What is Uganda’s main challenge? The continued growth of the
economy and more importantly the equitable distribution of this growth.
If you think about it, once that second equation is solved
everything, from democracy to population growth will fall in place.
You cannot have a democracy when your people are poor with
little hope of coming out of poverty because the education, health and even
security systems do not work as they are supposed to. We are poor because we
are not productive, meaning given the inputs at our disposal – human resource,
land and capital we only extract minimal value. To increase productivity, you
need a better educated, healthier population.
I am always amused when I see people complaining about Uganda’s population growth rate being out of control – by the way, it has been falling consistently for about a decade. Population growth is a function of poverty, as ironic as that sounds...
The figures will show that Uganda’s poverty levels are down,
the problem is the measure of poverty – people living on less than a dollar a
day or more recently they have been a bit more charitable and put it at living
on less than $2.25 a day or something.
In western economies that is not how they measure poverty.
They get together a basic basket of goods and services – electricity, piped
water, housing, high school education etc to determine poverty levels.
Our
dollar a day measure is derived from how much food it takes to sustain a person
for a day.
So maybe for starters we too need to elevate what we
consider the poverty line, in order to focus our minds on a higher goal – if
lifting people above the poverty line is the reason for our existence.
That being said everyday we are reminded that even this
minimalistic goal is not top of the agenda of our leaders.
Last week it was reported that MPs had bumped up their
allowances by sh102b most, if not all went to beef up their mileage. They
argued two things. That only MPs from far away constituencies benefitted from
the existing mileage payouts and proposed an additional uniform rate that all
MPs irrespective of how far their constituencies were would be paid. And
secondly they justified the increment arguing that fuel prices had risen
throughout the year so they passed that they be paid in arrears from July last
year.
The actions of parliament often elicit a bad taste in the
mouth. There is the issue of whether parliament in itself is value for money.
But that is not unique to Uganda. But in our circumstances, a poor country
where more serious priorities exist, than propping up an entitled elite,
disgust is a very charitable word.
It reminds me of the book “Why nations fail” where the
authors Daron Acemoglu and James A.
Robinson, in seeking to explain why some
countries are prosperous and others aren’t, drawing on historical record from
as far back as the Maya empire, came to the conclusion that it is not climate
or geography or genetics that dictates the fate of nations.
The answer lay in the politics – Surprise! Surprise! But
particularly whether this politics promoted extraction by the elite or
inclusion of everyone in sharing in the benefits that accrued from the economy.
"They made the case that everywhere countries rose to prosperity and then collapsed or even failed to take off all together, the common denominator was a ruling elite that sought to extract gain from the economy disproportionate to their contribution or usefulness....
That as night follows day the unsustainability of the way
those societies were designed resulted often in destructive class struggles or
environmental disasters or internal weaknesses that exposed them to external
attack and invasion.
Our story cannot end well if we continue to be held hostage
by a political class whose number one focus is not to ensure an improvement in
the general standard of living, but instead are gorging themselves at the public
trough with impunity and shameless disregard to everything happening around
them.
Anyone who has eyes to see knows we have embarked on a very
slippery slope.
A project I am undertaking shows there were massive
sacrifices we all had to make in the 1980s and 90s to ensure we get to where we
are now. But at every turn there have been those who thought they were more
equal than the rest, but the collective need for sacrifice overrode their baser
instincts. Now it seems that restraint has been thrown out the window and its
now a free for all and god for us all.
It is hard to see a happy ending, assuming the current state
of affairs.
