By Milton Olupot
Sunday, September 26, 2010
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THE US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has expressed deep appreciation to President Yoweri Museveni for what he is doing in Somalia on behalf of the AU and the international community.
Johnnie Carson, the Assistant Secretary, Bureau of African Affairs, while briefing journalists at the UN General Assembly in New York, said Mrs. Clinton on Friday morning had a very productive hour-long meeting with Museveni on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.
During the meeting, Clinton described Museveni as “probably one of the most important leaders in East Africa, and certainly in the continent” who has, through his military, provided the backbone of the AMISOM peacekeeping forces in Somalia.
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“He has probably in excess of 5,000 of the nearly 8,000 troops on the ground helping to defend the TFG government and carrying out both a UN and AU mandate.” Carson told the media that Clinton also indicated to President Museveni that the US would continue to work with him and his government as he seeks to end the repressive activities of Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army.
Later, Museveni addressed the 65th general assembly on Reaffirming the Central Role of the UN in Global Governance, and assured the meeting that Uganda would achieve a number of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
He pointed out that the country would attain the goal of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger and attaining universal primary education.
The President was also confident that Uganda would achieve gender equality and empowerment of women, ensuring environmental sustainability, and developing a global partnership for development.
MDGs are a UN global action plan for countries to achieve eight anti-poverty eradication targets by 2015.
Museveni, however, said the country had encountered challenges in the areas of maternal and child health and the set goal might not be met by 2015, but added that the country had developed a national roadmap to accelerate the reduction of maternal and child mortality and morbidity.
“This is our comprehensive strategy which clearly spells out our national priorities. We have prioritised four key interventions, which include: effective antenatal care, skilled attendance at birth, emergency care for women who experience complications of child birth as well as family planning,” he said.
Museveni told the UN that the country had also prioritised the healthcare system infrastructure.
“Regarding the MDG on HIV/AIDS prevention and control, we are now renewing our efforts to deal with the challenges of this epidemic,” he said.
“Uganda was recently ranked among the middle performing countries, according to the UNDP’s Human Development Index. However, we have never believed in donor-anchored MDGs as a sustainable solution,” he added.
The President argued that MDGs should be based on the growth and transformation of the economies of the target countries. “I am glad, therefore, that the cloud of Afro-pessimism is dispersing. The opinions of the Afro-pessimists are being consigned to where they have always belonged — on the dung-heap of history.”
He said some groups in the West, where Afro-pessimism abounded in the past, had now started talking of the African ‘lions’, no doubt trying to equate, in their minds, the performance of African economies to the Asian “tigers” of yester years.
Museveni cited Groups like Mckinsey Global Institute as beginning to group the African economies, which collectively recorded a rate of growth of 4.9% of GDP in the gloom years of the recent global depression, compared to 2% of GDP for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, into four categories of diversified economies, oil exporting economies, transition economies and pre-transition economies.
Uganda, he said, was put in the transitional economies. Although, he added, the “Mckinsey” group needed to improve their statistical base and some of their insights, they were among the first Western groups to recognise what leaders who have been working on African issues for a long time and what they set out to achieve in the years after independence, long ago knew was possible.
Source: New Vision