President Yoweri Museveni has promised to inject Shs 1 billion in the Crime Preventer’s Savings and Credit Cooperative Organization (SACCO) to enable them get startup capital to improve their businesses.
Speaking to the Crime Preventers at Lugogo this morning, President Museveni implored them to form SACCOs in order to benefit from this initiative. With this intervention, he said, in July each district will get Shs 100 million to man down shooting unemployment cases and poverty in the country.
He cautioned them to be exemplary in averting crime and eradicating poverty in their ancestral villages. “Your leaders should work with Police and Operation Wealth Creation with one crime preventer at every parish to serve as an example for the rest,” he said.
Mr. Museveni also said that he, not the former Inspector General of Police Kale Kayihura, mooted the idea of enlisting the services of crime preventers.
“In the role of detecting crime, I need to sit down with your leaders to see how to handle it, criminals operate mainly in villages and if you have not yet developed village coordinators, and it is high time you do it. I regard you as a reserve army for Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF), my idea is to have a small and equipped army with a big reserve,” Museveni noted, and lauded Gen. Kayihura for offering effective leadership to the Crime Preventers.
President Museveni’s meeting with crime preventers follows an earlier meeting with their head Blaise Kamugisha in Rwakitura, where the latter vowed to work hand in hand with police to avert the rising crime which includes abduction, torture and murder.
The National Crime Preventer’s Forum (NCPF) was founded in 2013 with the aim of promoting community policing through sensitization, awareness and outreach.
However, since the formation of NCPF, political elites and legal scholars have said their activities as illegal.
