Manifesto
Financial Liberation
Key Issues
Effective and Actionable
Our express purpose is to end the economic civil war that has raged in this country for decades, to build a Ugandan economy that is inclusive (rather than exclusive to a few people) and to share the wealth of this nation equitably.
The potential of Tourism in Uganda is immense. According to a World Bank report, with a small investment of $30m, Uganda can more than triple its tourism earnings to $10bn a year. Considering that the entirety of Uganda’s current budget is just over $12bn, that would be a major shot in the arm for the economy. Tourism is also important because it is of direct benefit to the ordinary Ugandans, and fits well into ROCK’s overall plan of boosting the personal income of the citizenry.
If there is one sector that gives Uganda a comparative advantage over virtually every other country in the world, it is agriculture. Uganda has just under half of East Africa’s arable land, with a unique two seasons a year for most crops, and with more than 80 percent of her soils being fertile, Uganda has the ability to be a food basket for the region and beyond.
Traditionally, Uganda has always been an Agricultural economy with over 75 percent of her people living off the soil, but the sector has diminished over the years because of deliberate and perpetual neglect from the government. Consequently, the once prosperous farmers have been reduced to paupers producing only for subsistence use.
But we at ROCK pledge to revive the agriculture sector by doing the following things;
- Mapping out different regions of the country and allocating them cash crops that are best suited to them
- Encouraging the people of those regions to concentrate on those crops
- Offering farmers expert advice on best farming practices and optimal utilization of farmland
- Government will relieve the farmer of the burden of selling their produce by taking up that responsibility (at rates that are competitive and very profitable to the farmer) and finding international market for that produce
- If the government fails to market the produce, it and not the farmer bears the loss.
In so doing, we shall revive rural wealth and ensure that people in the countryside have a respectable and sustainable source of income.
Currently, only 20 percent of the population bears the brunt of taxation and are heavily burdened and are on the verge of collapse. That’s because the other 80 percent, who are mostly subsistence farmers, are off the tax grid. But by reviving the agricultural sector, and offering to market the produce, we shall not only uplift the incomes of the erstwhile subsistence farmers, but we shall also bring them into the taxation bracket and expand our base. In so doing we shall be in position to ease the burden on manufacturers and traders.
Streamlining of this industry to ensure that mining is done legally and ethically, and that the raw minerals are either processed locally or exported in a transparent manner in order to benefit not only the local communities, but also the entire nation.
We have to restore people’s freedoms to interact with their Government without any fear of persecution. Ugandan’s will enjoy their right to question the way they are being governed by those they elected to represent them.
We also intend to restore all media freedoms because a free media is a bedrock of democracy, and demonstrates that the government is not afraid to be accountable to the citizens
We also intend to divest power from the office of the president by restoring an independent and dignified Judiciary with its own jurisdiction free from government claws.
We also intend to support the scrapping of several unjustifiable laws that have been enacted as a means of keeping a dictatorial government in power.
