Museveni explains opposition to family planning methods

President Museveni yesterday explained why he rejected family planning methods proposed by some development partners as one of the ways to control population growth, and instead encouraged Ugandans to have more children.

Speaking at the launch of the 2024 National Population and Household Census preliminary results in Kampala, the President said he dismissed foreign concerns about Uganda’s population growth because he wanted the country to progress at its own pace.

 “You remember we had problems where some groups wanted to castrate our people, saying they were controlling the population. And I told them, ‘Please, the problem of too big family sizes is medical and socio-economic.’ That is what we told you,” he said.

“If you have one child, and if he or she dies, what do you do? That is why the insurance policy was to have as many children as possible because some will die and some will survive,” he added.

Strategy

Mr Museveni said his strategy was that the population can be controlled if there are reliable medical services as well as proper socio-economic factors, with more people in the money economy.

He indicated that whereas traditionally, children were seen as labourers, where more children meant more workers, this trend has changed with having more children meaning digging deep into one’s pocket for necessities.

“You go with these foreigners, they tell you lies. So when they were saying population birth control, I hear, use injections, I said no. This is not the problem,” the President said.

“The problem was, first of all, having reliable medical services so that people know that even if you have one child, he or she will not die unless there is an accident. So I said that this business of having insurance by having many children would be addressed with time,” Mr Museveni added.

He indicated that as a result, the government introduced universal immunisation so that children do not die, pointing out that the infant mortality rate has decreased from 122 deaths per 1,000 to 30 deaths per 1,000. He also noted that life expectancy has increased from 43 to 63 years.

“People started calling me ‘mzee’ when I was 26, leading the fighters in the bush in 1971. They looked at me as very old because people were dying early, so we needed more so that some die and some survive. But now, life expectancy is 63 years, and people are joining the money economy,” Mr Museveni said.

Uganda joins middle-income status

Meanwhile, President Museveni indicated he thought the population was going to be about 50 million but was surprised to find it at 45.9 million.

“I told Ugandans that the census was going to prove many things, and you remember the other discussion we had that Uganda had entered middle-income status. We were thinking that the population now is like 48 million. But as you hear, it’s 45.9 million with a GDP of 50 billion,” he said.

“You can see now the other level of middle-income status is confirmed by figures that you have really entered middle-income status,” he added.

Results

The census preliminary findings released by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (Ubos) show that Uganda’s population increased by 11 million from 34 million 10 years ago to 45.9 million. The data shows that the population growth rate had dropped to 2.9 percent compared to 3 percent in 2014, while the fertility rate dropped from 4.7 in 2014 to 4.4 in 2024.

The Ubos Executive Director, Mr Chris Mukiza implored the government to use the data to improve people’s lives.

“During census, Ugandans kept telling us that you are counting us but what do we get? How shall we benefit? They kept asking us to go and tell our government to use the data to improve the livelihood of Ugandans,”  he said.