Background
Abia Nasasira Kyomugisha hails from Kicuzi subcounty in Ibanda District. She is a member of the United Nations (UN) Women in Politics and previously worked with Star Times, a cable and satellite company in Uganda. Abia is married to Sanyu Zacchaeus with whom she shares a beautiful daughter. Abia graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Social sciences.
Previously a member of NRM, Abia met with the Alliance for National Transformation (ANT) Presidential Candidate, Mugisha Muntu and realised that ANT was a disciplined party and one that carried a message of change that should be trusted. Betraying her heart, she chose to forsake a party whose ideals she felt no longer served the people of Uganda.
Abia is running for the Ibanda Woman Member of Parliament seat. Ibanda, situated in the Western Region of Uganda, was elevated to District status on July 1, 2005. Formerly, it was a county in Mbarara District. Ibanda has an estimated population of 255,500 as of 2012 statistics.
Abia is passionate about her people and has been in leadership roles since she was a little girl. She says that as a young person and as a woman, she is familiar with the challenges in her own district and believes she is both equipped and experienced to provide the kind of leadership required to bring about change in Ibanda. Some of the challenges that Abia points out in Ibanda include an entrenched cycle of poverty, which contributes greatly to rampant domestic violence, and inadequately run health centres in the area.
The Plan
Abia is committed to empowering women and girls as a way of ending the cycle of poverty in the household. She believes that one of the ways to do this is to educate women and girls in modern agriculture and providing them with improved seedlings that they can use in farming, towards improving household income. Furthermore, she believes that women, being the primary farmers in the home, need to be connected to markets as this would greatly improve their incomes and reduce their dependence on men or their husbands. From her observations and having lived in Ibanda most of her life, she says poverty contributes strongly to the levels of domestic violence, and that nearly every week, they lose someone to this scourge.
As aspiring Women MP for Ibanda, Abia is focused on encouraging women and girls to join business-oriented and savings groups as a way of improving their own earnings. To educate girls and women is to empower them to manage their households sustainably. As aspiring Ibanda Woman MP, Abia believes that when young girls are skills, they can move beyond dependency to self-sustenance.
While women and girls are a natural inclination for Abia, she is also focused on improving the status of health centres in Ibanda. A personal circumstance in the family brought her and her family face to face with the immense inadequacies of the health centres in Ibanda. Her father developed stomach cancer but could not be diagnosed over a long period. The health centres and clinics in the area are not equipped to diagnose such illnesses yet they had no way of knowing. She believes that all health centres should be able to provide services good enough to save the lives of the people in her region.
The people of Ibanda are passionate about life yet also hungry for life. Their struggles are real and because of these struggles, they remain vulnerable to bribery of the ruling party. Abia calls upon the people in Ibanda to resist selling their vote for a “sanitizer” (a name being given to the small bribes being handed out by candidates from the current ruling party) and vote for people who will bring qualitative change to their area. There are stereotypes about the ruling party being the only capable party but she firmly believes this is a misguided perception and calls on the people in Ibanda to vote out the current government which continues to misuse power for personal gain.
A Call to Vote
Abia’s call to the people of Ibanda is for them to resist the bribery of the current ruling party. She calls upon everyone in Ibanda, to vote for qualitative change which is espoused by ANT as a political party. She urges the women in Ibanda to vote for her because she is not just one of them but has the right ideas, passion, commitment, and resilience to bring about change in their community and end the unhealth cycles of poverty and domestic violence against women.