forum for Democratic Change President, Col Dr Kiiza Besigye has accused the World Bank, of knowingly being an accomplice to the economic crimes of the ruling National Resistance Movement, NRM party and President Yoweri Museveni by extending what he termed as ODIOUS DEBTS to the Junta, for which the people of Uganda shouldn’t be held responsible.
The development comes after the World Bank approved another $300m loan for Uganda. $240m of the loan is credit and $60m is a grant for refugee support.
The credit is supposed to boost Local Governments’ service delivery.
“Whereas the written objectives of these loans may be good, the World Bank knows very well that they’ll not be achieved. The World Bank has a permanent office in Kampala and works closely with Uganda’s Ministry of Finance, Bank of Uganda and other departments involved in economic planning and management” Besigye says.
Adding that the World Bank is aware of the risk to Development Outcome of their loans to Uganda, especially, during a general election and that they’ve carried out evaluation studies that avail them information, some extracts of which Besigye has showed to the nation.
Besigye argues that the World Bank knows how the €600m borrowed early this year to support Uganda’s Covid19 response has been grossly misappropriated, misused and abused, with a large part of that money already being splashed by the ‘NRM/M7 Junta’ to rent support during the ongoing general election exercise.
“World Bank knows that recently hundreds of lower local governments (Sub-Counties), hundreds of Town Councils, 51 Counties (Parliamentary Constituencies) and 8 Cities were created in the middle of a pandemic and economic crisis!” he said.
Besigye also argues that World Bank knows that the main motivation for creation of the vast majority of these administrative units was election gerrymandering and not service delivery.
He says this, indicates clearly, that they are in collusion with the NRM government to make Ugandan tax payers suffer even more, as the loan burdens fall directly on them.
