There are things that we shall keep in the media until solutions are found. One of the senior officials at the United Nations in New York replied to a question that conferences on the same subjects will continue to be organized until solutions are found. I agreed with him then, I agree with him now. And that is what I intend to do with Uganda until solutions to the questions raised are found. Ugandans and other readers are urged to make constructive comments on what we write in order to reorient Uganda’s development path. The purpose of development is to end poverty. Economic growth rates while necessary are meaningless unless they lead to poverty reduction. Poverty can only end by addressing dimensions that create it: illiteracy, disease, poor diet, poor housing and clothing, low productivity and value addition etc. Buildings, referenda and constitutions are necessary but not sufficient. Pass or fail depends on how much poverty has been reduced. You may have sufficient revenue and skilled people and yet fail to reduce poverty because of the way resources are used. Why has Uganda with adequate resources and skilled human power failed to address these dimensions that have kept over fifty percent of Ugandans absolutely poor? Here are the principle reasons.
There is a belief that Uganda does not suffer from a debilitating shortage of natural and financial resources including government revenue and skilled human power. We have enough to get by. The primary problem is rampant corruption, sectarianism and associated incompetence and mismatch between professionals and assignments.
To overcome Uganda’s development challenges which are many, corruption must be attacked head on by Ugandans and development partners that contribute a large share of recurrent and development funds. Setting up anti-corruption institutions and commissions of inquiry while necessary are not sufficient. There has to be real political will to act decisively by people with a clean record. None should be above the law. Suspending corrupt officials without getting them punished to the limit of the law and returning what was stolen with interest is not a sufficient deterrent. Targeting junior officers or vulnerable individuals for punishment while heavy weights go scot free does not solve the problem nor convince the public that the government is serious. Corruption has diverted public funds into private pockets that would have been used to solve the daunting challenges. Let us examine one example. One of the major agricultural problems is drought. To get its magnitude and frequency, all you need to do is read annual budget speeches. Whenever crop production is low it is largely because of drought. The answer is irrigation. The government decided to solve the problem and allocated money for construction of dams to collect rain water for irrigation purposes. The money was stolen and the dams were not constructed. The outcome of this corruption is continuation of droughts that have become more frequent, intense and longer in duration with severe damage to crops and livestock, hence food shortages and export commodities. It is not clear whether anybody was arrested, charged and the money recovered with interest.
Uganda has many citizens with recognized expertise and experience in many areas of human endeavor. But sectarianism which is widespread in Uganda uses a different criterion that skips these people. So we have people in key and strategic positions who are not well qualified or who have not bothered to improve on the job because they cannot be dismissed or even disciplined by their immediate supervisors for poor performance. We have heard senior officers accused of corruption and/or incompetence boasting that they will not resign unless the appointing authority says so. I have heard managers complaining that they cannot do anything about incompetent colleagues for fear of landing into trouble because these officials are well connected. I have witnessed Uganda representatives attending international conferences in Addis Ababa, Geneva and New York. You wonder how the government could send some of these people and why they would accept to represent the country or chair some meetings when they have little or no knowledge about what is being discussed. In many instances, the level of incompetence is mind boggling, to say the least. The experienced Ugandans are largely marginalized because they worked in previous regimes or were not encouraged to return home. And gaps are filled with junior, inexperienced foreign experts. Here is what Mallaby (2004) wrote about an exchange between one Uganda senior officer and his colleagues about foreign experts. “Within his office [the senior officer] always had a team of young British economists working for him, even though Ugandan colleagues chided him: ‘How can you open up the ministry to these foreigners’, they asked. … What were the foreigners going to do with the ministry? Walk off with the furniture? On the contrary, it was in the national interest to harness these hardworking outsiders, whose salaries were paid by the World Bank and other donors”. Clearly experienced Ugandans were marginalized and humiliated in this ministry.
The final point is the mismatch between professionals and assignments. I touched on this point in one of the recent articles on Ugandans at Heart Forum. Let me elaborate. At the moment Uganda is going through economic hard times: high inflation and interest rates, high unemployment and underemployment and economic growth at 5 percent per annum that is below the 8-9 percent required as a minimum to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. The economic environment has also shifted from Washington Consensus which was buried in 2009 to public and private partnership, implying a more active and strategic role of the state. In these circumstances, one would have expected the president to have at the senior policy making level (vice president, prime minister, speaker) a seasoned economist versed in Keynesian economics and Uganda’s development challenges. Yet President Museveni decided to surround himself with lawyers in the three top most offices. And experts in key ministries and departments have remained those he appointed in 1987 to manage a neo-liberal economy that has been superseded by neo-Keynesian type economy. No wonder unemployment has remained unaddressed because the government is still focusing on inflation control. It is not surprising that Uganda unlike other countries in developed and developing world does not have a stimulus package because there is no one high enough to ring the bell.
Those concerned about Uganda’s development challenges and prospects should speak up more about the dangers of corruption, incompetence and mismatch between professionals and assignments than on funds and skills. These are important policy issues that cannot be left to government officials alone. Hopefully the government will respond and welcome us as an integral part of Uganda’s decision making process. Uganda belongs to us as much as it belongs to them.