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 45th 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.