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Abu Mayanja |
A learned friend and astute analyst
Abu Mayanja
President Museveni is currently on a nation-wide tour of Uganda preaching the gospel of bonna bagaggawale, (let everybody become rich).
The strategy apparently involves not only identifying and attracting investors to Uganda, but also parcelling out the country into economic or productive zones. Each zone is expected to grow or rear those crops or animals for which it is best suited. The President has been blaming the acute unemployment on ‘wrong’ courses at university. We all wish His Excellency success in his endeavours.
But as the first minister of Information and Broadcasting in the NRM government, I recall some of the obstacles we identified as standing in the way of Uganda’s rapid economic development and the steps we proposed to overcome them.
One of the problems was that in
Uganda, we were ‘producing what we did not consume and consuming what we did not produce.’ After 19 years of NRM government, it is not easy to say we have done so much in resolving this problem. It seems we are still producing cotton and consuming mivumba. We export cotton, vanilla, coffee, copper and timber that we produce and import what we use.
We also denounced the use of big trucks with or without trailers on our roads; they destroyed our roads whilst carrying very little tonnage of merchandise compared to what a single railway train would carry.
Therefore, our strategy was to divert virtually all commercial traffic to the railway station. We invested in some locomotives and wagons in fulfillment of this policy. Today, however, the rail line even to Mityana has been covered by tall elephant grasses; there are not trains moving west of Kampala and even in Kampala to
Mombasa segment, the lorry has regained undisputed sway.
We also said, that in order to preserve something of our independence and ensure jobs for our people, we would accept no food aid.
Remember these were the days when Uganda was confronted with the dreadful carnage. But we came out boldly against the external food aid for a few months as it turned out. Because food aid found its way, first as part of the school feeding project and then as so many other things. Result?
Policy discarded. But the flagship of our economic policy, as everybody would recite in those days rested upon ‘The building up of an integrated, self-sustaining, independent national economy and if you were scholarly, you could add ‘with forward and backward linkages’. It is amazing that today nobody hears of this lynch-pin in our development strategy. And nobody has ever seen or tasted the
fruits of such an economy.
Instead, we have been running a donor-driven economy, governed and controlled by market forces, not much different from what used to be known as ‘Reaganomics’ or ‘Thatcherism’.
I wish to suggest that Uganda needs to and revive the philosophy and machinery of economic planning, with a full ministry devoted to the purpose, a planning commission consisting of some of our ablest minds and serviced by an equally competent secretariat.
Today, the President blames unemployment on the graduates, who pursue ‘wrong courses’ at college, but why should universities — especially the state universities be permitted to offer courses that are irrelevant to the needs of the market?
The problem will continue to bedevil us until we set about planning for our development. In the education sector, we need to know what kind of manpower and in what
quantities we need over a given period of time.
Zoning alone will not do the trick as His Excellency knows. The idea of zoning in the NRM era was first mooted in the 1990s. It has not been implemented up to now.
The New Vision reported last week that meat in Kiboga was selling at sh300 per kilo and a cow that used to cost sh400,000 was now going for sh100,000 because of the drought that had made pasture as well as water unavailable. It also reported that a jerrycan of water was going for sh900 in Mbarara district again due to the drought. In other words, our Ministry of Lands, Water and Environment cannot solve the problem of our herdsmen; we are still dependent on the elements for survival. In the meantime we continue to destroy our forests with the greatest abandon.
Some 10 years ago I was shocked when, flying from Kamuli to Entebbe, I saw that virtually the
whole of Mabira forest had been cut down and turned into banana gardens.
My proposal to copy the Kenyans in having a national tree-planting day was rejected because the forestry department did not have enough seedlings. Do we have any plans to beat not only the current drought but the longer-term threatened movement of the Sahara southwards?
Published on: Tuesday, 8th March, 2005 |
