UGANDA AT 57, SHOULD WE BE EXCITED?

This week we commemorated 57 years of our Independence from the British.

At the last census in 2014 almost all of us -- 97.2 percent of the population were below the age of 54. Five years down the road the people who were not around at Independence is near total.

"It does not touch our hearts to know that in 1962 there were only 300 A-Level students or that there was no chartered accountant, solicitor, architect or pathologist in the civil service. Those are folk tales that there are not enough old people around to tell us around the fire or wherever families now commune....

But digging up an old World Bank report authored in 1962 it is shocking how it seems time has stood still.

“Over the last 60 years, Uganda’s economic growth has been unspectacular but steady. Uganda remains an agricultural country: two-thirds of gross domestic product is derived from farming and over 90 percent of all exports are produced from the land. Agriculture is in large part subsistence farming (mostly done by women with hoes) with a growing, but as yet smaller, proportion of total output produced for the market: three-fifths of the area under cultivation are used to produce food for the consumption of the cultivator and her family,” the report read.

The study went on to report that industrialization was still in its infancy and that there was an acute shortage of skilled manpower which would put a cap on how far the country can go in achieving its development ambitions.

If you extrapolate the statistics to account for the population growth which has grown more than fivefold since, subsequent governments have outstripped the colonialists’ achievement in access to education and health, the stock of infrastructure and even the shift of the economy away from subsistence agriculture to services and industry.

But clearly Independence serves as a very low bench mark. The UN’s Human Development Index, a measure of living standards, we in the lower reaches of the survey of 190 countries.

While we have seen the most sustained period of economic growth in Uganda’s history in the last 33 years, it counts for nothing if people’s living standards are not being lifted along with the general economy.

"The reason for that is not hard to find. Most of the growth of the last three decades has come in services, construction and industry, mostly in the urban areas. But when three quarters of your population are in the rural areas and seven in ten people derive their livelihood from agriculture, it comes as no surprise that most people cannot relate to the fantastic growth in the economy this country has managed...

So looking forward it seems obvious what has to be done.

Economic growth has to be sustained. There can be no improvements in general living standards without economic growth.

Investments in education and health too have to continue, even accelerated. All the roads, dam and railways will count for nothing if you do not have the manpower to sweat them. The Economist magazine a while back reported on a study, which showed that between infrastructure development and building human resource capacity, countries are best advised to bias their investments toward building human capacity.

In our case what this means is while we should not let up on the momentum of infrastructure development, we should emphasise the quality of the outputs in the education and health sectors more than the inputs. Building classrooms and health centers are all very nice but what is better is the quality of graduates that emerge and the health service delivered.

We don’t need to go anywhere to show proof of this. Our better educated population – than at Independence, has proven more ingenious and creative in resolving our day to day challenges despite the deficits in infrastructure and all else.

"One major bottle neck needs to be handled too. The donor community complains that we are failing to utilize funds availed to us. Our absorption capacity is as low as 15%. What this means that if the donors have committed a billion dollars to us we are only utilizing $150m with rest being sent back to be passed on to other countries....

Reduced donor dependency is desirable but to attain that it would not hurt to use their funds to achieve that.

On closer scrutiny our inability to absorb these funds is bogged down with prolonged bureaucracy, with projects not being expedited unless the President intervenes personally. That is not the way to run a modern state.

This state of affairs benefits a few to the detriment of the many.

If we are serious about overall development, we need to look into this urgently.