One of the NRM’s biggest problems after 40 years in power is that some of its greatest achievements are being discounted precisely because they have lasted so long.
Give people an
inch and, quite naturally, they will want a mile.
For much of
Uganda’s first quarter-century after independence, the questions were painfully
basic. Will I get home safely tonight? Will my property still be mine tomorrow?
Will there be sugar, soap or salt in the shops? Will another coup or war
overturn everything?
Today those
questions sound almost absurd.
That, whatever
else one thinks about the NRM, is part of its achievement.
Its two greatest
legacies will probably be the restoration of security and the revival of an
economy wrecked by political turmoil, economic mismanagement and war.
Younger Ugandans often roll their eyes when older people say: “At least we can sleep.”
It sounds like an
embarrassingly low bar.
But those five
words carry a deeper meaning.
People who lived
in Kampala in the early 1980s remember a city that was often compared to
Beirut: gunfire, curfews, roadblocks, armed men and the uncertainty of whether
you would make it home.
So “at least we can sleep” is not really about bedtime...
It is shorthand
for restored security.
And security
underpins almost every economic gain we have made since.
You do not build
factories, banks, hotels, telecom networks or supermarkets where property
rights are meaningless and armed men can undo years of work in one afternoon.
Security was the
foundation.
Everything else
came on top of it.
But success resets expectations.
A Ugandan born in
2000 is not going to congratulate government because soldiers do not routinely
drag people out of their homes at night.
Why should they?
Security is what
governments are supposed to provide.
Their questions
are different.
Where is my job?
Why is housing unaffordable? Why am I still dependent on my parents after
university? Why do connections sometimes seem to count for more than
competence?
These are
legitimate questions.
The same
generational disconnect applies to liberalisation.
Many younger
Ugandans do not realise how many things they now treat as basic were once
privileges.
Take the
telephone.
There was a time
when getting a telephone line from Uganda Posts and Telecommunications
Corporation could take years. You filled in forms, followed up repeatedly and
hoped your application had not disappeared into the mountains of paperwork.
"Today there are more telephone users than there were Ugandans in 1986...
That is not a
small transformation.
The same applies,
to varying degrees, to electricity, banking and the internet. Goods and
services once concentrated among government offices, big companies and a narrow
urban elite are now accessible to millions.
None of this
means access is universal or affordable enough.
It simply means
progress happened.
And this is where the NRM’s next challenge lies.
"The gains of the last four decades will remain politically fragile if too many Ugandans believe they have been captured by a relatively small urban elite...
There is still
much to achieve in narrowing disparities in wealth, income and opportunity.
For the urban
graduate, frustration may mean a poorly paid job, expensive rent and the
feeling that connections matter too much.
For the rural
young person, it may mean poor roads, weak schools, limited access to finance,
unreliable power and little realistic chance of moving from subsistence to
wealth creation.
Economic growth
is not enough if too many people remain spectators.
The next phase
must therefore be about widening ownership of the gains already made.
More Ugandans
need to own productive assets. More farmers need to move into commercial
agriculture. More small businesses need to become medium-sized businesses. More
households need access to good education, affordable credit, reliable
electricity and functioning markets.
The question can
no longer simply be whether Uganda is richer than it was in 1986.
The question is
how widely that prosperity is shared.
There is, however, another danger: assuming all this progress was inevitable.
It was not.
Countries can go
backwards.
Economies can
collapse.
Institutions can
be destroyed far faster than they are built.
"One symptom of our fading historical memory is the growing revisionism around Idi Amin, especially the claim that expelling Asians in 1972 was some heroic act of economic nationalism...
It was not.
The expulsion
removed people who had accumulated commercial knowledge, capital, supplier
relationships and management experience over generations and handed businesses
to politically favoured beneficiaries, many of whom had neither built them nor
knew how to run them.
Factories
collapsed. Shops emptied. Supply chains broke.
Ironically,
Asians later returned and are today, once again, among the main drivers of
Uganda’s commercial and industrial life.
There is a lesson
there.
Capital is not
created by confiscation.
Entrepreneurial
ability cannot be transferred by presidential decree.
"Prosperity cannot be redistributed before somebody creates it...
A generation that
never experienced the destruction can afford to romanticise it.
History without
memory easily becomes mythology.
None of this gives the NRM a permanent pass.
Forty years
later, telling a 25-year-old that things are better than they were in 1986 is
not an economic programme.
"Young Ugandans are right to demand the mile.
But they should also understand how we got the inch...
The NRM should
not expect eternal gratitude for restoring security and rebuilding the economy.
Equally, younger Ugandans should resist the idea that today’s relative
stability and abundance simply happened.
They were built.
And they can be
destroyed.
The real task now
is to preserve the foundations while making sure the prosperity built on them
spreads beyond Kampala, beyond the politically connected and beyond the already
comfortable.
Because “at least
we can sleep” should not be the end of Uganda’s ambition.
But neither should we forget why, once upon a time, being able to sleep was an achievement.
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