By Mulengera Reporters
Recently former defense minister Vincent Sempijja led all religious leaders from Greater Masaka to Gulu where they met, ate and dined with Gen Salim Saleh, the overall coordinator for operation wealth creation.
The agenda was how the church influence could be leveraged to amplify President Museveni’s wealth creation programmes. The clerics in Masaka unite under something called the Inter-Religious Forum of Greater Masaka.
The membership includes the leaders of the Anglican, Catholic, Born Again, Seventh Day and Muslim faith. Each one of these was represented at the Gulu meeting.
Delegation leader was Masaka City-based Pentecostal Prayer Palace Senior Pastor aka Bishop Sserwadda. His church is at Kijjabwemi in Masaka City.
Ssempijja helped to coordinate the meeting. Saleh, whose activities the President funds mainly through Hajji Yunnus Kakande the Secretary of the President’s Office, thanked the clergy for their efforts against poverty in the area.
They briefed him about their initiatives and what they think needs to be done to amplify good outcomes from PDM, Myooga and other government programmes.
Saleh agreed to invest Shs15bn into the wealth creation activities being undertaken by the Inter-Religious Forum of Greater Masaka. The money, which has already been provided, will be used to put in place a huge coffee processing plant on the 5 acres of land the clergy’s forum has been provided with inside the presidential industrial hub at Bulakati Lukaya in Kalungu district.
The clerics assured Gen Saleh of readiness to massively mobilize their flocks to engage in large scale coffee planting so that the donated coffee processing plant can be put to sustainable use.
On his part, Bishop Serverus Jjumba, who heads the Masaka Catholic Diocese, says the offer by Gen Saleh couldn’t have come at a better time. He says Masaka has clearly distinguished itself as a large scale producer of high quality coffee.
Inspired by Saleh’s offer, Bishop Jjumba says the Catholic Church he leads in Masaka is going to make coffee growing compulsory in each parish at household level. Each parish is to be required to have a large scale coffee plantation to serve as a model to be emulated by all Catholics in Greater Masaka.
Gratefully, each of the Catholic parishes has plenty of land and Jjumba is hopeful that Saleh’s efforts to amplify coffee production in Greater Masaka will go a long way in amplifying household incomes.
Jjumba also says that for the case of the Catholic Church, he leads, the coffee growing programmes are going to be chiefly coordinated through the defunct Bwavu Mpologoma Cooperative Society whose operations his leadership is determined to revamp. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
