President Museveni delivered his New Year message on December 31, 2011 from his Rwakitura country residence. Overall, it is uninspiring and defensive largely blaming everyone else but his government and himself as head of state and government and governing party for what went wrong in 2011. He even blamed torrential rains as if they alone are responsible for Uganda’s poor roads!
His message lacked vibrancy and confidence that characterized past messages when the going was relatively smooth and the international community presented Uganda as a success story.
Museveni focused on a glass half full, completely ignoring the empty half and the purpose of economic growth. He also avoided mentioning areas that would have caused him trouble such as the stolen 2011 presidential, parliamentary and local elections, the security situation in view of peaceful demonstrators and innocent people killed, wounded and detained during walk to work and other demonstrations, and the East African economic integration and political federation project which he has singled out as a top priority for his administration.
Regarding the latter, the Burundi East African community summit which was not attended by two heads of state raised troubling issues that led to a request for new guidelines to be issued, amounting to a return to the drawing board.
The development proposals for 2012 repeated the familiar ground where little has been achieved in the last 26 years including agriculture, transport and energy infrastructure, education and skills development, efficiency of public service delivery and fighting corruption.
To get a full picture of what happened in 2011 let us examine a few areas by way of illustration. You will notice that contrary to Museveni’s positive presentation, Uganda’s performance actually fell far short of expectations.
The 6.5 percent economic growth rate registered in 2011 fell far short of the 9 or 10 percent required as minimum to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 including reducing poverty and hunger in half. To reduce poverty and transform Uganda’s economy on a sustained basis Uganda needs to grow at an average rate of ten percent which was attained in the mid-1990s in large part because of excess capacity which has since been used up.
Museveni’s message did not mention the participants in and beneficiaries of economic growth. He omitted that presumably to hide that it is Kampala and a few families that did very well in 2011 as in previous years. Furthermore, it is in Kampala where foreign operators are concentrated and therefore the main beneficiaries of the benefits of economic growth together with a few Uganda families they collaborate with.
Because Kampala with a population of 2 out of 33 million Ugandans and concentration of foreign enterprises that are relatively capital-intensive generated some 70 percent of GDP, one can safely conclude that poverty and hunger and other offshoots spread and deepened for the majority of Ugandans because of rising food and oil prices. Sermons and comments on Christmas day captured the gravity and desperate circumstances prevailing in the country.
As in the past Museveni was not able to wrap economic growth around the people. The end result of economic growth and inflation control to single digits is the improvement in people’s standard of living. Economic growth and low inflation are meaningless if they do not do that.
Still trapped in the Washington Consensus doctrine of economic neo-liberalism that gave pride of place to the invisible hand of market forces, laissez faire and trickle down mechanism which has been abandoned, Museveni continued to focus inter alia on inflation control as an end in itself.
In a depressed economy as Uganda experienced in 2011, slashing government spending and restraining consumption has the potential of depressing the economy further. Instead the government should have launched a stimulus program such as public works to create jobs and increase incomes and generate demand for goods and services, stimulate investment and end the recession. It is during the boom – not the recession – that austerity measures are applied.
Although bad weather adversely impacted food production and rising prices, the pain would have been lessened by regulating food exports to neighboring countries and beyond or targeted subsidies should have been provided at least to lactating mothers, pregnant women and children including school lunches that keep children in school and improve performance especially of girls.
Undernourished pregnant women produce underweight children with permanent physical and mental disabilities. Children who are not properly fed during the first three years of human life develop smaller brains than normal with all the negative implications at school and in adult life. A caring government should therefore have put more emphasis on food and nutrition security than on foreign exchange earnings by selling foodstuffs in external markets.
Museveni talked positively about foreign exchange and high commodity prices and incomes but omitted terms of trade. What matters is not the income per se but what that income purchases. When the total cost of goods and services needed exceeds the income earned in a particular year, the individual or household is worse off regardless of an increase in income.
In future Museveni’s New Year messages on economic performance should be comprehensive with a focus on human security that includes education and health security, food and nutrition security, job and economic security, cultural security, environmental security and human rights and fundamental freedoms security.
Put differently, the defense of the people – not just the territory which Museveni appears to stress witness recent reshuffles in security forces instead of in civil service – should govern the implementation of the program Museveni outlined for 2012 in the areas of agriculture, infrastructure, public service delivery, human resource development and fighting corruption. In the area of oil particular attention should be paid to the environmental impact.
Finally corruption which has become the single most important constraint to Uganda’s development will not be resolved by condemning it regularly – even in the strongest terms or appointing commissions of inquiry whose findings and recommendations are then shelved. Neither will it be resolved by arresting or dismissing one or two individuals.
The majority of Ugandans remain unconvinced that Museveni is ready to end corruption. To demonstrate his readiness and determination to end this disease once and for all, let him arrest or dismiss all corrupt politicians and civil servants whom he knows that have lined their pockets with public funds and continue to do so.