Africa-Press – Uganda. Parliament has recently finished working on the Draft Budget for the 2021/22 financial year.The image of the Finance minister carrying that Shs45.4 trillion will be prominent front page news that none of you will miss.Everyone with an interest in the allocations can now start scrutinising the way the national cake has been sliced. Even if this is just a draft, little or nothing will change when the final document is confirmed.
Throw in some supplementary endorsement and the shell will not be the same. Amid the process of looking through the figures by committees last week, MPs, again, took a keen interest in how the sports budget is shared.Of the Shs17.6b for the 2020/21 budget, Shs10b was allocated to football – the country’s most popular and biggest sport. While it’s not new, it still gets tongues wagging as it’s to be maintained.
It rubs the ‘lesser’ federations the wrong way. They want a share of that. However, there’s no guarantee that if government withdrew some of it, that it will still be allocated to sports.It could be reallocated to some classified expenditure anyway. Yes, football gets the largest chunk of the sports budget but the solution can never be a reduction to support other federations.
Sports needs a bigger share and this is where the advocacy of the MPs who come from a sports background or who have fronted sports to get into the 12th Parliament have to stand up.MPs, through their primary roles of legislation and budget allocation, ought to push the sports agenda whenever accorded the platform to do so in the August House.
The 2021/22 budget is gone as the allocations have been made by the 11th parliament and it’s unlikely that sports can get a higher figure than in the 2020/21 financial year.Now, the foresight should start. What are sports priorities for the subsequent years and how can the subsector’s challenges be overcome? You want to expect and demand that parliament leads the way once they are sworn into office in a few [email protected]
