By Ritah Kemigisa
The Operation Wealth Creation (OWC) has refuted claims that they illegally acquired a deal to supply relief food during last year’s lockdown and after inflated the food prices.
Many Ugandans have since questioned how this office that is coordinated by president Museveni’s brother, Gen Salim Saleh got the deal and yet it only deals in agricultural inputs and not produce.
However, addressing journalists, the OWC director of operations Sylvia Owori says the deal was a special procurement from the OPM adding that they sourced the food supplies from their existent network of about 2 million small household farmers.
“We came in to save the situation, people were going to die and yet we knew where to get good quality food,” she said.
She adds that the farmers contributed 4M kgs of maize Flour worth shs 10billion and 1.8M Kgs of beans with shs 1.8 billion totaling to shs 18.1 billion and not shs 81.1 billion as reported.
Owori meanwhile argues that for the first time, the small farmers had a share of the money away from the big shots.
The fight is between the big producers who exploit the small farmers, for example the farmers sold to us Posho at shs 2400 and yet OPM had given shs 2500, we used the shs as operation cost,” she said.
