Parliament sat in an emergency session on Tuesday and swiftly approved a government request for supplementary budget funds of 602 billion shillings ($258 million) for the 2010/11 financial year (July-June).
The money included 95 billion shillings in extra funding for state house, more than double the 80.6 billion shillings allocated to the president’s residence, which also doubles as his office, at the start of the fiscal year.
East Africa’s third largest economy, which discovered commercial hydrocarbon deposits in its west in 2006, is due to hold its presidential elections on Feb. 18. President Yoweri Museveni, in power since 1986, faces a stiff challenge from Kizza Besigye, whose four-party opposition coalition, the Inter-Party Cooperation (IPC), has made deep inroads in Museveni’s traditional rural support base.
“This is a president who is pretending to be running for re-election in a fair competition and yet he has decided to deploy the entire treasury of Uganda to finance his private politics,” Hussein Kyanjo, an opposition member of parliament, told Reuters on Wednesday.
The ruling National Resistance Movement’s spokesman, Ofwono Opondo, told Reuters much of the additional money was to meet costs related to security threats from south Sudan’s impending referendum and Somalia.
He rejected the opposition’s assertions that Museveni was misusing taxpayers’ money. Ugandan law allows the president to use all the state facilities that he is ordinarily entitled to as a head of state during campaigns.
Critics and opposition politicians say Museveni exploits this privilege to divert state funds to finance his party, heavily tilting the electoral ground against the opposition.
“Museveni has shamelessly decided to raid the country’s treasury to further his own selfish political ambitions while anguished mothers are dying in hospitals due to lack of basic medical care,” said Margret Wokuri, spokeswoman for the IPC.
