Govt needs to plan for the long-term

The semblance of frugality is welcome. Cutting budgets for operations such as meetings and foreign travels that the Covid-19 pandemic has turned into “indulgence” must be supported. However, the measures only beg for an increase in volume of the question: Just how are we still in the same place, or even worse, than we were the first time the virus forced the country to lock down?

Covid-19 has never really let up. The respiratory disease was mutating, a fact known to all those the citizens expect to be securing their future. Yet, even as the budget estimates were being presented, did any technocrats and other authorities see the need to cater for a potential Covid resurgence?

Uganda has a fully-fledged ministry of disaster preparedness but whether a pandemic begs the attention of this ministry seems like a matter for Constitutional Court interpretation. 

In 2011, the Department of Disaster Preparedness and Management of the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) developed a National Policy for Disaster Preparedness and Management aimed at “establishing institutions and mechanisms that will reduce vulnerability of people, livestock and wildlife to disasters.” 

But in 2021, barely six months after emerging from the first lockdown that devastated the socio-economic fabric of the country, we are left to ask where even the Shs30b the government received in private sector donations for Covid-19 relief went to. The government says the money was used for the purchase of pick-up vehicles. Just like that. 

Whereas it’s true that a pickup can do a lot in fighting a pandemic, the slap in the face from the deadly virus offers a surreal realisation. The government is back at square one, if not worse, of emergency response to the pandemic. Millions of devastated citizens are waiting for cash handouts from OPM, more than two weeks after the latest 42-day lockdown was instituted.

The whole debacle points to the need to put in place a national emergency fund. In an era where granaries are still valued, plastic water tanks decorate homesteads, and NSSF is preaching savings for the rainy day, an emergency fund should not be Utopic.  Virtually no single year goes by without a major disaster in the country but without an emergency fund, the government is always caught flat-footed and forced to run helter-skelter for relief. If the government really wants to “secure the future,” it should not do so by looking for Shs100, 000 for Covid relief to vulnerable citizens but instead plan for the long-term.