Why poor countries have poor services and rich nations have better services
Joseph Mukasa is a peasant in Uganda. He
has been performing well in expanding the output of his three acres
piece of land. From an income of about Shs5,000 per month in 1995,
(which when adjusted to inflation comes to Shs18,000 in 2015 prices), he
now makes Shs130,000 per month. This is because he begun employing
modern agricultural techniques such as fertilisers, irrigation and
improved seeds that are both fast maturing and high yielding. In real
terms, Mukasa has actually grown his income by 700% in 20 years.
Mukasa has a wife and six children. In
spite of his growth in income, he cannot afford to send them even to
cheap private schools where it costs Shs 400,000 per student per term
(Shs 2.4 million per term for six children). Good private schools charge
Shs 1.5 million. He has to buy cooking oil, clothes, kerosene and salt
as well. So he sends them to UPE schools where they get poor quality
education. When the children fall sick, Mukasa cannot afford to send
them to private hospitals. He sends them to government health facilities
with poor services. However, Mukasa also has a drinking problem. He
spends Shs13,000 (10% of his income) per month on crude waragi.
Meanwhile, Mukasa’s neighbor, Haji Nasur
Nsereko, is a businessman. He has grown his net profit (income) from
Shs3.5 million in 1995 (Shs 12m in 2015 prices) to Shs 17m in 2015 – an
increase of 30%. He has only two children whom he educates at the
prestigious Kampala Parents and pays Shs1.5m for each per term. He also
sends his children to the private International Hospital Kampala when
they fall ill. During the end of year season, he sometimes takes his
family for holidays in Nairobi or even Dubai.
Nsereko also has a girlfriend at Makerere whom he bought a car and
often travels with on business trips abroad. He has a mistress in
Kampala for whom he rents an apartment where he stays when he is in
city. And he has a couple of other girlfriends on whom he spends a lot
of money in nightclubs when he is in Kampala shopping. He loves to party
and is often in Govnor and Kampala Casino. In LC1 meetings, Nsereko
says Mukasa is poor because he is lazy and cannot send his children to
the best schools and hospitals because of drunkenness.
Mukasa’s children have internalised
Nsereko’s criticism of their father. They are angry saying they do not
get a good education or healthcare because their father is selfish and a
drunkard. They complain that instead of spending his money on their
education at Kampala Parents and treatment at IHK, he spends it on
alcohol.
Mukasa’s children give Nsereko as an
example of good parental care. They point at him sending his children to
excellent private schools and hospitals and holidays abroad as evidence
that he is not selfish like their father who “spends his money on
alcohol.”
Mukasa’s children may be right to be
angry with their father for his expenditure on alcohol. But they are
wrong to claim that his drinking is the reason he does not send them to
the best schools and hospitals.
They are also wrong to point at Nsereko
sending his kids to the best private schools and hospitals or holidays
in Dubai as evidence that he cares more about his family or uses his
income better than their father. As we have seen from his lifestyle,
Nsereko is more wasteful of his income than Mukasa. It is simply that
his waste is covered-up by the large sums he earns.
This example is the crisis facing most
analysis of governments in Africa. There are certain “obvious truths” we
have created to explain our circumstances.
We argue that citizens of the poor
nations in Africa have poor quality public goods and services because
our leaders are corrupt and selfish. This argument is backed by a lot of
evidence of wastage (as in Mukasa’s case) that it has acquired the
status of gospel truth. To argue against it is similar to questioning
the existence of God among believers. I will criticise it with a lot of
humility because for many years I was among its leading advocates on the
national, continental and global scene. Watch my TED speech, I make it
with dramatic effect.
Indeed on our continent of Africa, as in
other poor nations elsewhere, civil wars have been fought, military
coups staged, organised popular insurrections, contested elections,
broken marriages, built media houses, and governments have risen and
fallen on this utopian orthodoxy. My personal retreat from it happened
gradually and over time. It was a result of extensive reading of
contemporary third world politics and the history of Western Europe and
her offshoots in North America, Australia and New Zealand.
When I read books, newspapers, academic
papers and watch documentaries on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma,
Papua New Guinea, Afghanistan, Napal, Nicaragua, Haiti, El Savador, etc.
and all other nations of Sub Sahara Africa, I find the story similar.
Public goods and services are in a sorry state because leaders are
corrupt and selfish. The implied (sometimes openly expressed
counterpoint) is that rich nations provide their citizens better quality
public goods and services because their leaders are selfless, honest
and are held accountable. The more I read and regurgitated this gospel,
the more I begun to suspect that something is wrong with it.
For example, I began to ask: how can so
many nations on different continents share a common fate of selfish and
corrupt leaders? In any case, all these nations had seen many changes of
government without much change in governance. Governments in Africa
change but the accusation of corruption and selfishness remains. May be
it is because we lack democracy. But India has had a democratic system
with regular “free and fair” elections, regular changes of government
for 70 years but the problem of corruption and poor public goods and
services seems to get worse.
Then the truths began to dawn on me: the
common thread in all these countries was that they were poor. They had
low per capita income, which led to low government revenue per capita
and that itself led to low public expenditure per capita. All these
nations have varying degrees of corruption. But I realised that like
Mukasa, their corruption is not the explanation for their poor delivery
of public goods and services. Like Mukasa they cannot afford better.
The second realisation was our
everlasting belief that citizens of rich nations have better public
goods and services because their leaders are selfless and honest. I have
not studied many rich nations closely but I have studied the USA
closely enough to make my claim. That like Nsereko, the USA wastes a lot
of its taxpayers’ money on useless military adventures abroad (which
benefit a few corporate oligarchs). Its politicians are more corrupt and
selfish than ours. This is obscured from most American citizens (as it
does in Nsereko’s case), by the vast sums it spends.
This realisation came to me slowly,
spending nights looking at the public expenditures of Uganda, Kenya,
Rwanda, Tanzania, India, Senegal, Zambia – and USA. The more I
internalised it, the more I felt liberated. I used to be an angry young
African wondering what was wrong with our race – that it produces the
worst leaders. Then I became a calm and reflective African who
recognises that our leaders face serious structural bottlenecks. The
corruption and selfishness mantra is a conveyor belt of prejudice and
ignorance.
Africa has very bad roads compared to
say Europe and North America. And there is a lot of corruption in the
award of road contracts across our continent.
But since it is an election period, let
me avoid using Uganda and rely on data from Kenya. We have read horror
stories of bad roads in Kenya and endless reports of corruption in road
construction. But look at this.
Kenya has 161,000 kilometers of road. Of
these only 11,000 have tarmac. This means that 150,000 are what are
called gravel (or murram) roads. Many opposition politicians in Kenya
blame corruption for their bad roads.
It costs about US$800,000 to build one
kilometer of tarmac road for a double lane road. But because Kenya needs
to build larger roads on major routes with four or six lanes (find
figures for Thica road), let us say the average cost of a kilometer of
road is $1.2 million. That means Kenya needs $180 billion to tarmac the
entire road network. The budget for Kenya in 2015/16 is $20 billion.
Even the most honest government that does nothing except construct
roads, would take nine years at current spending to tarmac them.
So I wrote to the IMF for figures of
government revenue in Kenya and for figures of government spending per
year since 1990. So how much money has government of Kenya spent from
1990 to 2016 on all its activities? It is $202.58 billion – barely
enough to perform one function of government – tarmac all its roads. And
remember Kenya has to deliver education and healthcare, justice and
accountability, industry and tourism, water and electricity, security
and order, agriculture and hospitality and it has to placate the
interests of its noisy elites.
When Kenya’s citizens, journalists and
politicians think of their road network, they think it is in a sorry
state because of corruption and the selfishness of their leaders.
But now I realise the contribution of
corruption to its poor road network is statistically insignificant. The
substantive issue is that Kenya just doesn’t have the money to pay for
good roads. For example, it costs $150,000 to construct a kilometer of a
standard gravel road. Out of 150,000km of gravel roads, only 40,000 are
in good to fair condition. It would cost Kenya $16.5 billion to bring
all her gravel roads to good condition – that is almost the country’s
annual budget of $20 billion.
I know it is hard to convince people
that the “corruption and selfish leaders” mantra is bereft of serious
thought. This is because, as cognitive scientists tell us, human beings
are cognitive misers. We prefer to do as little thinking as possible. So
when we confront a problem, we actually don’t think deeply about it. We
just retreat to our assumptions, biases, prejudices and pre conceived
notions.
Why go around looking for proof and
exposing inconvenient truths when you can just accept and regurgitate
what everyone else accepts as the true. Why labour to establish why poor
countries have poor public goods and services when there are accepted
truths that this is due to the corruption and selfishness of their
leaders or the laziness and racial inferiority of their people?
I could go on with explanations of how
even without one shilling being stolen, Kenya or Tanzania and Uganda or
any other nation of Africa, cannot deliver good quality healthcare to
its people. The same applies to security, education, agriculture,
justice, water, electricity etc. It is sad that our governments live in a
modern world dominated by rich governments. This has led us to embrace
bases of legitimacy of governments based on the governance models of
rich countries. Yet we lack the necessary government revenues to govern
the way rich nations govern their citizens.
I don’t want to be misunderstood to be
saying corruption is not a problem. It is a problem but a minor one and
it is not the fundamental explanation. In fact corruption is perverse
because poor governments cannot pay their employees well. That means
some steal simply to make ends meet. When the rich steal, they bribe
poorly paid police officers, prosecutors and judges to get away with
theft. Poor governments simply do not have the money to pay for the
costs of effective oversight over their expenditure.
But most critically, at higher levels of
government, corruption is the way the system works, not the way it
fails. High-level graft is a characteristic feature of high politics
even in rich countries like America, UK and France. The claim that
African leaders are singularly corrupt is mistaken. Their high level
corruption only becomes a ground for prejudice because there are so many
of their citizens without basic public goods and services. But as
already mentioned, even if there was no corruption, Uganda (or Kenya,
Senegal, Tanzania, India, Ghana, Zambia, Malawi etc.) cannot do
fundamentally better.
There are exceptions to this rule. For
example, Rwanda, Cuba and Kerala (a state in India) have shown that
nations with low per capita income can sometimes punch above their
weight and deliver better public services like water, health, etc. But
these are three examples among 137 poor governments – not enough samples
to be generalized.
Many opposition politicians have
defeated incumbents in Africa – in Zambia, Kenya, Senegal, Benin,
Malawi, Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, etc. Other nations have seen change
of government through military coups, civil war or popular
insurrections. In all these cases, there has not been a dramatic change
of governance, the sole exception being Rwanda. Museveni’s real triumph
would be to lose to Kizza Besigye (like Milton Obote lost to him) so
that he too can step down from the utopia of corruption as the reason
for failure to seeing that his country, like Mukasa, is constrained by
low incomes.
amwenda@independent.co.ug
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