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Without Mincing Words
Andrew M. Mwenda |
NRM�s relationship with peasants is contradictory
Dec 26, 2004
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If governments are representatives of vested interests within society, what is the social base of the NRM? Is it peasants as President Yoweri Museveni and his supporters never get tired of telling us? The history of the NRM/A struggle, being based in rural Uganda, tends to lend credence to such a claim. But how come the NRM Ten Point Programme never really addressed itself to the concerns of the peasants: agrarian reforms aimed at increasing the returns to agriculture or land reform to give land to the tiller. Instead the Ten Point Programme is a generalist agenda showing no bias as to which vested interests (or classes) influenced it. Thus, although the NRM tried to "democratise politics in rural areas" through the resistance councils, these institutions never became agencies for articulating broader peasant concerns on agrarian issues. Instead, they acted as NRM's security appendages, or vehicles for resolving community disputes. Sadly, the major grievance around which the NRM mobilised support for its struggle were ethno-regional: that this was a movement to wrestle power from northerners "who are terrorising us" (Bantu) through the control of the military. Secondly, to mobilise Baganda peasants to support it, the NRM, ironically allied itself to conservative, semi-feudal forces symbolised in the leadership of Yusuf Lule, the very constituency that NRM was supposed to liberate peasants from. At one time, the NRM/A even brought Kabaka Ronald Mutebi to the "liberated" zones to show itself as representing Buganda's ethnic concerns. Precisely because of this alliance, when it captured power the NRM was unable to carry out a comprehensive agrarian reform programme. Instead it sought to reproduce power by servicing the same semi-feudal interests at Mengo. Museveni's relationship with the peasants is contradictory. On the one hand he introduced local councils, which gave peasants an institutional framework through which they could have a voice in politics, a highly commendable innovation. On the other hand, through his alliance with international financial institutions on which he relies for foreign aid to sustain his rule, Museveni has presided over the deliberate destruction of autonomous organisations of peasants - the co-operatives - the most effective institutions through which peasants could have had a voice on the price of their crop and other agrarian concerns. And how did Museveni's government come to destroy cooperatives? In 1981, Robert Bates published his book Markets and States in Tropical Africa: the Political Basis of Agricultural Policies in which he argued that state officials in newly independent African countries, vested with powerful instruments of economic control - like agricultural marketing boards - employed them to buy off urban constituencies and therefore stay in power and enrich themselves. According to Bates, the political elite had two options: to let the market determine the price of the farmers' crop (in which case the farmer would get a high price) or to set the price at a very low level but extend support to farmers in form of free or highly subsidised fertilizers, farm implements, seeds etc. The ruling elite chose the second option because a high market price for crops is a reward to the farmer's labour while free or highly subsidised farm inputs are state patronage from which the ruling elite would win farmers' political support. Bates argued that these policies destroyed farmers' incentives to increase agricultural output and thereby sabotaged the process of development because of an added factor: that while seeking to combine political survival with self enrichment, the political elite built rental havens and erected bureaucratic obstacles to the free play of market forces and therefore to the efficient allocation of resources. For Bates, this had a debilitating effect on peasant agriculture - the only economic sector capable of propelling future development. Dismantling state power and leaving peasants free to take advantage of market opportunities seemed to be the answer. Bates' book soon became, as Prof. Mahmood Mamdani has put it, "the official truth" in international donors circles. Thus when the government of President Museveni signed on the IMF and World Bank programmes in the late 1980s and early '90s, it agreed to dismantle state intervention in agriculture by liberalising crop marketing, privatising state marketing boards, etc. and leaving peasants at the mercy of the market. Fifteen years later, the market has only led to short-term benefits like the 1995-97 coffee boom, but undermined long-term incentives to invest in agriculture. That is why while Uganda exported 4.2 million bags of coffee in 1995 and earned $750 million (because of favourable international coffee prices) it only exported 2.7 million bags in 2003 and earned slightly above $100 million when coffee prices plummeted. What was lost to the Ugandan policy makers and their allies in the international development community was that market forces have potential to generate great benefits and great disincentives. Bates himself returned to Africa and in a study of agrarian development in Kenya highlighted the need to inject bureaucratic regulation in agriculture to realise its growth. In a groundbreaking work titled Beyond the Miracle of the Market: the Political Economy of Agrarian Development in Kenya, Bates' argued that markets and states do not stand opposed to each other. Using primary research material on co-operatives in Kenya, he demonstrates that markets depend on state action, echoing the findings of Karl Polanyi almost half a century ago. Uganda swallowed Bates' ideas in the first book, but their effect was to destroy autonomous peasant organisations like cooperatives. The NRM survived this because of a creative double maneuver: making local councils organs of the state, and then pouring large sums of monies into them "to deliver social services." Where rural elites would have been activists in the co-operative movement's struggle to ensure a high price for peasant produce, they were compensated with positions in local councils where they have access to large budgets financed by foreign aid. This is where the alliance between donors and Museveni's government in shaping Uganda's post 1987 reconstruction has had a destructive impact on Uganda's capacity to build a viable and sustainable economy on the one hand and on the future of democracy on the other. While service in local councils was initially voluntary, now it became paid employment through a set of allowances. The circulation of money in local councils marked a secondary transition: instead of being vehicles through which peasants could aggregate their interests and place them on the national political agenda, they became instruments through which Museveni mobilises support for his policies and candidates during elections. Now even that is changing since the cabinet white paper is proposing wages for LC1 chairpersons, a factor that will transform these councils into state bureaucracies. Having destroyed the co-operatives, and now bureaucratised the local councils, peasants hover in the dark. They have lost autonomous organisations, which they had before NRM came to power (however much previous governments had undermined the democratic content in these co-operatives), and now the local councils have been transformed into state bureaucracies. The loss of democratic participation is combined with loss of negotiating power over their livelihoods. Thus while the richest people in Uganda's countryside in 1970 were cash crop farmers, today they are politicians in the local councils. This expansive and expensive decentralised bureaucracy can only be sustained through an unproductive alliance between international capital and local patrimonial power. That is why Museveni's fortunes are precariously tied to the fortunes of his international backers. |
� 2004 The Monitor Publications
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