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Late last year when he twice met regional businessman and manufacturer Adrien Ntigaciga, President Museveni saw an opportunity to boost Uganda’s agricultural productivity while saving on the foreign exchange of USD300m which Uganda annually spends on importation of fertilizers.
In 2023 alone, Uganda imported 0.3m metric tones of fertilizers to boost agricultural productivity. So on 4th August 2023, Museveni was elated when he met with Ntigaciga who carried with him a game changing proposal aimed at boosting Uganda’s fertilizers situation.
Museveni was appalled to learn that, because of prohibitively high prices, Uganda’s fertilizer application ratio was at 1.5-2kgs per acre against the recommended 50kgs per acre. He was told this is largely because fertilizers are all imported in Uganda and are very expensive.
Museveni was also restless with the fact that Ugandan soils have become depleted having supported agriculture production for all these centuries or years and now badly require replenishing of the all-important soil nutrients, which can only be achieved through fertiliser application.
The president was also aware that the problem of depleted soils was being aggravated by poor farming practices such as deforestation, bush burning and bush clearing which only expose the country to soil erosion. And through soil erosion, the limited fertility levels and nutrients remaining in the soil get further drained away into water bodies and thereby further negatively affecting agricultural productivity per acre.
Mr. Ntigaciga’s proposal and presentation made Museveni to conclude that agricultural production in Uganda could only be profitable through application of fertilizers. Ntigaciga told a deeply converted Museveni that he was planning to invest in Uganda by setting up a fertiliser-manufacturing factory similar to what he has in Burundi and Dodoma in Tanzania.
Using his company called INTRACOM Holdings Ltd, Ntigaciga promised Museveni he would put up a similar factory in Uganda and have it up and running within 18 months. Gratefully, Museveni was assured, cow dung, which the Intracom fertilisers factory in Uganda would use as the primary raw material, was abundantly available in the country. The other top up raw materials like nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium were also abundantly available in Uganda.
Ntigaciga promised the President he would also later on expand his operations in Uganda into establishing the country’s first agricultural bank and agricultural insurance company to make life easier for Ugandans and foreign investors dedicated to operating in the country’s agricultural sector.
The business magnate also promised to establish a logistics business to facilitate transportation of fertilisers from the manufacturing center to where they are required. He also promised the President he would establish a fertilisers packaging materials-manufacturing factory in Uganda.
All these would create new jobs for Ugandans which Museveni considered to be good news for the country. The President was convinced that fertilisers application was no longer an option but a necessary must for all farmers interested in profiting from agriculture.
Museveni was convinced that way, productivity of Uganda’s agricultural activities would be boosted by the investment Mr. Ntigaciga was promising. The only support, Mr. Ntigaciga required was an offer of free land by the government of Uganda. President Museveni immediately offered to help out on this.
On the evening of 12 October 2023, Museveni got his pen and paper and sat down to write a directive which his State House secretary was ordered to type and deliver to the Gender Ministry. The Minister concerned assigned it to officials to operationalize and implement the President’s directive.
The President was directing that 130 acres out of the 377 the Gender Ministry owns at Kampiringisa in Mpigi be donated and leased to Mr. Ntigaciga to facilitate the establishment of the different factories he wanted to put in place.
The President directed that the Ministry of Gender writes a letter of no objection indicating to Uganda land commission that they have no problem with their Kampiringisa land being leased to Intracom fertilizers Uganda Ltd to enable Mr. Ntigaciga carry out the different manufacturing activities he had promised.
However, this wasn’t done and instead the President’s investor was tossed up and down and even subjected to endless extortionist schemes. Months after landing the President’s written directive, the investor got frustrated with endless extortion and mounted pressure which resulted into several crisis meetings being held.
One such meeting occurred last January and two Ministers attended namely Sarah Mateke for Gender who died recently and Bwiino Kyakulaga from the Agriculture Ministry. On another occasion, officials from Intracom met with a higher power delegation of government officials before whom Mr. Ntigaciga’s representatives shed jerrycans of tears as they explained how a lot of cash had been spent bribing Gender Ministry officials who ate the cash but still didn’t deliver.
These tearful fertiliser manufacturer’s representatives included Fredrick Okaka, Engineers Masatire and Samson Rubenga. This website has seen a January 6th 2024 letter written to the Gender Ministry by the frustrated investor making it clear he is unhappy with the way he has been treated and subjected to endless extortion schemes.
Even after pocketing large sums of money from the investor, the Gender Ministry officials didn’t deliver the land as was directed by the President. Instead they started playing hide and seek including offering the investor with alternative land elsewhere yet Kampiringisa was the most ideal location for his projects as was appreciated by the President.
The other option was to give the investor much less land in terms of acreage (115 acres) than what the President had offered him (130 acres). Sources say that the President is now very bitter and feels betrayed which is why he wants to punish and causing the prosecution of the different government officials involved in this extortionist racket.
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