Emyooga what is it?

I find astounding calls by Members of Parliament (MPs) for termination of the Youth Livelihood Program (YLP), on grounds of failure to collect about Shs. 300b (three hundred billion shillings) from the first cohort of beneficiary youth.

How then will the objective of the revolving loan fund, as was the intention of YLP, be achieved?

Which begs the question: why wasn’t the word “loan” or variations of it, such as “credit”, included in the name of the program?

“The political leaders, like MPs, and technical heads in different ministries seem not bothered by the challenges caused by starting up a government program named in a language of a given ethnic community, e.g. ‘Bonabaggagawale’, Obulamu, Entandikwa, Emyooga, etc. These are projects meant to serve the whole country where people speak different languages. The MPs can’t even reason that once the name of the project is not clearly being understood by people then no one will get the concept correct.” Lira2021 wrote in comment to blog post “Emyooga what is it?”

Certainly, Lira2021 has a point. “Once the name of the project is not clearly being understood by people then no one will get the concept correct.”

It appears the case with YLP.

Case in point, among reasons articulated for the abysmal 25 percent YLP loan recovery rate, as reported in the media, are:

• Political misconceptions – loans versus grants (political gift).
• Poor business capacity – including lack of financial training
• Weak institutional tracking – including poor data keeping. No or meagre funds allocated to district local governments for loan recovery.
• Economic pressure – including loan structure, size and repayment time.

Very similar reasons are reported in the media in the case of Emyooga; and the latest such project, the Parish Development Model (PDM).

Emyooga and PDM are also credit funds, but one cannot tell straight away from the project name.

Why is it that the naming of government loan schemes is ambiguous as to intentions?

The case of YLP is not a one off.  

Why isn’t Parliament debating all credit projects to the people as a whole?

Why isn’t Parliament accepting its responsibility as the institution that approved allocation of the funds in the first place?

Many questions need asking and answering, in order to avoid setting bad precedents, that is okay for people to take loans from government and not pay them back.

Sadly, MPs aren’t asking and answering the relevant questions and are instead taking the easy way out.