By Julius Peter Ochen
Africa-Press – Uganda. There is some government news that is heartbreaking to watch or read, even to a certified boob. And one such piece of news is now emerging from the Office of the Prime Minister.
In 2024, I travelled with a Mukiga friend from Kampala to Musingo. It was his first time setting foot in, and laying eyes on, the Acholi sub-region. Driving from Gulu to Lamwo via Pader and Kitgum was the most fascinating journey of his life. The land looks vast, fertile, and flat. Twenty kilometres from Gulu City, he started asking, “Where are the people? Where are the gardens?”
For the people, I knew where they were. They were what he was already seeing. But the gardens, I couldn’t explain. Entering Pader District and then Kitgum, the sights seemed not to have changed for him. He asked for the nth time, “Where are the people? Where are the gardens?”
Before he could draw his own conclusions, I offered an explanation — one that was not anywhere near the truth. To tell him that people do not have the means to open farmlands, I am sure he would have asked why they have not revolted to date. He was the epitome of the volcanic temperament often associated with the Bakiga. I told him that Acholi people do not like growing crops along the roadsides, so the gardens are deep in the villages. He believed me, because nothing else could make sense.
The following year, 2025, I set out to open five-acre demonstration gardens for a new variety of soybean that had been released to farmers, so that I could offer practical lessons to my villagers. I arrived fully equipped with seed and fertilizer. That was when it dawned on me that there were only three tractors in Pader District among 55,000 households.
When I attempted to book a tractor for ploughing in the second week of February, I was told that the earliest I could be served was the second week of April. The tractors were fully booked. At that point, I began to believe the UBOS poverty statistics for the Acholi sub-region and their underlying causes. The good plan collapsed.
And just this week, news found me in my sitting room that the government had delivered 55,000 hand hoes to Nwoya District. I assume this is the same quantity going to each of the eight districts of Acholi. After all, Nwoya is the least populated of the eight districts.
If a hand hoe costs UGX 10,000 on the open market, it probably costs UGX 15,000 through the OPM. No doubt. That further means that a single delivery to Nwoya costs the government UGX 825 million. That amount can purchase nine 85-horsepower John Deere or Massey Ferguson tractors. Is this the mechanisation the government promised? Who in Uganda cannot afford UGX 10,000 to buy a hand hoe? And even if there were some, the Parish Development Model (PDM) has already bailed them out. So why is the government putting bandages where there are no wounds?
If the government delivered 10 tractors, each 85 horsepower, to any district in northern Uganda, the next problem would be finding markets for whatever crops they chose to produce. Why would the government shy away from such pleasant problems?
With hand hoes, the maximum acreage a household can cultivate per season is about three acres — one for maize, millet, or cassava; another for beans or peas; and another for cash crops such as soybean, sunflower, tobacco, or cotton. One acre of any of those cash crops would rarely fetch more than Shs700,000 — and that would be the household’s earnings for the entire season. Why wouldn’t poverty prevail, or rather settle comfortably here?
Without strategic minds to shape President Museveni’s renewed term of office, even Uganda Airlines could collapse in the hands of the newly recruited Wake, praised as Africa’s most consequential aviation leader.
The writer is an online farmer with 30 years’ experience in tillage.
Source: Nilepost News
