How political debate is divorced from our revenue and skills
reality on state delivery of public goods and services
When I was in boarding secondary school in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, we used to eat maize porridge every morning for breakfast,
posho and boiled beans every lunch and supper. The same experience
characterised our meals at Makerere University in the mid-1990s. My dad and his
contemporaries have amazing stories of their school experiences in the 1950s
and 60s. In those golden years, students in boarding secondary schools, but
most especially at Makerere University, would have eggs, sausages, bacon, bread
with jam and butter, milk and sugar at breakfast, rice and chicken for lunch
etc. Professors Holger Hansen, Nelson Kasfir and the late Joel Barkan have
recounted these stories to me as well.
In those days, salaries for teachers, nurses, doctors,
lecturers and other professions were high, affording government employees a
decent lifestyle without being corrupt. The public service embodied a public
spirit and public sector workers pursued a collective vision. Many scholars
argue that as economic decline and inflation eroded the value of the wages of government
employees, corruption became the main source of sustenance. However, I have
grown suspicious of almost everything written about Africa.
So recently I got my very brilliant son (in the African
usage of that term), Ian Ortega Aliro, to compare the figures of 1960s and
today. The data is diverse, but we can use a snapshot of it. In 1962, Uganda
had a population of seven million people. However, there were 323 students
enrolled in S5 and S6 and 800 at Makerere. Surely, the colonial government
could afford to feed students in high school and at Makerere on sausages and
eggs; it had very few mouths to feed. The Obote administration pushed the
enrolment in S5 and S6 to 4,220 in 1970. By 1970, intake of Ugandan students at
Makerere University had grown from 120 in 1962 to 870 per year, a humongous
leap.
But even this number is still far modest compared to the
population size of nine million in 1970. Uganda’s population has grown five
fold since 1961 to 35 million today and four fold since 1970. Therefore total
enrolment in S5 and S6 would be 1,615 if we take the 1961 figure and 16,880 if
we use the figure of 1970. However, the actual numbers today are 1.4 million of
whom 670,000 are in USE.
For argument’s sake, let me stick to my long held bias that
the Museveni administration is extremely corrupt and incompetent. There is a
lot of truth in this, and Museveni would agree with it. But it does not explain
the whole story. I am now inclined to believe that even with this handicap, if
Museveni’s corrupt and incompetent administration had only 1,615 students in S5
and S6 as the colonial administration did, it would afford to feed them
sausages, eggs, bacon, bread with butter and jam for breakfast. Even if I
multiplied from the 1970 figure, it is possible that with 16,880 students in S5
and S6, government would feed students much better.
Look at the total number of state employees in 1962. There
were 5,700 civil servants, 8,300 teachers (primary, secondary and all other
tertiary institutions only half of whom were on government payroll), 700
soldiers, and 450 policemen etc. In today’s numbers this would be 28,500 civil
servants, 20,500 teachers, 3,500 soldiers and 2,250 policemen. Today the
numbers are: 280,000 civil servants, 220,000 teachers (on government payroll),
50,000 soldiers and 50,000 police. There were only 124 doctors on government
payroll. There were only 570km of tarmac roads. Every single indicator I can
use – for education, health, water, electricity, roads, telecommunications
etc., etc. the colonial state (or whatever existed of it) was very thin on the
ground. It had little interest in taking these public goods and services to the
people. It could afford decent salaries and a high quality of services because
it was serving a small section of society.
This is what animated our founding fathers in Africa to
demand for independence. But it also contained the seeds of the eventual
failure of state action in Africa. For immediately we got independence, our
leaders sought to rapidly expand public goods and services to cover the entire
population – good politically, terrible technically and financially. This is
because we did not have enough human skills, leave alone financial resources,
to meet these exaggerated aspirations. Therefore, the state got over-developed
in function, but was underdeveloped in skills and revenues; so its reach went
far beyond its grasp. At the heart of Africa’s post-independence failure lays
this mismatch between aspirations and skills and financial capacity. Our
post-independence leaders were not venal. They were unrealistic in rapidly
improving access of public goods and services to the people, a factor that
inflicted a heavy toll on their quality.
This explained why enlightened leaders like Kenneth Kaunda,
Julius Nyerere and Leopold Senghor produced almost similar results as less
enlightened leaders like Mobutu, Idi Amin, and Gnassingbe Eyadema. As an active
participant in public debate in Africa today, I am worried that our politics
(and even intellectual life) does not address our core existential dilemma.
For example, can the size of Uganda’s public expenditure
produce the quality of public goods and services we demand across all sectors?
The USA spends US$27,800 per person per year (federal budget plus state budgets
minus federal grants to states); and even here I have excluded public
expenditure by cities. According to the 2015/16 Budget, Uganda will spend US$
140 per citizen this financial year. And on this shoe-string budget we demand
services of Sweden! Our expectations are out of synch with our pockets.
Even with these meager resources, is there room for
improvement? Certainly. Can our public goods and services be better at our
current revenues and skills? May be yes, as the example of Kerala (a state in
India), Cuba, and Rwanda show. But these three are outliers. It is possible
that Uganda right now is getting almost the quality of public goods and
services consistent with its revenues and skills and certainly consistent with
its political accommodations. If we want to improve the quality of our public
goods and services, we must limit access. If we want to expand access, we must
accept deterioration in quality. We cannot have it both ways. Yet I know
nothing will inflame the anger of our elites than an old man destroying their
utopias.
amwenda@independent.co.ug
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