President Yoweri Museveni has called on the new Prime Minister to ensure implementation of government programmes and directed him to use the government machinery on the ground including RDCs and sub county chiefs to ensure progress.

“The Prime Minister has laid his finger on the sickness… lack of implementation. Now we are going to cure sickness of not implementing. The Permanent Secretary in OPM must help the Prime Minister to get monitoring mechanism. These RDCS can be used. I don’t know why they are not used, they are there in every district and can be made to monitor. These together with sub-county chiefs are government employees. If they don’t supervise sack them,” he said using the saying that `the eyes of a cow look beautiful but nobody eats them. They are beautiful for nothing.

“I congratulate my brother Dr. Ruhakana Rugunda on being appointed Prime Minister. Am the one who appointed him because I know him and parliament this time they were unanimous, which is shocking because for that parliament to be unanimous must be a miracle. I thank him for taking up this post in government,” he said before detailing his long relation with the new Prime Minister since the days of the struggle.
The President said total commercialization of agriculture is crucial because that is where the poverty is and that when people produce commercially, there will be huge production.

“NRM has lots of cadres, disciplined ones like Rugunda here. He is a senior man but has always kept quiet even when we bring in junior ones and put them on top of him, he does not mind because he knows the reasons…balancing this and that. My father Kaguta was my senior but when I became President, he accepted me,” he said.

Dr. Rugunda took the Oath of allegiance and oath of Prime minister at the ceremony conducted by the Head of service John Mitala and attended by various dignitaries including Chief justices, ministers, Service Chiefs, Permanent Secretaries and close family members.

The swearing in of the new Prime Minister follows the new appointment by President  Museveni on September,18,2014, and unanimously approved by Parliament. Dr. Rugunda replaces Rt. Hon. Amama Mbabazi.
Dr. Ruhakana Rugunda thanked President Museveni for giving him what he described as a heavy responsibility.
``I would like to sincerely thank the President for giving me a heavy responsibility at this critical phase of Uganda’s transformation agenda,” he said, adding that the NRM and the people of Uganda have invested heavily in education through U.P.E and U.S.E and now even more in University Education through various ways of expanding the education infrastructure of having more people on Job.

“The next phase has come – jobs for these young people who have been properly invested in, educated and with skills, they must put their skills to work so that the country can be transformed,” he said.

He said the fact that the government has invested heavily in railway, roads, ICT among other is to demonstrate that we are spending heavily to absorb this labour force prepared by government to undertake work in different sectors.

Rugunda said the bottlenecks which the President has talked about include the lack of implementation of government programmes.
“Mr. president government is going to move and move expeditiously and as usual I count on your total support to ensure bottlenecks are removed as quickly as possible so that the services to the people of Uganda can be delivered with diversion, without hindrances and straight to the target,” he said.
Rugunda said what is striking is that Uganda at very difficult times even during the insurgency was able to perform quite well and grow at rates of 7 – 8 percent.
“Now the country is peaceful thanks to sacrifice and struggle by our gallant forces, I see no rational reason why we should continue walking when we should be running to transform the conditions of our people.

Our commitment is to achieve object of transforming the country and enable young people, now skilled to put to use what they had got through education and be real catalysts of transformation.

The Prime Minister called upon the President to give them full backing , enable capacity of various offices to effectively monitor, remove and break the bottlenecks so that what we promised the population can be actualized implement and achieved.