Last week, I argued that President Yoweri Museveni has
actively stifled the growth of a robust private enterprise sector generally
though he has promoted the growth of individual businesses. He has pitted
indigenous capital against non indigenous capital by giving preferential
treatment to the latter and thereby generating hostility against them from the
former. He achieves this because our business class has not yet developed a
consciousness of its collective interests and the organisational means to
pursue these interests politically. The Uganda Chamber of Commerce and Uganda
Manufacturers Association are still young and weak.
Musevenis overriding objective is regime maintenance. To
achieve this, he faces a strong revenue imperative. He needs money to buy
political support (by providing elites with government jobs/tenders); to
finance his legitimacy (through provision of public goods and services) and to
buy weapons to coerce those who resist.
The state in Uganda meets these revenue demands by raising
money from the local economy through taxation. It then supplements domestic
revenue with foreign aid from a largely naive, sometimes self-interested
international aid community. This alternative source of money weakens the
political influence of citizens, especially the private sector over government
policy. By disarticulating the government from its citizens and its business
class, foreign aid literally creates a mercenary state.
The funds and diplomatic support from the international
community create jobs for local elites; bribes for the poor in form of welfare
handouts like free primary education, roads, basic healthcare and releases the
states own revenue to finance its coercive capability the army and the police.
These dynamics undermine the incentive of the state to seek an aggressive
strategy of building a robust business class that can politically use state
power to bring about capitalist transformation.
Although international solidarity is important, the particular
form Western aid has taken in Africa is problematic. For example, international
aid is attracted to our failures, rather than our accomplishments. Hence it
comes to help us end poverty rather than to create wealth. Consequently, it
pours money into villages to feed the hungry and treat the sick rather than
into businesses to innovate and expand. Of course these humanitarian gestures
are good. But they do not create dynamism. Instead, they tend to subsidise
failure rather than reward success.
There is a practical problem with a strategy that seeks to
fix ones weaknesses instead of leveraging ones strength. When you fix
weaknesses, the resulting growth is slow and incremental growing additively (or
arithmetically) as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc. When you leverage your strength, the
results grow at a geometric rate (multiplicatively) as 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 etc.
Thus, if one used foreign aid to support farmers who are innovating with new
technologies or businesses that are finding creative ways of growing bigger and
penetrating newer markets, the resulting growth would be multiplicative. Aid
fails because it goes to help a failing farmer (who is poor and hence cannot
pay his medical bills) rather than a successful one.
Yet Musevenis strategy of stifling the growth of an
indigenous business class and pitting it against non indigenous business class
cannot succeed in the long term. Ugandas macroeconomic policy framework
ironically imposed on him by foreign donors promotes the growth and alliance of
capital. So he can only influence the pace but not the direction of this
change. Every day, many Ugandans enter business and succeed singly or in
partnership with foreign investors.
How then do we promote collaboration between local and
foreign capital? This is the issue we need to discuss. Yet a section of
Musevenis opponents spend most of their time fighting the growth of the very
class our country needs to transform. They keep complaining about the
inadequacies of Ugandans rather than finding out our collective strength. This
generates apathy, something unlikely to motivate Ugandans to work for change.
At the lunch discussion with the Western ambassador, one of
the loudest critics of Ugandan society was a guy who runs a successful private
research institution. The other was a successful academic at Makerere. These
guys have achieved a lot in spite of an incompetent and corrupt government. I
wondered why they are so obsessed with Musevenis failures rather than their own
accomplishments and those of MTN, Oscar Industries, Kalita Bus Service, Simba
Telecom and Ruparelia Group. We need to leverage our strengths to change our
country.
But first, we need to overcome this apathy. And to disagree
with Museveni does not necessarily mean that one should reject everything he
has done. Many Ugandans in business and other sectors believe the reforms of
the late 1980s and early 1990s improved our lives. To deny this is to switch
them off. To them, you sound like Museveni full of partisan rancour and therefore
unable to see the value on the other side.
This partly explains why many enlightened people have turned
away from politics thinking that it cannot be a vehicle that represents their
shared understandings of the Ugandan reality. Ironically, it is the oppositions
inability to appreciate Musevenis achievements that works to the presidents
advantage.
Many if not most of Musevenis mainstream critics are
caricatures of the worst in his politics. The population cannot therefore see
the difference. We need a new kind of politics that understands the good we
have achieved under Museveni and therefore need to protect and build upon; what
we have lost under him and thus need to re-create (e.g. public spiritedness in
public service and politics); and the new things we need to do differently to
move this country forward.
For now, Kizza Besigye has failed to craft this politics.
His public spiritedness and personal courage have been effective in mobilising
the base i.e. rallying those who already disagree with the regime. But they
have been ineffective in winning over those who are sitting on the fence.
Besigye has thus solidified the anti-Museveni base but he has not grown it
either. Whoever seeks to grow this base needs to be more circumspect. Agonising
that Uganda is a dysfunctional country, its people only left at the mercy of
Museveni and cohorts cannot bring about the change we need.
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