Stop sloganeering over peripheral issues called “governance”
and seriously think about our strategic challenges
I have a frustration with President
Yoweri Museveni’s Uganda: even after 30 years of impressive economic growth
rates, Uganda is still far from any significant transition from a backward
rural agricultural society to a modern urban industrial economy. Nearly 80% of
Ugandans still depend on agriculture for a livelihood and live in rural areas.
Industry employs only 8% of our people while services employ 12%.
Because of investment in universal primary and secondary
education and rapid expansion in access to tertiary education, especially
university education, Uganda is producing large numbers of educated and
increasingly urbanised youths who cannot find jobs. The limited capacity of our
economy to foster structural transformation is largely because much of the
growth has been driven by low productivity sectors like services.
Since 1986, growth in agriculture has been by increasing the
number of hands holding a hoe and by putting more land under cultivation i.e.
no productivity (output per unit factor input) growth. Manufacturing grew at a
rate of 14.34% between 1986 and 2000. Between 2000 and 2015, it grew by 5.68%.
From 2005 to 2015, it grew by 4.97%. Since 2012 it has averaged 4%. The main
engine of growth since 2000 has been services averaging 7.2%.
Before opposition activists can jump onto this point to
score political points against Museveni, I must add that this problem bedevils
all African countries with the sole exception of Ethiopia. It has been
occasioned by the influence of international financial institutions over public
policy in Africa. And given the centrality of manufacturing to transformation,
Uganda’s (and Africa’s) challenge is therefore how to stimulate this sector. The
advantages of manufacturing are obvious. It creates large scale jobs for the
less skilled. So it has capacity to absorb hundreds of thousands of our youth
graduating out of universal primary and secondary education. It has high
potential for growth in labour productivity compared to services or
agriculture. How does our country address this challenge?
The opposition in Uganda claim we need “good governance,” a
cliché that has become fashionable and involves fighting corruption, holding
free and fair elections, building “effective institutions,” respecting human
rights, etc. This hotchpotch of ideas was started by the World Bank in its 1989
report titled Sub-Sahara Africa, From Crisis to Sustainable Growth. It has been
peddled by Western academics and regurgitated by their politicians, diplomats
and journalists. It has infected African elites and “intellectuals” involved in
public debates like a plague.
Anyone who takes thinking seriously and cares to study the
history of developed nations would easily see that what is called “good
governance” is a consequence of development, not a cause of it.
If “good governance” was a precondition for transformation,
the world would not be having a single developed country. The Western world
transformed through a very brutal process involving slave trade, slavery,
piracy, brigandage, genocide, colonialism, world wars, cruel labour practices,
apartheid, etc. – what Karl Marx called “primitive accumulation of capital.”
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