The National Youth Council (NYC) and youth Members of Parliament have vowed to boycott this year’s National Youth Day celebrations over an inadequate budget.
This was announced on Friday, June 30th, 2023, during a campfire conversation at the Grand Global Hotel, Kikoni in Kampala.
During the gathering, the chairperson of the National Youth Council, Jacob Eyeru, said this year’s budget allocation for youth is meager and threatens their operation.
“Our past budget used to be 2 billion shillings; the previous one we pushed and it was raised to 4 billion shillings, and no sooner had we started celebrating than they cut it to 800 million shillings in this financial year starting July 1, 2024,” said Eyeru.
According to Eyeru, this year alone the government plans to spend over 600 million on different youth day activities and celebrations, but the total budget for all activities allocated for youth activities is 584 million shillings for the whole year, a figure he termed a peanut.
The National Female Youth MP, Phionah Nyamutoro, said the country should consider budgeting to impact the lives of the people.
“I think most of the discussions we have today are retrospectives of what should have happened before, and we cannot go forward like that as a country,” Nyamutoro noted.
The national Youth council recently petitioned the speaker of parliament, requesting more funding and demonstrating about the NYC cut budget allocation.
