THE COURT ACTION, ONE MORE STEP TOWARDS DEMOCRACY

Last week the constitutional court annulled the Anti-Homosexuality Act on the grounds that when it was passed the house did not have enough MPs seating to make it law. For a bill to pass into law at least one third of the voting members of parliament have to vote on it.

And then within days the constitutional court ruled against the continued tenure of Chief Justice Benjamin Odoki beyond the statutory 70 year old age limit, despite the extension granted by President Yoweri Museveni last year.

In the heat of the moment it is easy for the supporters of contrary positions to be displeased with the two court rulings. 

The opposition in both these cases maintained a deafening silence, not criticising the courts for their lack of impartiality as they have done in the past.

If we describe a democracy as a rule based society, with laws made by the legislature, operatlionalised by the executive and interpreted by the courts, the events of the last fortnight are good for democracy.

The ideal is to have a country where institutions and not individuals, are the guarantors of our freedoms, long term stability and progress.

Of course first you have to have the institutions, then you have to make sure they work.

"It is all very nice to write these institutions into law and even man them with competent officials, but in order for them to grow and take their place at the center of events, this institutions have to be exercised....

We might have our misgivings about this or that institution but we give them no chance to improve and serve us if we do not put them to the test.

Take for instance, someone breaks into your house and steals a few things. Because you have your doubts about the capacity of your local police post you neglect to report the incident. When they are drawing up the budget for the police post next year they will look at the incidents of the past year as an indicator of how much to commit to your local police post. Invariably because your incident and several others were not communicated police HQ will decide that the one sleepy constable and a bench for a desk will continue to be adequate.

"By choosing not to deal with the police because you doubt their competence a self-fulfilling prophecy is set into motion....

The building of a democracy is not something that other people do, it’s something we all help with in whatever way we can. 

In an attempt to win political points people may argue that the government should know better and not put society in a place where it has to challenge it. But governments are political animals, they will get away with whatever they can depending on the vigilance of the people.

Of course there is a danger that government business can be paralysed and swift action bogged down in red tape, but that is the price we should be prepared to pay to live in a democracy.

"Stronger institutions will guard against the excesses of political expedience, the arbitrariness of dictators and even save our more benevolent leaders from themselves, after all, they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions....

And finally by testing our institutions and allowing them to grow into their roles we can expect a level of predictability about our environment and guarantee that in the future we will have recourse to these institutions even if we are no longer in power or aligned with the powers of the day.

UGANDA’S TICKING ECONOMIC TIME BOMB

Last week the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) released their annual Human Development Report.

The key feature of the report is its Human Development Index (HDI), which measures the standard of living or general wellbeing of a nation’s people. It’s all very nice for your economy to be growing at gallop but if the benefits are not trickling down to the people it’s all for nought.

So while Uganda has been recording an average of six percent annual economic growth over the last decade its rankings on the HDI is a lowly 164 out of the 187 polled. This is in sharp contrast to its 45^th position of fastest growing economies in 2013, which was in the top quartile of the 219 countries surveyed, according to the CIA World Factbook.

And

the naysayers will jump up and down and allege government must be cooking the books, hence the contradiction. Not necessarily. It’s possible for an economy to grow but the benefits are not evenly spread around....

In our case this is easy to see. When the NRM marched on Kampala agriculture accounted for nearly all of Uganda’s GDP. Over the last three decades agriculture’s contribution to the economy has shrunk to under 30 percent. 

This is a good thing and a bad thing.

Good because the economy is more diversified with services, manufacturing and construction producing more. Good because we are less and less at the mercy of changing climate or international market conditions.

Bad because it is estimated that as many as four in five Ugandans still depend on agriculture – the subsistence, soil scratching, type for their livelihood....

In effect more and more people are getting less and less access to the economic pie.

So the billion dollar question for us is why is this happening and what can we do about it?

As has been pointed out before the majority of our people are in the least productive sector of the economy, the agriculture sector has been growing by under two percent compared to industry and services which are growing at more than triple the rate.

Secondly, the fastest growing sectors are concentrated in the urban areas construction, manufacturing, hospitality and real estate activities and therefore benefiting the majority.

And related to that the sectors that would allow for upward social mobility are also concentrated in towns – education and health services, energy and transport infrastructure.

If you think about it

the current crop of Uganda’s leaders came from poverty and got a leg up from a system that ensured they had inexpensive (often free), quality education and health services

. This allowed them to get higher paying jobs than their cousins in the village allowing them, to pass on the legacy down the generation.

Economic growth must continue. There can be no development without economic growth. We need to exercise our minds on how to spread the love more equitably.

Where to start? Corruption is as good a place as any. The text book definition of the vice is using public goods for personal enrichment, when you think about it every shilling that a top official appropriates with his grubby fingers negatively affects service delivery to the people.

So while the majority have no access to health and education services, these officials appropriate the entitlement of thousands of Ugandan patients and students to take their own abroad to benefit from quality learning and treatment.

Whichever way you look at it corruption is at the heart of the growing inequality in our country. The economy is growing – only politicians with jaundiced eyes will dispute that, but clearly not all of us are the high table.

This state of affairs if it goes on unchecked will have an averse effect on economic growth – as more and more people shift attention towards corruption and away from production. To ignore these signs means this economy is a time bomb waiting to explode.

UGANDA THINKING ABOUT POPULATION CONTROL THE WRONG WAY

A big deal was made last week of President Yoweri Museveni’s supposed change of heart on the issue of population control.

Museveni is reported to have said in the past that he is not too concerned about Uganda’s high   population growth rate. In fact he welcomed it as a bigger population would be a source of labour and potential market for investors wanting to set up here.

Champions of population control rent their hair whenever Museveni made this view known arguing that a growing population without the corresponding economic growth would put strain on the nation’s resources and lower the average living standards. They argue that we need to bring the population growth rate under control before it’s too late.

Uganda’s population is growing at 3.6 percent or put another way if the population continues growing at its current rate into the future our numbers will double every twenty years.

Uganda’s population stands at 35 million.

Museveni’s office later clarified that the president made the distinction between family planning, which is good for the health of the mother and population control, which refers to the overall growth of the population. He is all for family planning and still wholeheartedly behind the population 

 continuing to grow. In his mind there was no contradiction between the two.

First of all no one wants a population that is poor, sickly and generally cannot sustain itself. They would be no good to themselves or to potential investors.

"To seek to control the population in order to pre-empt a poor economic environment in the future is to put the cart before the horse...

The history of populations shows that as economies grow and health facilities improve there is a surge in numbers.

It’s not hard to see why this is so.

Societies lose less children during child birth and in their infancy, for one.

Then as more women go to school and join the workforce, population growth rates hit a plateau before going into decline.

As resources increase among families girls get a chance to not only go to school but to stay in school longer, as fathers with increasing prosperity feel less and less  the need for dowry. In addition every year the girl stays in school after she has reached puberty is one less baby added to our population.

It is part of the explanation why urban women have low fertility rates – the number of children they give birth to during their child bearing years, than their rural sisters.

But also with more education and financial independence women are better able to control their reproduction cycles either through contraception or just deciding their choice of partner.

The history of the world will show that if you want to bring populations under control you need to improve the economy first. As incredible as it sounds you can have an economy that is rich but a population, while small, which is poor.

We don’t have to go very far for examples.

The oil rich nation of Equatorial Guinea has one of the richest populations in the world at $25,000 per capita, but is only ranked 20 places above Uganda on the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI). Uganda’s per capita GDP stands at around $600.

The HDI measures the welfare of the society in terms of access to, education and health services, clean water and sanitation, human rights and other freedoms. The better a country’s HDI the better the quality of the lives of its people.

And the population of Equatoria Guinea? The population of this little West African nation is 1.2m people.

Two things stand out, that for population to be brought under control the women have to be economically empowered and secondly, that this can only happen in the context of an overall improvement in the population’s wellbeing.

To study Europe during the industrial age or the US after the Second World War may be a stretch but we can take a leaf from the East Asians, who while they have had aggressive population control measures in place, these only complemented improvements in their economy in stabilising their population growth rates.

And finally the claim that we better watch it since our land doesn’t have the resources to sustain a bigger population. That claim does not stand up to the facts.

"The UK, which is the size of Uganda, has a population of 93m and a population density of nearly twice our own. Anyone who has been to the UK or knows anything about it from high school geography knows they do not hold a candle to us in terms of natural resources, but I have never heard of their population being a problem?..

There are other reasons than concern for us that is driving this whole agenda of lower population. A story for another day.

It seems to me a linear logic, you improve the economy to lower population growth, not lower the population growth rate to improve the economy.