THE POWER OF COOPERATIVE SYNERGY

BOOK: MAKING COOPERATIVES WORK

AUTHOR: CHARLES KABUGA

I have long held the view that Uganda and Africa in general, is poor because of our inability, unwillingness or external schemes that prevent us from aggregating our resources be they land, capital or labour.

We try to got it alone as individuals, communities or countries preventing our ability to take advantage of economies of scale and the synergies that come with. I have seen synergy defined as one plus one equals 11 not two.

"The point is, when we come together we can unlock potential that is greater than the sum of our individual parts...

That is why I am a big fan of the cooperative movement and the book “Making cooperatives work: Optimizing development through social capital” by long time cooperator Charles Kabuga could not have come at a good time in the history of our country.

It is an opportune time because there is a rush to start savings & credit cooperatives (SACCOS) around the country, to take advantage of the Parish Development Model (PMD) funds. When the dust settles there will be a handful of cooperatives left standing, hundreds of others set up opportunistically will have fallen by the wayside. Which will be sad but inevitable.

Hopefully the failed SACCOS will not discourage people from staying the course and joining the more viable SACCOS.

In his book Kabuga does a commendable job of charting the history of the cooperative movement, internationally and in Uganda, outlining the theoretical framework on which they operate, the oftentimes uneasy relationship with state and what he sees as the future of the movement.

In Uganda the cooperative movement was severely weakened by the economic troubles of the 1970s and 1980s. Structural adjustment of our economy, which required a cut back on public expenditure, privatization and especially liberalization of commodity marketing dealt a near deathblow to the cooperatives.

He points out that cooperatives relied on the commodity marketing monopolies the government put in place and the cooperatives were the main suppliers to these marketing boards. When these were disbanded and private players begun exporting commodities, the cooperatives whose management failed to move with times found themselves adrift at sea with the inevitable collapse following soon after...

The closure of the Cooperative Bank in the late 1990s sounded the death knell for the cooperatives as we knew them at worst or forced a reset of how they had to operate in the future. Few cooperatives survived this carnage.

Kabuga has some time-tested advice on how sustainable cooperatives can be set up and some thoughtful ideas about how they may have survived the structural adjustment period.

I agree wholeheartedly with him that cooperatives need to make a deliberate decision to build their capital base. The practice now is that cooperatives tend to distribute a lot of their profit to the members annually. While this is good for morale and endears the leadership to the members it counterproductive in the long term. Weak capital bases is a major reasons why the cooperative movement failed to overcome recent economic upheavals.

That being said the relevance and the importance of the cooperative movement is needed now more than ever before.

Despite decades of economic growth the wealth inequalities are widening and the cooperatives Kabuga maintains may be just the mechanism needed to help bridge or at least slow the rate of inequality.

The beauty of the cooperatives is that they do not need any one’s permission to begin. While to legally operate in the country one needs to register with the trade and cooperatives ministry, the will to cooperate has to be self-generated. This is an important point because cooperatives are not about positioning for handouts but a tool for building self-reliance in our communities, leveraging the power of numbers to advance society.

"For those with cold war hangovers he says cooperatives are not a socialist tool. That in fact there are cooperatives even in the most capitalist of societies albeit going by different description....

The book is potentially a powerful reference for the industry a critical resource in a world where the reality is settling in that we are going to have to develop ourselves and not rely on foreigners with  alternative agendas that do not necessarily rhyme with ours.

It is written in very accessible language and is must read for any leader political or otherwise who has a genuine desire to uplift his people.