On Wednesday Uganda Christian University launched a think
tank, the African Policy Center, which will conduct research meant to inform
public policy, biased towards a Christian world view.
Dr James Magara presented on the think tank’s role in the
Africa of the 21st century. The problems of Africa Magara said, come
down to the fact that we have been doing a lot of doing, unaccompanied by much thinking.
Adopted from Second World War America, think tanks are often
independent organisations which set themselves the task to research and
disseminate knowledge often with the aim of influencing the powers of the day.
"This attempt speaks to the wider challenge of Africa and more specifically Uganda. We are poor, backward and even hopeless, because we have not aggregated our resources, be it our labour, our markets, our political activism, our finances or in this case our thinking...
We see it all around us.
Look at the classical factors of production.
Barley a quarter of all land in Uganda is titled. This is a
disturbing statistic because without recognisable property rights for the
majority of Ugandan households it is difficult to unlock the full value of the
land we live on. One way to unlock this land is to aggregate these holdings
into bigger holdings either through acquisition or cooperation. It is economies
of scale such as these that see the US with only three million farmers, down
from 30 million after the Second World War, can be the world’s largest exporter
of food.
The labour movement is thin on the ground in Uganda. While
serving as a useful counter to capital, labour movements have had the
unintended consequence of leading to greater efficiencies in the work place
through innovation and automation.
And finally capital. Our lending rates are too high, we have
too little capital to finance our own projects and our financial markets are
shallow, restricted to a handful of products, leaving out the majority of consumers,
because we have not brought together our monies in meaningful ways. We save
less than 15 percent of our GDP in the formal banking system, while the east
Asian countries at least double that figure. Aggregating capital in this way
not only makes it easily accessible and cheaper but attracts even greater pools
as well.
In the more developed western economies they have taken this
a step further, with the creation of capital markerts, which supply patient
money to their businessmen. All the capital markets on the continent do not
have market capitalisation – the value of all the shares listed on an exchange,
equivalent to that of the Brussels Stock Exchange (about $3.7trillion).
But they have gone a step further, and despite some recent
hiccups, have been pushing aggressively to consolidate their politics. See the
United States and the European Union. This allows them to not only consolidate
their markets but to project their unified will allowing them to have more
influence on world affairs disproportionate to the populations of their
countries.
The disaggregation of our resources is by design and by
accident.
"And why have we failed to aggregate our resources? A lack of leadership or more specifically a dearth of leadership, which sees uplifting the wellbeing of their respective people as their raison d’etre...
Since independence through design or accident of history, our
leaders have not been the sharpest knives in the draw. As a result they have
found little use for knowledge or gone out to promote research and its
resulting knowledge used to inform decision making.
In fact they have been willing consumers of other people’s
thinking, the Bretton Woods institutions or Brussles or even Moscow, knowledge
we cannot have been generated for altruistic purposes least of all for our
benefit.
The African Policy Center has a noble mission, it will run
itno a lot of roadblocks –opposition from established players or inertia from
the intended recepients stuck in their old ways. But no one imagines the road
ahead will be smooth.
