KYANKWANZI

President Museveni has listed a number of areas that he wants the newly elected ruling NRM party Members of Parliament to focus on in the new term.

The NRM national chairman on Thursday warned the newly elected legislators against making mistakes as has been the case with their predecessors and past leaders.

“It’s good we have started with this retreat so that you don’t make mistakes which many other leaders have done and failed. Leadership is not accidental. You can’t do things by chance,”Museveni said during the official opening for the NRM retreat at the National Leadership Institute (NALI) in Kyankwanzi.

The president said many leaders spend much time doing public relations for themselves instead of working for the electorates but said this approach is not sustainable.

“Your predecessors sometimes don’t attend to this and think leadership is public relations which involves attending burials and sitting in churches the whole day even if they have nothing to contribute. This will fail because people are looking for solutions and not public relations. You need to learn how to be a perennial and not seasonal leader,”Museveni said.

Deal with people’s problems

The NRM chairman told the newly elected legislators that the biggest weapon for their long stay in the house will be identifying people’s problems and trying to solve them.

He advised that this can be done by providing practical solutions rather than dipping into their own pockets.

“By solving the problems, don’t use your pockets. Why should you do that? A leader shows the way but doesn’t carry people on his or her head. That’s why your predecessors are in a lot of debts. The line of the NRM is how to ensure prosperity and strategic security for ourselves. Those villagers must change. You can’t continue having preindustrial people in an industrial age,” Museveni said.

“It is not about sitting and standing and saying point of order. You look like clowns and it(parliament) is like a theatre am not happy with the way you conduct yourselves like in a theatre. When will all the homesteads in your villages get income, electricity, safe water, and good houses? That is what we mean by social-economic transformation. You, young people, help me implement the issues of your people so that they get out of poverty. This time you must help us do what we have planned to do for a long time.”

Avoid travels abroad.

The NRM national chairman in the same vein asked the newly elected party leaning legislators to avoid the unnecessary travels abroad that he said have seen the country waste a lot of resources.

“This travelling outside to benchmark is corruption. It is not correct to squander the scarce resources by travelling. Our late comrade Magufuli fought this travelling and saved a lot of money to do other things,” he said.

President Museveni also asked the new legislators to help him deal with the issue of rampant land evictions, especially in Buganda region.

The three-week retreat that started on April 7 and will end on 29 is being attended by 243 newly elected NRM MPs plus the 27 Central Executive Committee members and those from the East African Legislative Assembly.

According to the NRM Secretary General, Justine Kasule Lumumba, the core objective for the retreat is to ideologically re-orient the NRM leadership to enable them to refocus on the socio-economic transformation of Uganda within the broader context of the survival of the African race given the current global pressures and challenges.

Source: Nilepost