President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni has punched holes in Col Kizza Besigye’s proposition to re-open schools.
The powerful opposition leaders last week blasted government for keeping schools closed when the President partially reopened the country after a 42-day lockdown due to the second wave of Covid19.
Besigye said, his former boss’ administration had failed to plan for schools reopening by vaccinating all teachers during the lockdown .
He appealed to parents to exert pressure on government to reopen the schools.
Besigye predicted that the continuous closure of schools will have a huge generational challenge both physically and mentally on “our children.”
“This closure of one and half years is going cause a generational catastrophe of the young people. It’s a disaster for the young people.”
But his longtime political adversary, Museveni, thinks Besigye’s plan is wrong and if implemented will leave many parents dead.
Speaking Thursday while celebrating The International Youth Day Celebrations in Kampala, Museveni faulted Besigye for ignoring key aspects in his proposal.
The President said Besigye’s plan to immunize all teachers was based on the wrong assumption that all schools in Uganda are boarding schools.
“The other day I heard Dr Besigye talking that schools should open and that the government has no plan; that we should have immunized the teachers… Okay thank you very much Dr Besigye, but you have not thought the problem through properly,” Museveni articulated.
“Actually the teachers are among our priority list of immunization and I think many of the teachers have already been immunized because they were on the first list 250,000 to be immunized.
“But the problem is that even if all teachers were immunized, only a few schools are boarding schools. Majority of them are day schools, so the children will study and go back home and kill all their parents.”
“Is that what Dr Besigye wants or he didn’t remember that the majority of the schools are day schools?”
Museveni said was the reason he decided to keep the schools closed “until we have immunized majority of the people so that if the child gets corona, the people at home are already immunized.”