ONC is an extension of President Museveni’s helping hand, let’s support the vision

By Ben Ssebuguzi 

At least in 2002, a swarm of youths were detained for walking to the State House to meet their National party Chairman without an appointment. You can imagine the embarrassment that comes with arresting your dear supporters by security who are trying to find their leader to address their challenges!

I think this is one of the incidents that motivated President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni to appoint a dynamic and honest person in the Office of the National Chairman (ONC) with a good team to help him reach out to his Bazzukulu. 

There are a number of other embarrassing moments when the Bazzukulu would hijack His Excellence the President on his way most especially at Kibuye asking him to help them with jobs and start-up capital.

In other words, it means that either there was a big gap between the Office of the National Chairman with the ordinary people or most probably they were not listening to ordinary people which led to strife. This might have prompted  NRM mobilisers to start looking for the President at the State House. This unfavourable behaviour would definitely make the President lose peace of mind while conducting state duties at Entebbe. 

Additionally, it is possible that the President used to send to his office funds to help his Bazzukulu and it would be misappropriated or even misallocated. But ever since the new management headed by Hajjat Hadijah Namyalo and team took over at ONC, the terrain has greatly changed for the better as many lives of youths and women have benefited from ONC start-up items to create wealth including grinding machines, popcorn machines, tailoring machine welding machines among others. This has enabled our President to carry out state duties without worrying about the Bazukkulu hijacking him on his way. 

Consequently, this has made the Office of the National Chairman of NRM to be felt on the ground by everyone in almost every household because of the impact we are creating across the country.  ONC is becoming a story to tell in bars, churches mosques because we are using the President’s office to improve lives. It is also very humbling to see the grateful faces of women and youths showing appreciation to President Yoweri Museveni while handing them empowerment tools.

The purpose of this article is therefore to appeal to everyone who is in charge of helping the President realise his dream of supporting disadvantaged youths and women through the ONC wealth creation program, industrial skilling, etc to appreciate the purpose of these programmes and support them from the start to the end without remorse. 

Our members of parliament who are responsible for appropriating funds in the budget for the State House to do so like a matter of agency because almost a big chunk of State House money is being directed towards improving the production of the economy and increasing the welfare of the Bazzukulu. It is very heartening to see graduates attaining welding skills  for free courtesy of President Museveni which they use to start up their own jobs. 

This state house industrial training is another gem which is in line with the National Youth policy which recognises that the high causes of the unemployment rate are lack of employable skills and lack of access to resources like tools which ONC is trying to address by playing a complementary role. 

In conclusion, this magnificent vision of helping Bazzukulu requires multi-sectoral collaboration to work together. Vices like egocentrism, pride and arrogance are some of the challenges that can impede the progress of President Museven’s helping hand. 

Suffice to say, is that ONC’s activities of empowering the disadvantaged through giving wealth creation tools is in line with the theme of our FY 2024/25 budget “Full monetization of the Ugandan economy through commercial Agriculture, Industrialisation, Expanding and Broadening services, Digital transformation and market access”. This also makes ONC one of the vessels to attain the government target of growing the economy tenfold and achieving GDP growth from about $50b in FY 2022/23  to USD 500B by the year 2040.

Long live General Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, Long live Hajjat Hadijjah Namyalo SPA/PA and manager ONC 
The writer is the Head of Research at Office of the National Chairman (ONC)