UGANDA CAN NOT REST ON ITS LAURELS

In last year’s NRM day message President Yoweri Museveni reported that the economy had grown to sh39 trillion from the measly sh3.4 trillion in 1986. This was nearly a 12-fold increase in 26 years.

This means that on average the economy grew by about 9.8% annually, a prodigious figure by any measure.

But the truth is we have only just dug ourselves out of the hole we put ourselves in with the economy’s mismanagement starting in the 1970s.

We have restored peace and security, rehabilitated our infrastructure and added some new capacity, we have educated more and more people and created new industries to absorb some of them.

Anyone who was around in 1986 knows we have come a long way. But there is still a long way to go.

Per capita GDP now stands at about $350, which is far below the $1000 required to be qualified as a lower middle income country. To qualify we have to at least triple the economy’s size.

But given that our population growth stands at 3.6% it would take another 16 years to triple the economy. But that is premised on an annual economic growth of 9.8% a rate we have not achieved in the last ten years.

Forget the mathematics. The point is whereas we are grateful to the NRM – at least the urban elite, for facilitating the improvements our standard of leaving this is not time to rest on our laurels.

I have various officials lament that we are not as grateful as we should be to the NRM for lifting us out of our morass but they should know that to him who much is given much is expected.

And similarly when you give a man an inch he wants a mile. That is the reality of the human condition, if they cannot face it they can pack up and go.

Looking forward the government is already on the right track. They have embarked on the most ambitious infrastructure development in more than road rehabilitation works of the 1980s. Plans are there to lay out thousands of kilometers of road, boost power generation fivefold, reactivate the railway and water transport on lake Victoria.

Infrastructure is the lifeblood of any economy and cannot be underestimated. American investor Jim Rogers toured the world on his motor bike in 1980 and saw first hand the huge investments in infrastructure China was making at the time in roads, rail, sea ports and predicted at the time that the world’s most populous nation was gearing up to become a major player in the world.

Since the Chinese economy has grown more than twenty fold and is snapping at the heels of the US economy, which it is projected to overtake in size by 2030.

But to borrow from China’s meteoric rise, the country invested heavily in human capital. It is graduating as many if not more PhDs in science as the US – they stopped talking about literacy levels as a measure of education there, and there health systems while challenged by the scale of the population, many of the western economies in the procedures they can carryout and in research and innovation. You can have all the infrastructure in the world but if you do not have the manpower to exploit it they may as well be white elephants.

The liberalization of the economy has unlocked private initiative. But the market place while it’s the most effective mechanism for wealth creation is not the best placed to distribute the booty.

If wealth disparities are beginning to widen unsustainably blame it on the government whose role it is to distribute the economic gains of the last three decades. And we are not talking about handouts to Ugandans but the effective and efficient delivery of public goods – security, social services and national strategy, which would give every Ugandan a chance to climb the social ladder.

At the heart of this inefficiency is corruption, which further concentrates finite government resources in a few pudgy hands. Corruption has to be rooted out, least of all because its networks are capable of  hijacking state institutions and even overthrowing governments.

Development is a function of politics. And political borders are important. That is why the people in Kisoro may have a better standard of living than their cousins in eastern Congo but may not live as well as their counterparts across the border in Rwanda.

Going into the next 50 years a certain consensus has to be reached within the political class to a bare minimum agenda. So that even if parties seat across the floor there should be an understanding that with issues like the economy we have to pull together. The constant bickering and heckling serves no purpose other than to embarrass the honourable ladies and gentlemen.

Past results do not guarantee future performance, they counsel but given our recent past there is probably less cause for despondence as there was on 27^th January 1986.

UGANDA HEADING DOWN A SLIPPERY SLOPE WITH COUP TALK

Last week Defence minister Dr Crispus Kiyonga sounded a warning to the NRM legislators at their retreat in Kyankwanzi.

Kiyonga warned that MPs should guard against actions that undermine the public’s confidence in parliament as such actions can make the army intervene and take over the government.

“Even soldiers, just like all Ugandans, are watching. We should not take their discipline for granted. If the military feels the country is in the hands of wrong politicians, some officers might be forced to intervene in the name of refocusing the country’s future,” Kiyonga said.

Kiyonga’s comments seems were said in the specific context of events at the end of last year in parliament when MPs shouted down the speaker and caused an adjournment during debate on the oil bill.

Days later commenting on the defence minister’s comments the General Aronda Nyakairima, the chief of defence forces while agreeing with his bosses was reported to have said,

“Stand advised that should you not change course, other things will take place.”

The remarks by the gentlemen were startling in themselves but what was even more remarkable was the deafening silence from the public.

Maybe we were befuddled, “How can they overthrow themselves?” For the vast majority of us the line between the NRM and the UPDF is only on paper.

Once we had got over that initial confusion, we probably then asked, “Are these people allowed to say such things?” a hangover from an era when for contemplating let alone voicing such mental meanderings, one would be slapped with a charge of treason. Clearly things have changed or have they?

And then we went on and wondered, “But would it be so wrong if they took over and set this whole place straight?”, these thought of course informed by the log jams we see created by our political processes contrasted with how things can work once we have sidelined the politicians – read the recent improvements in Kampala city.

Politicians should be under no illusions. As citizens and consumers of the government services we really don’t care who is in charge as long as service delivery is effective. We hold no allegiance to any one person or group of people for any other reason than they can properly answer the question “What have you done for me lately?”

Truth be told

"we do not hold our MPs in high esteem, we think they are overpaid, self-aggrandizing, hecklers only good for milking during the campaign period and always eager to increase their already heavy paychecks...

An Afrobarometer survey of almost a decade ago put MPs at the bottom of a list of our leaders ranked in terms of respectability. Our honourable members have done little since then to improve our perception of them.

See how the public did not bat an eyelid when the President called them fools and idiots.

That being said, parliament – warts and all, is an important institution of the democracy we want to build. If it is not working well the solution is not to abolish it but to find a way to make it work better.

As it is now the house with nearly 300 members is too unwieldly to do much good.

A house a third that size will not only be significantly cheaper but also easier to manage. But to reduce the house number would require a vote by the same house and it is unrealistic to expect the monkeys to vote objectively on the fate of the forest.

The next best thing is for the house whips to be more forceful in keeping party members in line. A lot of the chaos in the house is largely because of uncoordinated troop movements with in parties and particularly the ruling NRM, slowing down progress and the bogging down proceedings.

The many corruption scandals within the civil service do not endear the government to the people.

Bottom line is the government and all its arms has to work for the benefit of the tax payer or its relevance will be in doubt.

"That the defence minister and then the army commander can voice such opinion in public should be worrying, never mind how unlikely it seems. Giving the army ideas is rarely a good idea...

Frustration at the way our political class is conducting its affairs is palpable. With our representatives complicit in the mismanaging of the country’s affairs how ironic it is that it is the army that has come to voice our disgust.

UGANDA'S EDUCATION SYSTEM SHORTCHANGING OUR KIDS

This week the Primary Leaving Exams were released to the usual fanfare we have come to expect over the last decade or so.

Events followed a familiar script with newspapers splashing the top students on their covers, parents trooping to media houses children in tow and the feted scholars telling us how  they want to be doctors, lawyers and engineers but, thankfully not politicians.

We have stopped marveling at the proliferation of perfect scores – four points in the four tested subjects. Candidates are getting four-in-four with disturbing regularity. In an earlier generation getting an eight-in-four, which probably meant all distinctions, was enough to swell the average kid’s little head, now such a candidate slinks off into the corner in dejection.

The question has to be asked, is it that our kids are getting brighter and brighter? The theory of evolution which suggests that we continue to evolve and that offspring will continue to exceed the achievements of their forefathers would make this a feasible assumption.

Or is it on the other hand that our kids are now being specifically honed to achieve four-in-fours like at no other time in our history? The proliferation of private schools whose main marketing tool is the perceived success of its students, has a lot to do with this.

The answer of course can be found in both questions.

In the last two decades with sustained economic growth the access to better schools has improved, so too has the relative health of the population. The kids therefore generally have access to better schooling and with better diet, their brains develop properly and hence their capacity to retain information, which they dutifully download during exam time.

And that is the crux of the matter.

As the private sector has stepped in to fill the gaps in the education sector, exam results have become the end rather than the growing of well-rounded human beings who can operate effectively in the real world.

This means cramming our kids with information within the strict confines of the curriculum while ignoring other aspect of their personal development like character building for instance.

As a result we are churning out brigades of automatons who have good retentive memory but little else.

This situation is not unusual to Uganda. In the late eighties a study in Japan showed that the rate of broken bones by children was growing at an alarming rate. An investigation showed that the children’s bones were weaker than usual and it did not take much to break a bone. At the root of the problem was the enormous pressure society was placing on its youth to excel at academics, which would lead to a job for life in one of the country’s mega corporations. Children were spending more than fourteen hours a day in the classroom, in cram school (coaching) and doing homework leaving no time for sports.

The world has changed since.  The world now demands more independent thinking, communication and entrepreneurship skills and Japanese kids find they have been trained for a working environment that has shriveled.

Broken bones are now the least of the worries that Japanese families face.

There is a growing phenomenon of Japanese kids – suffocated by academic pressure and eventual failure to operate in a new world, shutting themselves away in their rooms for up to 15 years playing video games, surfing the net and watching TV.

Our education system was designed by a colonial system that needed subservient, paper pushes to man the administration, which would guarantee you a job for the rest of your working life and a pension for the rest of your life.

In my time I competed with Ugandans. The current generation is competing with East Africans, by the time my four year old son makes it to the work place the competition will be global.

He will need to not only be proficient in several international languages, he will also have to shed the inferiorities of his forefathers to allow him to work anywhere in the world and if all else fails he will go into business for himself.

Good grades still count, but when they become an end in themselves rather than a means to the greater goal of creating well rounded individuals equipped top take on the future you know the system has passed its sale-by date.

JAMES MULWANA: LESSONS FROM A LIFE WELL LIVED

Industrialist and entrepreneur James Mulwana died earlier this week and was put to rest on Wednesday. As a country we should be thankful for the gift of the man and that he was with us long enough to leave an indelible mark on our history.

For a man who lived to the ripe old age of 77 and filled those years with a life of achievement it is futile to try and capture the essence of the man in one article.

He was an intensely private man who never courted the media, but from the words of friends and colleagues one can glean a few life lessons from the godfather of Ugandan business.

·         Work like you will live forever

The breadth and depth of Mulwana’s business and community involvement would put the majority of us to shame. His businesses are household names and his service to his community and country, while not as visible, have touched thousands upon thousands.  Mulwana counseled patience to those who would listen. This advice was all the more surprising coming from a man who had lived through some of this country’s darkest   times, where expediency and bare faced opportunism took the place of integrity and diligence. People’s experience of the man was that he was never after the fast buck, and the portfolio of businesses he put together was testament to that philosophy. Mulwana knew intuitively and from experience that no enduring legacy can be built in a hurry.

·         A man has got to do what a man has got to do

Mulwana went into business at a time when the environment was rigged against the African entrepreneur. He then lived through a time when it was prudent to keep your head down. In the last two decades the foundation he had painstakingly laid down bore fruit and earned him immense wealth. He was known for an unbending will but to have survived – no, thrived under the circumstances, he must have coupled this with rubber-like adaptability. Clearly he was driven by a sense of responsibility for which whining, complaining and failure was not an option.

 ·         Follow your own star

As a budding businessman he might have gone into the traditional retail businesses at one time or another but in later years he was never afraid to step out into the unknown. A local pioneer in the manufacture of car batteries, plastics, flower farming and agro-processing, Mulwana must have known the pain of breaking ground but he remained confident in his ability to preserve through the steep early learning curves to win first mover advantage in a lot of his business enterprises. Say anything else about the man but no one will accuse him of being a copycat.

·         Impressing those who don’t care, humility

By all accounts he was humble man, a humility that was probably forged in years of battling insurmountable odds and living with the ever present fear of failure. But probably also because having dealt with businessmen from far and wide he knew in his heart, his achievements were  modest compared to what he saw in his travels and interactions. He was a reluctant big fish in a small pond, who knew there was still work to be done.

·         Leave a record

It is interesting how those who are not hell bent on leaving a legacy are the ones who invariably do. By taking care of business year after year, decade after decade Mulwana cemented his place in Ugandan history. His life’s major omission maybe that he never wrote his book. A life well lived like Mulwana’s deserves not only be documented but also told in his own voice, to narrate how he handled the spirit crushing set backs, how he overcame self doubt but also how he came about his own philosophy of life. Isaac Newton said that the reason he made so many discoveries is because he stood on the shoulders of giants, men who had gone before him and provided the foundation from which to launch his work.

We are a third world country mired in poverty and disease, it is the doers like Mulwana not the flossers and smash-and-grab artists who dominate our headlines, that will change that fundamentally.

As a trailblazer and leader of men, his life should serve as inspiration for all other aspiring empire builders.

SOMALIA: CASE OF THE GLASS BEING HALF FULL

 

Lieutenant General Katumba Wamala was last week in Somalia in one of his frequent visits to war torn Somalia.

Uganda contributes almost 20,000 troops to the Africa Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), the five-year regional peacekeeping effort to support the transition of the continent’s eastern most country.

During the duration of the mission a semblance of stability has returned to a country, which imploded after the overthrow of Siad Barre in 1991, torn apart by feuding clans jostling for supremacy.

The war against terror and recent threats to the safety of the maritime routes off the horn of Africa has made the continued existence of Somalia as a failed state untenable.

Enter Uganda and Burundi who provided the initial forces for the mission. The mission’s   objective among other things is to support the transitional government, implement a national security plan, to assist in creating a secure environment for the delivery of humanitarian aid.

Somalia is far from attaining a sustainable peace, but the green shoots of peace can be discerned.

"A sustainable peace will come when a critical mass of the society have individual and collective interest in acting within the law. That is when they have something to lose and breaking the law would risk igniting a downward spiral into anarchy and hopelessness...

Arguably the easy part of pacifying part of the country has been done the tricky part is to generate economic growth and then distribute this growth to create the bedrock of future stability.

Lt Gen Wamala is making the right noises. He suggested last week that a Marshall Plan for Somalia is necessary for it to resuscitate itself.

The Marshall Plan was a US sponsored financial plan to get Europe back on its feet in order to fend off communism.

Over the last two decades Somalia has literally bombed itself back into the stone age. The infrastructure and human resource have been so severely damaged and their development stunted by years of fighting that they are unable to marshall the resources internally to get themselves going again.

They have one big trump card, I think. The Somali diaspora is not only strewn all over the world, but has maintained close ties and developed into entrepreneurs of some repute wherever they are.

Entrepreneurs and not governments are what grow wealth. And if they are local entrepreneurs they are much more willing to take risks that foreign capital would not, creating confidence in the economy for the time when others will join the party.

Sluggish progress is being made towards building the foundations of government. Governments facilitate business development by providing public goods like security, social services and an overall enabling policy environment. This is important because without these a Marshall Plan for Somalia will not have the desired effect, will in fact be like throwing money down a black hole.

Just as AMISOM has shown that regional initiatives can provide solutions to regional problems, it’s probably time to show too that regional capital can play an instrumental role in lifting the economy of Somalia.

Nineteenth century financier Baron Rothschild once said, “The best time to buy is when there is blood in the streets” Investing in Somalia in the next five to ten years – assuming the current trajectory towards stability is maintained, will be like getting in on the ground floor.

By the time of the second world war the US had already taken its place at the high table of the world economy. Its pivotal role as the arsenal of the free world and the ensuing economic benefits that came with being at the center of reconstructing Europe is what cemented its place as the dominant economy of the second half of the last century.

"And just because the continent is helping Somalia stabilize does not mean we shall have first pickings of the opportunities available....

With Europe’s economy in the doldrums and the US recovery still making hesitant progress, capital is looking to Africa for investment returns.

The high risk situation that is Somalia is not a first choice investment destination but look out for western nations to jump in to provide the concessionary money that will build the communications and energy infrastructure, revive social services and bankroll the creation of the government bureaucracy as a fore runner to the entrance of private money.

Africa has the institutional set up to jump into the fray, what maybe in doubt is whether we have the political vision to see the benefits of such an investment.

East Africa will be the biggest beneficiary of a stable, economically vibrant Somalia. Not only will it cease to be a security threat to the region but will add at least another ten million people to the region’s market.

Africa has invested blood and sweat in Somlia but it need not stop there.