President Yoweri Museveni also the National Resistance Movement, NRM presidential candidate says that youth can only become rich if they are engaged in wealth creation but with a proper calculation.
Gen. Museveni made the remarks while meeting youth leaders from Kigezi at Nshwere Primary School in Kiruhura District on Sunday.
“I was born in Ntungamo and by 1966, I had started realizing there was a big problem with our people who were nomads and used to move from one area to the other with their cattle. Their solution for diseases and pest was to run away from one place to the other with their livestock but in 1966 I held a meeting with them and they understood the problem. When they understood the problem, they stopped moving and copied what the government stock farm in Mbarara was doing” Museveni said.
While speaking in the local dialect, Museveni told the youth leaders that in order to solve the problem of little incomes for their homesteads, they ought to answer three key questions that he said rotate around expenditure and incomes for the families.
“Poverty in your homes can be addressed by asking yourself how much your family’s annual expenditure is, which assets your family has and how to use those assets to generate more income than your expenditure.”
He added that youths who are educated should help the illiterate people in the villages understand these ideas so they can copy them, to move away from subsistence production to commercial production, especially in agriculture.
“If you don’t advise them on what to do, they will make many mistakes. They have food and non -food needs but if they only work for their stomachs but forget the pockets, how will they address the non- food needs,” he wondered.
Explaining the four –acre model that was introduced in the 1996 manifesto, Museveni told the youth leaders that they can grow coffee on one acre and that it can fetch not less than shs18 million but also has market everywhere. The President noted that on the second acre, food can be grown whereas the third and fourth aces can be used for growing fruits and pasture for animals respectively.
The youth leaders told the NRM presidential candidate that they would put into practice the message given to them but asked for another lecture at the President’s demonstration farm in Kawumu that he accepted to do after the election.
Today, Museveni takes his campaign to Kigezi sub-region where he will hold engagements with party leaders in Rukingiri District.
