DOKOLO-Dokolo district Woman MP, Cecilia Ogwal has advised government to ring-fence Shs 100 billion for the reconstruction of Northern Uganda which continues to experience the suffering caused by the Lord’s Resistance Army [LRA] insurgency.
MP Ogwal said the affirmative action programme for Lango, Acholi and West Nile has not been captured in the national budget for the financial year 2022/23 and that if the government ignores her advice, the Northern Region will continue to face economic hardships brought by the LRA insurgency that took over 20 years to end.
After decades of the LRA conflict which ended in 2006, the government launched Northern Uganda Social Action Fund [NUSAF], Peace Recovery and Development Plan [PRDP], Northern Uganda Agricultural Livelihood Programme [NUALP] among others.
The initiative was to help the war-ravaged Northern Uganda recover and rebuild after the devastations of property and suffering inflicted by the war championed by elusive the now LRA leader, Joseph Kony.
The programme has since created a reasonable impact, even though a number of them were phased out due to financial challenges, corruption and duplication of works.
The government maintained NUSAF, a World Bank-funded development programme, aimed at improving livelihood, infrastructure, and creating employment through Labour intensive works among others.
There is also another programme introduced three years ago, Development Initiative for Northern Uganda (DINU) being funded by the European Union and it being manned by the Office of the Prime Minister.
“The affirmative action is now no more because it has been scrapped from the budget completely yet it used to help the LRA-affected areas a lot,” she said.
Under this programme, Ogwal said, there was a restocking programme, infrastructural development and regional department programmes but it is now history in the current budget.
Ogwal was recently reacting to the recent national budget of Shs 48 trillion approved and passed by parliament for the financial year 2022/2023.
“All these are going to be reabsorbed and lost out in the Parish Development Model [PDM] which many people don’t understand very well,” MP Ogwal added.
“I would want the government to ring-fence this Shs 100bln and distribute it in the LRA affected area but if we don’t do that northern Uganda will be weaker and more cripple than before,” she added.
The LRA conflict, one of Africa’s longest-running, resulted in a humanitarian crisis. The LRA is accused by the International Criminal Court of widespread human rights violations, including mutilation, torture, slavery, rape, the abduction of civilians, the use of child soldiers, and a number of massacres. By 2004, the LRA had abducted more than 20,000 children, while 1.5mln civilians had been displaced and an estimated 100,000 civilians killed.
https://thecooperator.news/icc-assures-of-compensation-of-lra-victims-in-northern-uganda/
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