By Spy Uganda
Entebbe: President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni has revealed that the government doesn’t have enough money to fund medical interns. The President proposed that to make the work easier, the person who has been sponsoring the medical student during the medical school should be the one to also sponsor him/her during internship.
“Who pays for the internship? Some people are saying that the Government must pay but I think that is risky because the Government would pay if it had money but it doesn’t have enough money since it has got a lot of things to do like roads, security etc. I don’t think it is okay to tie the future of our young doctors with government funding because it may delay or it may not be there,” he said.
President Museveni made the remarks on Saturday 24, August, 2024 while delivering a lecture of opportunity to 210 post-medical interns who had completed their 10-day patriotism and ideological training at the National Leadership Institute (NALI), Kyankwanzi. The meeting took place at State House, Entebbe.
The President’s proposal comes at a time when a good number of medical interns are stuck over delay by the government to release funds for them to start their internship.
“Why don’t we agree that a person who has qualified as a medical doctor after five years in the medical school, continues with the internship but with sponsorship from the person who sponsored him in the first place? What is the problem? If someone was sponsoring you for five years, why does he stop now? There’s another demand from the government. I have been told that these interns need a supervisor. Are these supervisors enough?” he inquired.
“What I propose is that on sponsorship, we maintain the one who has been sponsoring you during the undergraduate, let him sponsor you. If it was the government, loan scheme or State House or your parents sponsoring, let them continue so that you do the internship, if you do that, you remove the issue of waiting for government money. The government must also hire enough consultants to supervise you. If we do this, I think it will make the work much easier. That is my proposal, you go and think about it.”
Meanwhile, as the president hinges his argument of failure to sponsor medical students as has been the practice to lack of money, Parliament is set to spend an extra shs20 billion on regional parliamentary sittings, starting this week, a thing many critics say is a sign of lack of frugality and sheer waste of tax payers’ money. “How can you say, you don’t have money to educate a medical doctor, but you have shs 20billion to spend on an already over paid MP to go and have sex in a different lodge upcountry?. But what are this country’s priorities?” wondered one of the commentators via phone on condition of anonymity.
The President also lectured the post medical interns on how the National Resistance Movement (NRM) came into existence and the historical missions of the party.
“What is now the NRM started as a student movement in the 1960s, when we could not agree with the old political parties like the UPC, DP and Kabaka Yekka. Those political parties were emphasizing the politics of identity based on tribe, religion and gender. When we examined it, it was wrong,” he said.
President Museveni further informed the medics that politics is like social medicine whereby in medicine, you must diagnose the sickness of a patient correctly, once the diagnosis is correct, then you can be able to provide a prescription/treatment and if the diagnosis is wrong, then the patient will not be cured and he may die.
“The same with politics, you must diagnose what a group of people need, what they lack, what they are suffering from and what medicine can you prescribe for them. So, when we looked at that in the 1960s and we saw the wrong diagnosis of our old parties, we asked ourselves what do people need? They don’t lack clans or tribes. Why do you emphasize what they don’t lack, and you don’t attend to what they lack?” he wondered.
