There is a storm in Uganda over the Foreign Minister, Henry Okello Oryem, who defined the people who died of hunger in his country as "idiots": the BBC reports it, recalling that in 2022 starvation and related diseases caused more than 2,200 victims in the north -east of the African nation, according to the report of the Ugandan Human Rights Commission.
Oryem argued, however, that given the favorable climate and fertile land, people should be able to provide their own food.
"Only an idiot, a real idiot, can die of hunger in Uganda," the Foreign Minister told local television channel NTV Uganda.
"If you work hard, there is land in Uganda. The climate is right, despite climate change," he added.
Among the attacks that came after these words there was also that of the Ugandan writer and journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo, according to whom the minister did not understand "that hunger in a country like Uganda is a distribution/market problem".
As well as killing large numbers of people, food shortages in the north-east have left nearly half a million people in "acute hunger", the Commission's report said.
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