2016: THE BATTLE IS WELL AND TRULY JOINED

This week the National Resistance Movement (NRM) parliamentary caucus opened their now annual, retreat at Kyankwanzi.

It is an event that is impossible to ignore if only because the NRM makes two-thirds of members in the house. If you add the 43 independents – most of whom are allied to the movement, the ability to muscle through any legislation by the group is undeniable, even frightening.

During the retreat they harmonised their positions on various pieces of legislation but denied the issue of presidential age limits came up.

The constitution has it that Uganda’s presidents shall not be 75 years old and beyond. What is subject to interpretation is whether this means no one shall run when they are above that age or whether one will be obliged to leave office when he attains the number.

If hypothetically the NRM decided to cause the amendment, they on paper could very well do it as they need a two thirds majority to amend the constitution. They have shown themselves more than capable of doing this, as they did with lifting of the presidential two-term limit a decade ago. 

"From a purely political point of view the NRM is in the best place to be as a ruling party...

By design or accident all these meetings – the several caucuses and the national conference, enforce the perception that the party, despite its internal squabbling, is unified in its purpose and resolute in its determination to stay in power.

The same cannot be said for its friends across the road.

Concerns that this kind of power is not good for the political future of Uganda are valid. It does not bode well for a country when one vision dominates the political space. But then again does it matter, seeing as our economic stratification is non-existent with the overwhelming majority being peasants? Durable parties are built on the basis of economic interest.

Governments are not tolerant out of the goodness of their hearts but are compelled to be so if there is a real threat to their hold on power, in the way of alternative views of how the country should be governed which are widespread and popular. 

Seeing as the NRM has occupied most of the middle ground the opposition needs to position itself with a message that is counter to the NRM’s and then rally likeminded people and convince those seating on the fence to their way of thinking.

You don’t get the impression the opposition is doing this enough. It’s not good manners to kick a man when he is down but it’s a hard argument to counter.

The NRM on its part, having been in power for the better part of three decades needs to guard against complacency.

"Buoyed by a winning personality and unlimited resources they should guard against going the way of the Kenya’s KANU which was in power for almost 40 years but folded like a pack of cards once its leading lights Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi were out of power....

It’s kind of sad though that the opposition may have to rely on the patience of Job rather than a contest of near equals to unseat the NRM, because a stronger more vibrant opposition would force NRM to up its game in order to remain relevant. 

As it is now the opposition are looking the more jaded of the two making another NRM victory in 2016 an almost mathematical certainty.

DON’T UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF SMALL BEGINNINGS

In the space of a decade the army’s savings and credit cooperative scheme, Wazalendo has amassed sh131b in assets making it the biggest SACCO in Uganda today.

Each of their members saves 7% of their salary, which might not seem much, but when seen against their 70,000-strong membership it adds up.

Assuming the current rate of growth Wazalendo’s asset base will about double dfcu’s current total assets within a decade.  It is an amazing feat for a financial institution that opened its doors to business barely 10 years ago.

Somebody once said that we overestimate what we can achieve in a year and underestimate what we can achieve in ten years. Because of the former we take too much risk and in the case of the latter we don’t get off our behinds to do anything at all.

"The Wazalendo SACCO experience is particularly instructional because we know an army man’s basic salary is not that much but through consistency and taking advantage of the power of compounding they now have a war chest, which would be the envy of any financial institution in Uganda...

Money is not the be all and end all but to have some is a good thing.

The challenge always is to aggregate it into meaningful sums so that you can get involved in bigger projects.

This is the first challenge but not the most serious. The next challenge is to deploy this money to grow on its own, this is the hardest part.

When there is a lot of money hanging around you immediately gain in confidence and imagine everything you touch turns to gold. New speculative projects are proposed. Controls are relaxed and monies start getting lost. It starts as a trickle before becoming a full blown deluge, if the holes are not plugged.

The temptation to break out into new areas, to take on additional risk can be overwhelming but most times it’s enough to maintain current momentum of doing more of what brought to you the current point of opulence.

Thankfully the management at Wazalendo is very clear that the money is for the benefit of the members and they will not be seduced into going into other businesses or buying real estate or speculating in the markets.

Barring any governance issues, years down the road Wazalendo will be a key financial institution in this country, the soldiers and the country at large will be better for it too.

Beyond that Wazalendo shows us what we are capable of and we do not even know the half of it. The lesson is even more poignant when you think that its savers are not top executives, with top pay checks. What more can we do as a country if we set our minds to finding the appropriate vehicles to mobilise not only our financial resources but our labour, our land, our harvests, our minds?

And we would not be reinventing the wheel. The capitalists while they turn up their noses at socialism and communism, which were attempts to aggregate the productive forces of the economy for the general good, the first private company emerged from a need to pool resources and divide the risk among like minded men....

The Vasco da Gama’s who sailed around the cape of good hope and Christopher Columbus who “discovered” America were bankrolled by wealth y patrons coming together to invest in a dangerous but lucrative venture if it was successful.

Somehow in Africa our collectivism has remained ta the level of the tribe partly, I believe because the challenges that face the pre-colonial African were such that they could be handled by a few hands.

Apart from Kingdoms like the Zulu in South Africa, the ancestors of the present day Shona in Zimbabwe or the Kingdoms of Bunyoro-Kitara and Buganda in this region, there seems to have been little attempt to aggregate and form more viable entities. There really was no compulsion – internal or external, to do so.

But we need not go far back into history to see what can be achieved by collective action by even the humblest in our midst.

Across the border in Rwanda in 1997 the army started their own SACCO, Zigama Credit & Savings Society. Zigama has grown so big that it is now a fully-fledged co-operatve bank with an asset base of about $143m by the end of 2012.

It services its 72,000 members – who now include members of the police and prisons services, through 16 branches around the country. Imagine its power in another ten, 20- or even 50-years?

STOP LAND FRAGMENTATION, BUT WHO WILL BELL THE CAT?

President Yoweri Museveni has been taking every opportunity he can to warn against the dangers of land fragmentation.

He counsels that instead of breaking up of land for inheritance purposes families should maintain the land as a whole and instead share out the produce of the land.

That is the logical thing to do. 

But we continue to parcel out our land, which means inheriting producers get smaller and smaller pieces which deny them the economies of scale that come with working larger lands, increases costs of maintenance and inevitably leads to poverty being passed down the generations.

"Inheritance is a way for males to perpetuate their legacy, that is why property was often passed down to male heirs, who in other societies will keep the patriarch’s name alive. That was a useful method for a pre-industrial time when wealth was created by manual labour....

Two things happened in Europe that changed this chauvinistic way of thinking.

The Catholic church allowed widows to inherit some of their dead husband’s lands, which became the source of a lot of the church’s wealth when these widows eventually passed on and bequeathed the property to the church. 

Secondly, in industrial and post-industrial societies, where education has proved a great leveller, where women can be just as productive in the workplace, as knowledge is more critical than muscle in productivity women had a hand in creating family wealth and therefore had a say how it would be distributed.

The first helped consolidate a lot of land under the church, which reverted to the state in many instances after the revolutions and the second, often meant land remained in one chunk as most people had moved to the cities, selling off the lands and sharing the proceeds.

Of course there were other movements like the landlords harrying the serfs off the land to make way for large scale production made viable by the new market in the cities and by increased mechanisation. 

Inheritance still continues in the west. And yes the male offspring still get the larger share. But the women do too. This shift did not come from wishful thinking but was forced on society by developments in the structure of the economy.

In Uganda of course we are still in the pre-industrial age, actually we have not even experienced an agrarian revolution. Part of the reason we have not seen an agrarian revolution, is because our land holding are not only small but we have a convoluted land tenure system that can be a nightmare to navigate.

So the urgency to keep our land in viable wholes is there. 

However since we are in democratic times we cannot forcefully push people off valuable land, replacing them with more productive agents. And because we have no industries to herd people into if we dispossess them the issue of what to do with these idle masses will pose a serious threat to national security and the powers that be.

But we cannot leave things as they are. That is, if we are serious about real progress into the future.

For starters government should repossess all the land in the country and issue leases. This will allow them final say about land use and probably reduce the compensation claims that stall major infrastructure projects. The leaseholders will always be entitled to fair compensation but they would not hold the country to ransom.

We don’t have to wait for this to happen. Government should tax all the land in the country -- commercial, residential and farm land. To begin with this will automatically swell the treasury and secondly those people holding land fallow or undeveloped will have to make the very real economic decision whether to hold on to the land and pay taxes out of their pockets, develop the land and it pays its own way or sell it to people more likely to put it to good use.

It’s a mathematical certainty that a lot of value will be unlocked from our land like this.

"People have argued that taxing agricultural land will kill agriculture. 

I hope it kills agriculture as we know it today where farms are eking out a living on small patches because they are not using advancing farming methods, do not apply fertiliser or organise themselves into meaningful entities like farmer associations or cooperatives which can hold their own in the open market....

Land reforms are always a political hot potato.

In Uganda most especially, where the votes are in the rural areas, but also because of the absentee landlords who are content to brag about their vast lands in bars but have no plan or are incapable of exploiting their birthright.

To suggest these changes would galvanise these fat cats and make it uncomfortable for a seating government. And then of course some of the government’s biggest champions are unfulfilled farmers themselves and cannot pass judgement on the forest.

The inevitable consequence of all this would be a massive exodus to the cities, a touchy issue politically.

So politicians are more likely to retain the status quo than rock the boat however progressive the ideas may be.

Throughout history land reform has not come from moral suasion, the question then is who will bell the cat?