MPs grill UBOS officials
Members of Parliament on the Human Rights Committee want officials from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) to explain how Uganda attained a middle-income status despite existing poverty levels and starvation.
UBOS officials had appeared for a grilling session on Wednesday, to answer to considerations of the Human Rights Annual Report for 2018 to 2021.
The acting Chairperson, Milton Muwuma MP, Kigulu County, in Iganga District tasked the UBOS Director of Methodology and Statistics James Muwonge, to make MPs understand how a country can be at the brink of starvation yet still be at middle income level.
Muwuma questioned if it was not an exaggeration to declare Uganda as nearing middle income yet people are still starving to death in regions like Karamoja while others still survive on less than a dollar a day.
Ben Koryang, the Dodoth West MP, stated that UBOS had misled the President into declaring the country as having attained middle income.
Koryang wondered why the International Monetary Fund (IMF) later dismissed claims that Uganda had attained middle-income status.
However, Muwonge explained that they did not mislead the President, but used the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to arrive at the declaration, while the IMF and World Bank used Gross National Product (GNP).
MPs grill UBOS officials
He explained that the GDP looks at all people in Uganda irrespective of whether they are nationals or not while GNP looks at only nationals, income accrued to nationals.
Last month, President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, while addressing the country at Kololo Ceremonial Grounds during the annual State of National Address, declared that Uganda had attained middle-income status.
According to the World Bank, lower-middle-income countries are those with a Gross National Income (GNI) per capita which is between US $1,036, about UGX 4million and US $4,045(about UGX 15.6million), and upper-middle-income countries are those with a GNI per capita which is between US $4,046 and US $12,535, about UGX 48million.
