We should all congratulate the government for admitting, like the IMF and the World Bank before it, that mistakes had been made in Uganda’s development efforts. This is a wise move and there should be no regrets about it. When President Museveni addressed the United Nations General Assembly on September 23, 2009 and said in part “We have started doing what we had left undone for a long time…” I got a sense that the government had finally admitted the failure of its development model. This was confirmed a few days later when ministers and permanent secretaries acknowledged at a retreat that the development model pursued since 1987 had failed to produce the desired results.
When former President Pinochet whose government was the first to introduce structural adjustment in 1973 with ‘Chicago Boys’ (Chilean economists who had been trained at the University of Chicago in USA) and advice of the late Milton Friedman, father of monetarism, realized that the policy was not working he made a bold move. He dismissed the entire team of Chicago boys, appointed a new minister of finance and recast the development model by combining state and private sector in a new development agenda. The recessions ended and the economy has been doing very well since then. So what should Uganda stakeholders do?
- An honest and comprehensive analysis – without pointing fingers – should be undertaken of what went wrong with the model. This exercise should be undertaken by Ugandans themselves first. When you bring in foreign experts at the start of the process, you are going to get people with new ideas to test. This is not what Uganda needs now.
- Ugandans and their leaders need to know that we are still at the level of development that was experienced in medieval Europe (500-1500) – agrarian, over 85 percent of the population were engaged in agriculture, were mostly poorly fed, poorly dressed and poorly housed.
- The new model should combine agricultural transformation, agro-processing and services. Any attempt to take a short cut will end up in failure.
- The role of the state should be recast from passive to strategic participation in the development process. The state should focus on public goods that are not attractive to the private sector –rural roads and rural energy in particular. Uganda’s institutions should be revisited particularly education and tailored to the country’s short, medium and long term development needs.
- Participation in designing the new development model should be broad involving all Ugandans. They know what they need. They also know how to do it. What they do not have are the resources and facilities which the state can help to provide in the form of an enabling environment.
- Small and medium-scale enterprises including small scale farmers should be facilitated to grow and expand. They are the engine of development. They create jobs more than any other sector.
A monitoring and evaluation mechanism should be established to ensure that the development plan is implemented.