A few weeks ago, a Western diplomat invited a couple of us
to lunch to discuss the major challenge facing our nation and what the West should
do(I would have preferred should not do) about it. As I listened to Ugandan
colleagues speak, I got worried. They denounced our lack of good leadership and
poured scorn on the quality of our government. Here I agreed with them
entirely. Then they moved beyond this to a more generalised attack on Ugandan
society as being ignorant, lazy, complacent, cowardly, and more. This failure
to separate the failures of the Yoweri Museveni regime from the wider Ugandan
society concerned me deeply.
Apparently, many people turn their legitimate anger against
the corruption, nepotism and incompetence of the Museveni government into anger
against Ugandan society. It is here that Museveni has registered his greatest
success to make us lose faith in ourselves and even question our ability to
shape our destiny. A cynical elite is what Museveni needs because it cannot be
a vehicle for progressive change.
So I intervened in the debate arguing with passion that Ugandans
are not stupid and lazy and our society is not dysfunctional. Our nation is
full of innovative and vibrant people who are creating immense opportunities
for themselves and their fellow citizens to work and trade and earn ever more
incomes. I meet them every day when I am shopping, dining in a restaurant,
visiting an office, selling advertisement, banking a cheque, negotiating land
prices everywhere.
Of course this is not to say Ugandans are without
weaknesses. Our agrarian structure has given us a poor work ethic and its
attitudes and habits stand in the way of the necessary capitalist behaviour
that facilitates market exchange. Rather, my argument is that seeming
liabilities can be turned into great assets and that while the cards we are given
by history are important, how we learn to play them is more important. Although
our present obstacles appear to be structurally obdurate, there is room to
change our environment. The challenge is to identify change agents.
During the late 1980s, Museveni and NRM carried out vital
economic reforms. They withdrew government from most economic activity, thus
paving way for the private sector and markets to allocate resources in a more
efficient way. They liberalised the economy, privatised public enterprises (with
a lot of graft of course), deregulated prices, disbanded state monopolies and
controlled inflation. This unleashed our private entrepreneurial energy and
creativity that has been the driving force of our economic success.
You do not need to be a Museveni supporter to recognise the
positive results of these reforms. The economy has sustained average growth
rates of 9% for over 20 years, a rare achievement by an economy in Sub-saharan
Africa. This growth has brought prosperity to many and reduced the number of
people living in poverty from 56% in 1992 to 31% in 2006. Of course there are
those in the 31% who have grown poorer, many who have not improved and there
are also questions of equity in our growth. But these negatives do not erase
the said achievements.
Indeed, a lot of the dysfunctions we see are a result of our
economic success rather than failure. For example, traffic jams are caused by
more people getting richer and therefore buying cars faster than government is
expanding the size of roads. And because we drive more cars today, our roads
suffer faster wear and tear than if we were using bicycles although poor
quality construction due to corruption plays an important role. We have
constant load-shading of electricity because more and more firms and households
are getting unto the grid and using more machines.
Therefore, the major failure of the Museveni administration
has been inability to build state institutions to provide public goods and
services to citizens effectively and efficiently. That is why roads are a sea
of potholes, hospitals are death chambers, schools (if they are not burning or
collapsing) are producing half-baked graduates. Yet there are still a few
islands of probity, efficiency and competence in our public sector, which is a
sea of corruption, incompetence and nepotism.
Therefore, the failures of the Museveni government should
not be mistaken to represent dysfunction in the wider Ugandan society, although
they contribute to it. For example, the private sector is filling many of these
gaps with better schools, hospitals and supplying electricity. Neighbours from
Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya are flocking to our schools. Museveni may have
control over part of our lives but he does not control all our lives.
Monitor Publications Limited began in a basement 16 years
ago with hardly any capital. Now, it has a gross turnover of over US$ 10m. MTN
launched in Uganda only 10 years ago with limited capital. Now it is valued at
over US$ 1billion; its profits last year were over US$ 100m while it paid taxes
worth over US$ 120m. My friend Lucky has moved from being a taxi driver to
owning a fleet of 52 Kilita buses.
These successes are not accidents. They have been produced
by the ingenuity of the people of this country working singly on jointly with
foreign investors. Of course an enabling macroeconomic policy environment put
in place by the government has been critical too. But most of our achievements
have been realised in spite of bad government.
Having made this case, I was shocked (but certainly not
surprised) when some in the group accused me of having sold out. There is a
section of the Ugandan political class that wants to deny any credit to
Museveni. Some even take this argument further and seek to deny the progress
Uganda has registered under his leadership even if it was achieved in spite,
rather than because of him.
The problem with this group, however, is that when someone
disagrees with their assessment of Uganda, they do not respond to the
substantive arguments made. Instead they seek to attack ones moral character -
like in my case, accusing me of having sold out. This tactic of avoiding the
substantive debate and shifting to attack the personality of the individual
making an argument undermines the platform for honest debate of public issues
in Uganda.
Continues next week
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