Museveni asks Uganda to forget about costly bread, eat ‘Mwogo’
Uganda President Yoweri Museveni has urged Ugandans who cannot afford bread to instead buy and eat cassava.
“Africans really confuse themselves. If you’re complaining that there’s no bread or wheat, please eat mwogo. I don’t eat bread myself,” said Museveni in his off-the-cuff speech at the Labour Day celebrations held in Kampala.
Additionally, the Head of State said the skyrocketing prices of essential commodities in Uganda were a result of natural calamities like Covid-19 and exacerbated by man-made external factors like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which had disrupted the global supply chain and created a scarcity of products.
This is the second time President Museveni has attempted to address the increase in food prices in what analysts say is a controversial manner.
In 2021, the President who’s ruled Uganda for three and a half decades, appeared on camera with a measuring scale, knife and attempted to show Ugandans how much they should feed on per meal to avoid wastage.
“I asked the kitchen staff to prepare 1kg of the maize floor from the food being distributed by the Covid-19 relief team. My intention was to understand how an individual can consume this food optimally during this period.”
“This means that for 2.6kgs of posho, about 10 days are possible. The food should not be consumed wastefully,” he said while responding to activists who had been protesting at how vulnerable families were starving owing to lack of food during the Covid-19 period.
Ugandans have in the recent past lamented about the high cost of food and fuel prices, plus those of other essential commodities like soap.
A recent survey at local retail outlets in Uganda showed prices of common household items such as washing soap, sugar and cooking oil had increased by more than 50 percent since December 2021, with a notable price gap between supermarket chains and shops.