“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”
Except that this was an excerpt from a World Bank report
“Development of Uganda” authored in 1962 one would be forgiven for thinking it
was a more a current report.
At the time of the report Uganda’s population was just over
6.5 million, GDP stood at $230m (sh620b) and per capital income was about $35.
Fast forward to today the population is 34 million, economic
output is at about $15b and per capita GDP is about $450.
In addition agriculture accounts for less than half of GDP
and coffee and cotton are not the biggest foreign exchange earners.
"The report was requested by the Uganda government following a collapse in the world prices of coffee and cotton, proceeds from which pre-independence Uganda had relied to balance its budget and set up the Owen falls Dam and Kilembe mines....
The reduced income from these cash crops was putting a
strain on government’s ability to provide services, a delicate situation given
that independence was around the corner and the new government would need all
the resources it could muster to drive its expansion of social services.
When you read the report its amazing how as much as things
have changed things have not really changed
at all.
“Industrialisation is nevertheless still in its initial
stages. The small size of the home market has been a dominant limiting factor
…. The birth and growth of small backyard enterprises is still slow because of
the slow pace of development of indigenous small entrepreneurs.
“The labour force is still quite distinct in character from
that of industrialised countries. Wage labour like the cash crops, has been
grafted on the subsistence economy.”
"The World Bank reports that there were 13,000 miles of road of which a fourth were main road. This has remained largely unchanged at 20,000 km with less than a quarter paved...
But the researchers saw deficiencies in our national human
capacity which gaps they foresaw would cause trouble in coming years.
While noting that there were 240,000 people working outside
peasant agriculture the
15,000 skilled, technical, managerial and administrative
personnel needed for running and development of the economy were mostly Asian
and European.
"Uganda is seriously short of trained senior administrators and technicians for government posts …. The closer the date of independence the greater the need for “localization” of the civil service. The skills acquired can be acquired only through higher education and experience, and Uganda will have difficulty supplying them for many years to come,” the report said.
We may never know the loss to the economy after 1971 when
little or no new education institutions were set up but the population
continued to grow, and the shortages in manpower were aggravated by the fleeing
into exile of many middle class professionals.
And this human capacity deficiency is at the heart of any
problems you may think of in the country today inadequate medical care and
education services, corruption to name a few.
Seeing the enormity of the task the researchers proposed a
long term strategy.
“Educational patterns cannot be changed overnight.
Educational planning must take place on the basis of generations rather than in
terms of a five-year cycle,” they wrote.
The report a 520 page
tome, studied all aspects of Uganda’s economy and suggested the way forward. It
would be useful even today given that the same challenges the authors pointed
out at the time persist almost unaltered, today.
