Buganda seeks to enforce compulsory hard work among kingdom youth

Buganda kingdom Lukiiko (parliament) is seeking government approval to enforce hard work and discipline among the youth as a remedy to high levels of redundancy and criminality.

During the 3-day retreat held at Maria Flo hotel in Masaka city, the Lukiiko representatives from the counties, various departments, and ministries passed a resolution to engage the central government to allow them to use the carrot and stick approach, to enforce hard work among the youth.

Noah Kiyimba, the minister in charge of the Buganda cabinet and Lukiiko, says the representatives generally expressed concern about the growing tendencies of laziness and laxity among the youth, which frustrate the kingdom’s efforts of fighting poverty. 

According to Kiyimba, the representatives want to make it compulsory for every youth in the kingdom to at least belong to an enterprise association and have an income-generating project that will be directly monitored through the kingdom’s leadership structures. He indicates that many youth are circumstantially engaging in criminality and others have become habitual drunkards, because they have been left to enjoy excessive freedom, hence rendering them unproductive and poor. 

Israel Kazibwe Kitooke, the kingdom minister of information and mobilization observes, that besides compulsory hard work, Buganda also seeks to regain full authority to nurture socially acceptable morals among the youth in its territory. He indicates that the kingdom already has its established perimeters of morality that are rooted in cultural practices and beliefs, which they want the central government to allow them to rigorously enforce such principles. 

According to Kazibwe, the kingdom and country are risking its future generation should they not stand up to nurture the youth as responsible citizens. Buganda prime minister Charles Peter Mayiga, in his remarks, observed that the kingdom is committed to undertaking deliberate interventions towards improving the livelihoods of its people.

He noted that the kingdom is fed up with superintending over unproductive communities, saying that high time they utilized the existing structural leadership to cause tangible improvement in people’s social welfare. Mayiga called upon Buganda structural leaders to mobilize their communities to participate in all central government’s wealth and livelihood programs as one of the ways to uplift their standards. It remains to be seen how the kingdom would enforce the move in a kingdom that has been impaled by other tribes.