Uganda has become a conference country. Ugandans are attending conferences or workshops at home and abroad and hosting international conferences. The international conferences are hosted largely to boost Uganda’s sagging image but are very costly in human and financial terms.
This article is a response to a request at the UDU Boston conference (October 2011) to provide information that may help to understand why Uganda despite all its endowments and generous external support poverty remains high and is deepening for some 20 percent in the lowest income bracket.
By and large, these meetings are organized or attended to analyze Uganda’s development challenges, draw lessons and recommend solutions.
A closer examination since 1986 indicates that Uganda’s development problems have been analyzed in detail, lessons learned and recommendations articulated as outlined below. Consequently, conferences could be significantly reduced, resources saved and the focus reoriented to address emerging challenges.
First, Uganda’s development challenges have been exhaustively analyzed and solutions adequately articulated. The analysis and recommendations in the ten-point program later extended to fifteen remain valid as subsequently elaborated and expanded or refocused in research findings and other documents like UDU’s National Recovery Plan (NRP) which was officially transmitted to the government and Uganda’s development partners. The Plan is accessible at www.udugandans.org.
Second, from this exhaustive analysis Uganda has developed excellent policies, strategies and programs, witness the poverty reduction action plan, modernization of agriculture, environmental protection and management and policies and strategies including in the energy, industry, shelter, health and nutrition and education sectors.
Third, enabling institutional and legal arrangements have been put in place or strengthened for implementing, monitoring and evaluating these programs. Separate ministries or departments have been created or reorganized and authorities established for effective and efficient implementation and management of these development programs.
Fourth, funds from taxation, donations and soft loans as well as technical assistance have been provided.
In those areas where there was no war, poverty and its offshoots of hunger, disease and ignorance should have been significantly reduced thus fulfilling the promises made by NRM when it took over power in 1986.
Instead of focusing on implementation, monitoring and evaluation of program performance, conferences have tended to focus on discussing problems to be addressed as if starting from scratch. Ugandan officials at the central and local levels do not need to attend conference and workshops to be lectured about known challenges. They should meet to discuss what challenges have arisen in the implementation process and how to address them. The substance of these meetings does not reflect this approach.
For instance, Ugandan officials already know the importance of fish farming for generating income and foreign exchange and improving nutrition security.
Ugandan officials already know the importance of irrigation, crop and livestock disease control and appropriate high yielding seeds. Instead of discussing the importance of irrigation, Ugandans should be focusing on why irrigation has not taken place or worked where it has been provided, whether or not green revolution programs are working or not and then agree on the way forward.
Ugandan officials already know that deforestation, wetland destruction and general devegetation contribute to global warming with adverse impact on Uganda. Reminding them of this challenge is less significant than focusing on what corrective steps have been taken, the benefits so far and what remains to be done.
Recently there was a meeting at Kyankwanzi that trapped policy makers including the head of state and implementers for a week to discuss Uganda’s development challenges. Currently there is a conference at Sheraton hotel possibly with same leaders that attended the Kyankwazi workshop.
Once again, these conferences should focus more on challenges that have emerged as a result of program implementation since 1986. Issues of income inequality, distortions in resource ownership, de-industrialization, youth unemployment, rising fuel and food prices, school dropout and teenage pregnancy and decaying environment in rural and urban areas, domestic violence and crime as well as human trafficking should be the focus of meetings and workshops together with deficits in democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms. Politics, human rights and development go together.
The statement of one of the speakers at the Sheraton hotel gives an idea of how time and resources are wasted. The speaker is reported to have called upon all sectors leaders to carry out critical analysis of their performances and come up with workable solutions in pursuit of set targets.
This critical analysis should have been undertaken before the conference to serve as background material for discussing and deciding on the way forward. You do not gather in Kampala district capital leaders, ministers, MPs and permanent secretaries to tell them to conduct analytical studies on the work they are doing.
Instead a memorandum should have gone out instructing ministry and district leaders to analyze what they are doing and present outcomes as background information for a conference that is now taking place at the Sheraton hotel. The conference participants would then design strategies on the way forward.
It is the view of an increasing number of Ugandans and development partners that NRM government is wasting time and resources on discussing development challenges as if it is starting from scratch. The question to answer is why has the NRM government continued to conduct meetings in business as usual fashion when it already knows the problems and solutions.
Here is what Ugandans, their friends and well wishers need to understand in order to solve the puzzle. There is a conflict between poverty reduction as articulated in official documents and Bahororo’s fifty year master plan.
For poverty to be reduced Ugandans need to get good quality and relevant education and empowerment by among other things accessing adequate resources, jobs and remunerative wages and salaries. This poverty reduction strategy if implemented would have conflicted with Bahororo goals in the 50 year master plan. The goals include:
1. Only Bahororo (Tutsi from Rwanda) should get the best education and highest qualification, meaning that others should be prevented from reaping the same benefits of education and training;
2. Bahororo take charge of all resources in the country, meaning that non-Bahororo Ugandans should be denied access to productive and consumer resources;
3. Non-Bahororo Ugandans be made or kept poor so that they are controlled and respect Bahororo. Banyarwanda had a saying (it is unclear whether or not it still exists) that starving Bahutu would approach their Batutsi masters with a request that if Batutsi gave a glass of milk each to Bahutu, the latter would make the former their fathers. This is indeed great respect!
4. To realize the 50-year master plan Bahororo must control the army and have the highest ranks in the army.
Thus implementation of Bahororo fifty-year master plan which appears to be on schedule has meant freezing implementing poverty reduction programs for the rest of Ugandans, explaining in large part high levels of poverty in Uganda and skewed income distribution and resource ownership.
To confuse Ugandans and development partners the Bahororo-led NRM government has kept Ugandans and occasionally development partners busy attending conferences, analyzing development challenges, drawing lessons and making recommendations which are rarely implemented, witness the modernization of agriculture program.
The president makes sure he attends some of these conferences and workshops and tours the country to hoodwink Ugandans that he is serious about reducing poverty and transforming Uganda’s economic structure.
It is now 26 years since NRM government came to power with promises to end the long suffering of the people of Uganda once and for all. Yet, absolute poverty is still over fifty percent, youth unemployment is over 80 percent, quality education has plummeted, school dropout is on the increase, food insecurity and the associated neurological disability is rising etc.
A society so impoverished is vulnerable and indeed so easy to control and has to respect the master to get at least one lousy meal of maize or cassava a day.
The conferences are therefore designed in large part to hoodwink and divert Ugandans from understanding what has caused poverty to remain high and deepen the suffering in some communities. UDU’s National Recovery Plan (NRP) if implemented by patriotic and caring leadership would reverse this suffering and put Uganda on a high growth, equitable, sustained and sustainable development trajectory.
In power, UDU (an umbrella organization of parties and organizations at home and abroad opposed to NRM system and NRM supporters who are likely to join) would conduct few conferences and workshops largely to focus on specific implementation problems because general development problems and solutions are already known. These meetings would include Uganda participants from all walks of life rather than central and local government officials.
We call upon Ugandans and development partners to read the National Recovery Plan and enrich it as necessary to make it a viable alternative to the failed NRM policies.