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Wakiso, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | Residents of Katooke village in Nansana Municipality are concerned that food that’s distributed by the government might not be enough to take them through the time of the COVID-19 lockdown.
The government is distributing 6 kilograms of Maize Flour and three kilograms of beans to every member in each household, as one of the interventions to save the population from starving, after the suspension of business activities to battle a new strain of coronaviruses that has spread across the globe.
According to President Yoweri Museveni’s guidance, the food will be given to families whose livelihood was disrupted by interventions put in place to control the spread of coronavirus disease. But Katooke village chairperson Steven Kaweesa says that almost everyone in his village is starving, and families are feeding on porridge every day as an attempt to use the flour sparingly.
He says that many are contemplating abandoning the city suburbs and return to their villages because they are unsure how long the lockdown will last. The village has more than 16,000 people.
Unlike in parts of Kampala where some households were skipped and the inhabitants were not given food because they were expected to be well off, in Katooke the distribution was from house to house. Kaweesa says that everyone in his village deserves to get the food because all of them were locked up and they left their jobs.
The residents are demanding that the government makes arrangements to give them more food in case the lockdown is extended beyond May 5, 2020.
However, Nansana Municipality Deputy Mayor Kato Paul Yiga appeals to the government to speed up the process of distributing food in order to ensure that people are not tempted to move out of their homes in the search for food.
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