An insightful visitor to Uganda today would confront a
puzzle: there is a lot of activity in our country. The government has many programmes
to develop the country and improve the living conditions of its people. There
is Prosperity For All and the president moves around the country dishing out
cash to selected individuals and groups.
We have programmes like Universal Primary and Secondary
Education (UPE and USE). The boom in education is real and both the state and
the private sector are rapidly expanding its reach. The number of students
getting government scholarships to study at university has doubled while the
number of privately sponsored students at universities has grown from zero in
1990 to over 20,000 in 20 years.
In health, government, donors, NGOs and the private sector
are investing a lot. As President Yoweri Museveni never tires of reminding us,
his government has built 750 Grade III hospitals in every sub-county. More
money is poured to buy drugs. The total money going to the health sector this
ending financial year is Shs 1.3 trillion ‘ almost 90% of the total budget of
the entire government of Rwanda.
Then when our roads became a sea of potholes, the government
immediately increased the infrastructure budget to one trillion. When an acute
energy crisis stared the nation in the eye, the government created an energy
fund in which over Shs 120 billion is allocated every year. Big plans to
increase generation of electricity by 500MW have been announced.
The economy itself has been growing at an impressive 9% per
annum, and in spite of the international economic meltdown, our GDP has grown
by 6.7% this financial year. Although tax revenues are Shs 150 billion below
projections, they are 17% above revenues collected last financial year. The
private sector is booming ‘ more cars on the streets, more banks have been
licensed and more telecommunication companies are entering the market. Exports
are growing and shopping malls springing up etc.
In the governance sphere, there is a lot of media freedom
and newspapers, radios and televisions provide lively public debate. There are
NGOs and public bodies on every arm and leg of our existence promoting
‘accountability’ and prosecutions of the corrupt are at an all time high.
Parliamentary committees and commissions of inquiry add to an atmosphere of
vibrancy. Elections are competitive with a strong anti-incumbency bias where
nearly half of all MPs are never returned.
Yet this is one side of Uganda’s coin. The other side is
tragic. For all the billions going to public health and education, there are no
drugs in hospitals or books in schools; doctors, nurses and teachers’
absenteeism is atrocious. People no longer turn up at public dispensaries for
treatment and the dropout rate from free primary education is 78%. Museveni’s
new 750 dispensaries and 30,000 classrooms are mere monuments.
In spite of the multitudes of institutions of
accountability, public officials loot public resources with impunity. Although
there are many prosecutions of the corrupt, the cases involve small district
officials. The big fish in Kampala walk free. The president himself leads this
pack of the corrupt and presides over profligate expenditure on State House.
The institutions at the centre have limited capacity to direct things at
district level, thus decentralising and democratising corruption.
Within our lively public debate, critical individuals have
no access to the air waves and newspapers. The state has bribed, intimidated
and co-opted most media institutions and individual journalists ‘ only a
handful remaining in the few truly independent media. At parliament, the
accountability committees controlled by the opposition are more corrupt than
the committees controlled by the ruling party. Even in the churches priests
lie, rape and steal from their parishioners.
Public institutions and policies no longer embody a
collective vision. Instead, they have been turned into a vehicle through which
those in control of the state loot public resources with reckless abandon. Of
all the billions that government has allocated to health, education and
infrastructure, only a small fraction goes to the intended purpose, the rest
ending up in private pockets. A lot of private wealth in today’s Uganda has
been accumulated at the price of the atrocious record in public service
delivery.
How does one reconcile Uganda’s phenomenal economic growth,
boom in education, strong democratic traditions, a growing middleclass and
elite institutions with the depth of public corruption, impunity of
officialdom, institutionalised incompetence and unparalleled apathy and
cynicism in the public?
How do we label this state? Is it strong or weak;
developmental or predatory? Its propensity to design high sounding policies is
very high. Yet its capacity to implement them is disastrous. It has proven
capable of sustaining economic growth yet incapable of delivery of basic things
like law enforcement, health and education services provision. Even tax
collection where it has a vested interest, the state in Uganda has proven too
weak to deliver. So in every routine service, there is rampant corruption, absenteeism,
institutionalised incompetence and indifference.
Government critics feel that all this is because of a
democratic deficit in our country. Yet it seems to me that most of the
aforementioned dysfunctions are a product of a democratic bargain. In its
desire to stay in power, the NRM finds itself under strong electoral pressures.
To win over different ethnic groups in our multi-tribal society, it adopted as
its strategy the buying of elite support through patronage. As more resources
are diverted to integrate large sections of the elite into the eating circle,
very few resources remain to deliver public goods and services.
The debate on improving governance in Uganda has focused on
a copy and paste approach from western countries. It seems to me that behind
most of Uganda’s institutional innovations lies an assumption that public
officials have a strong commitment to the public interest. Yet the evidence
staring us in our eyes demands that we think outside the box.
How can we make public officials develop a vested interest
in improving the welfare of citizens? What threats can be sufficient to deter
public loot? Is it possible to reform the public sector and make it more
responsive to needs of our people?
amwenda@independent.co.ug
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