The First Lady and Minister of Education and Sports, Janet Museveni, has appreciated her husband, President Yoweri Museveni, for his continuous guidance to the education sector and his availability, whenever they call on him to facilitate their capacity-building programs.
“Your Excellency, you have always emphasized that one of the bottlenecks to development is an undeveloped human resource, a problem that must be addressed in order for us to attain a knowledgeable, skilled, and patriotic population,” she asserted.
The First Lady was speaking at a function where her husband passed out 413 secondary school Head teachers from greater Western Uganda, Mubende and Kasanda Districts on Saturday 3rd February, 2024.
The head teachers were undergoing ideological orientation training at the National Leadership Institute (NALI) in Kyankwanzi.
She thanked the National Secretariat for Patriotism, for promoting patriotic values in schools and expressed gratitude to the Secretariat for bringing on board headteachers from all regions of Uganda.
“In order to strengthen the efforts to inculcate patriotic values to our youth through the established patriotism clubs in schools, it is very important that the headteachers are empowered to coordinate these efforts.
Through the school system, we should be able to develop youth who understand the purpose of their existence, love their country, and are prepared to defend and transform it,” Maama Janet said.
“Therefore, Headteachers are very important leaders even more because you are the ones who hold the destiny of those schools that have hundreds of young lives in your hands. If you are honest, clean, kind and hardworking, you will surely pass these values on to those young minds. But if you are corrupt, if you lie to those children, then corruption will catch on like wildfire.”
On his part, the President lamented that government cannot pay good salaries to public servants if there's no socio-economic transformation in societies.
“How will the state pay good salaries if there's no socio-economic transformation? Where does it get money from? When we took over the government, we were earning very small salaries for a long time, even now I earn a small salary,” he said.
The President urged that if families undergo socio-economic transformation, they create jobs, people get income, and they will be able to pay taxes.
“When they are able to pay taxes, the government gets more money then it will be able to put up infrastructure, deal with peace and security and also pay good salaries to public servants,” he noted.
The President also reiterated why the government decided to increase salaries of scientists at the expense of their Arts counterparts.
“Recently I was in a small war with you, the teachers. When we got a little bit of money, we decided to enhance the salaries of scientists. That is where the war started. We need these scientists more because we need engineers, medical doctors, among others. I studied Arts but I cannot come with my Shakespeare to put up a bridge,” he said.
