THE TRUTH IS, THERE IS NO HOPE FOR AFRICA!

Last week President Yoweri Museveni addressed the African Union parliament at the event to commemorate a decade of its existence.

Museveni spoke on why Africa despite its rich endowment in people and natural resources continues to not only lag behind the rest of the world but also struggles to pull itself out of this endless spiral of poverty and “helplessness”.

Imagine a home with parents and kids. Top of the mind of the parents is to guarantee the long term sustainability of this family unit. They do this by guaranteeing physical security, which may take the form of a sturdy house and good security fence. They also work towards “soft” security by ensuring the family is fed, healthy and is growing in economic value through furthering education and work/business experience.

Whether this family succeeds will be judged years even generations down the line. We will be judged by our fruits against a criteria of whether we have advanced the human specie.

Imagine now that this family will not be left alone to chart its own path into the future. Outsiders are always looking in, coveting the family’s resources, not only property but he parents’ source of living, the children for all sorts of labour.

The covetous outsiders decide that in order to get access to the family’s endowments they need to weaken it at worst and break it up totally at best.

They use any number of ruses to achieve this – bribery, temptations of the flesh, alcohol and drugs and sometimes do away with the subtlety and use outright brute force to take what they want.

"For the family to weather all these storms and still prosper into the future it needs to maintain a common purpose anchored by a long term view of their ambitions for the “family name”....

What makes this struggle particularly difficult is that the dangers may not show themselves from onset, they are masked in good intentions and maybe promoted by the most trusted members of the family out of ignorance or treachery.

Scale this scenario up a million fold and you are talking about Africa.

Museveni is right when he says we are our own worst enemy in this fight, slanted against us by historical factors and weak technology.

Sadly our governments are often at the forefront of selling the continent down the river, just as the tribal chiefs of yesteryear did for a few trinkets and guns. The more things change the more things remain the same.

Zimbabwe is a classic case in point. The leadership there may huff and puff all they want how they are at the forefront of black empowerment but in hanging in on to power at all costs they weakened the economy to the point that only foreign currencies are respected in the former southern Africa food basket.

"When a government relinquishes control over the national currency, its ability to direct the economy is lost and its claims to be working in the service of its people are empty...

How did Zimbabwe come to this.

When politicians feel threatened by the productive sections of the economy, attack and bring them down in order to assert their authority, it’s only a matter of time before that county will be overran by interests other than those with an interest in the long term viability of the nation. We saw it in Uganda with the expulsion of the Asians in 1971.

But an attack on the productive sectors of the society need not be a physical one.

Hobbling them with high production costs due to poor infrastructure and cumbersome red tape can do just as thorough a job.

Uganda will be sold – is being sold down, the river by corruption, clichéd as it may sound.

Corruption defined as employing public resources for personal enrichment is chipping away at the walls of our home, dribbling in through the tiles on the roofs and the bashing determinedly at front door.

The figure of sh500b lost a year is gross understatement of the true state of affairs.

The natural instinct is that when you have been attacked in your house and in danger of being overwhelmed by your assailants,  is to make an alarm for outsiders to come to your aid.

In the last week I have been reading the book, “Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World” by Nicholas Shaxson, it traces the rise of the off shore financial industry and fingers it as the reason for the recent global financial collapse.

This industry which, facilitates the evasion of trillions of dollars in tax, launders hundreds of billions of dollars could only do so if it had control of the political processes of the west.

"Driven by corporate greed, the industry and its agents score the earth for profit, co-opting governments or getting rid of them altogether. Its appetite grows exponentially every year and despite western citizens' protests against them and the institution of some token regulation on their activities, they are not only alive and kicking, but thriving and expanding...

Which brings us full circle to Africa, what hope do we have with such forces ranged against our family?

THE PEOPLE’S HAPPINESS IS THE ULTIMATE GOAL

Yesterday was the International Day of Happiness and Uganda was found to be the happiest country in the East African Community according to a United Nations report released for the day.

The UN Sustainable Development Solutions World Happiness report found that Uganda was 119^th in a ranking of 154 countries according to their levels of happiness. This was ahead of Kenya at 121^st, Tanzania 149^th, Rwanda 150^th and Burundi 151^st.

Commemorating World Happiness Day begun in 2012 in recognition of the relevance of happiness as an indicator of wellbeing and development.

Classical economists may not have trouble wrapping their minds around the concept of happiness as an indicator of wellbeing but may argue about how to measure happiness in an objective way.

"In measuring happiness the report took into account the GDP per capita, life expectancy, having someone to count on, perceived freedom to make life choices, freedom from corruption and generosity....

In the top tier of the rankings are the Scandinavians – Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, whose welfare states have a long history of inclusive development.

The US 17^th, Germany 26^th, Japan 43^rd and China 92^nd, the world’s biggest economies, preform dismally in relative terms.

Using their measure of happiness it seems that a level of economic development while necessary is not a guarantee of the happiness.

The challenge of any research is cultural bias, so for instance in west if I press the switch and the light comes on or not can have a bearing on my happiness – or in Kampala. In a remote corner of the country they do not expect electricity – either because of persistent power outages or that they don’t have access altogether, an absence of power may not affect the village’s level of happiness. If there was loadshedding in Copenhagen or Stockholm for an hour or two however, there might be mass hysteria.

The same case can be made for the other criteria the report’s authors used.

But the difficulty of measuring happiness does not take away from its importance in our lives or reduce its validity as a measure of development. Everything we do in life is with happiness as the ultimate aim, to the extent that we achieve happiness it can be argued can be related to our level of development or lack of thereof.

"To use the analogy of a business, profit maybe the ultimate aim but it is achieved as a byproduct of providing goods and services to a demanding public. To go out and aim for profit directly is akin to being on the soccer pitch and focussing on the score board instead of playing the game....

The same with happiness, you cannot achieve it by being determined to be happy but by a roundabout way .

Which brings us to the issue of development.

Whereas there can be year-on-year economic growth – an increase in output, there may not be development, where this economic growth is spread more equitably.

A more developed economy, as defined above, would have happier people than a less developed economy.

"Economic growth is critical for development but is not an end in itself. This latest endeavour comes out of growing realisation of this by the masters of the universe....

The UN’s Human Development Index, which has been in effect since 1990 was the previous one to recognise that economic growth is not enough but its impact on the community should be the end.

Happiness is an ethereal concept but the sooner we get our planners to wrap their minds around it as a goal to aim for the better for us.

LESSONS FROM ACROSS THE BORDER

Recognising that Kenya’s public service wage bill had ballooned out of control last week Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto volunteered to forgo a fifth of their salary and urged other top executives in government to do the same.

The cabinet secretaries—the equivalent of ministers seem to have grudgingly passed on 10 percent of their salaries by the time of writing this.

According to official figures about 55 percent of the budget goes to paying public servants’ salaries. 

According to the record there are 700,000 public servants, a figure some say is half full of ghost workers, who cost their economy Kshs1.8b or sh54b a year in our money.

This is a pressing issue because

years of mismanagement of the economy means that Kenya has fallen behind in building infrastructure to service its growing population. As it is now our eastern neighbour should be spending $2.1b a year for the ten years to just be current with its citizens' needs.

So that is why Kenyatta and his team have taken the unprecedented step of taking a pay cut. In effect leading by example.

In order to find resources to keep up with the country’s obligations they know, and Uhuru made it an election pledge that they are going to go at the public service wage bill with machetes, maybe chainsaws.

One suspects that this ballooning payroll has its roots in euphoria following the ejection of KANU – the party that had ruled Kenya since independence in 1963. For every KANU sympathiser who was shown the door at least two people were hired into the public service.

In addition the new constitution created new layers of government, with the two houses and the devolution of power to the counties. Not to mention the affirmative action stipulations to guarantee that public service positions show at least a one-to-two ratio of the sexes...

From a political standpoint Kenyatta has to move quickly to fulfil this pledge, do it early enough that it does not cause problems at the next elections and also because the sooner they get working on expanding key infrastructure the sooner they can get the economy growing and reduce the disgruntlement at the current state of affairs.

Last year economic growth fell short of the targeted 5.7 percent, coming in at 5.1 percent.

The two places where politicians seek to reward supporters is in government jobs and public contracts.

More government jobs just lowers efficiency and this added injection into the economy often goes towards consumption rather than production, which has relatively small effect on the economy. If the public contracts involve infrastructure development however and they are carried out well enough the benefits to the economy can be massive.

So the Uhuru’s have their brains in the right place. If they can only shift more and more resources to infrastructure development they can go back to a bigger public sector and everybody will be happy.

President Yoweri Museveni said as much during a recent EAC meeting where he alluded to how the east Asian countries held the wage bill down while pumping massive resources into infrastructure and social services.

In the short term it can be a politically unpopular trade off but not to do it now will only increase social tensions that will threaten Kenya’s stability. While it is the largest economy in the region it has the widest wealth disparities in the region too. A formula for chaos if it persists.

"Great wealth disparities in an economy are an indictment on the government of the day. It often means while they may be generating economic growth they are not spreading around the love by taxing the producers to fund public goods like physical and social infrastructure adequately to allow more people to climb the social ladder...

You can actually have a big economy, even  have mouth-watering GDP per capita figures while the largest proportion of your people are living in abject poverty. Ask the people of Equatorial Guinea.

In Uganda official figures show that we have been more prudent with our public wage bill, with it accounting for under 30 percent of the total budget. We should maintain our vigilance on this number, regardless of the political pressure and focus on uplifting our physical and social infrastructure for long term sustainable development.

THE GUNS HAVE FALLEN SILENT BUT THE WAR IS NOT OVER

Last week former Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) captives petitioned parliament. The former captives, all women, were seeking reparations from government, many of them had mothered children with LRA fighters, ostracised by the community for it and had no access to resources to bring up the children.

They were therefore seeking compensation from government for the suffering they had gone through during their captivity.

The lawyers may contest the legality of such a claim but from a purely humanitarian standpoint it is a claim that would be hard to reject, if only because more flimsy and unwarranted claims have been rushed through our systems at breakneck speed.

"The war in northern Uganda is only over for people who do not come from the region, because they are not confronted with the after effects of lost relatives, broken homes and sub –human levels of poverty. However the country, whether we acknowledge it or not, is still reeling from the more than two-decade long insurgency in terms of lack of national cohesion, continued suspicion against the government and the continued losses to the economy that come with a significant portion of our population not fulfilling their economic potential...

The LRA insurgency started as retreating soldiers of the UNLA made a last stand in northern Uganda against the NRA, who had captured Kampala in January 1986. Along the way the rebellion was hijacked, finally coming under the control of Joseph Kony, who wasted no time with trying to win the hearts and minds of his tribesmen, but set upon a campaign of terror, conscripting children into his ranks as sex slaves and child soldiers.

The NRA cannot be exonerated. It had its lapses in discipline – as President Yoweri Museveni acknowledged earlier this year, with the general population stuck in the middle with nowhere to go. War is messy business, a far cry from the sanitised images we see beamed down to us from Hollywood.

A coincidence of events triggered by the Al Qaeda attack on New York’s Twin Towers in 2001 led to the labelling of the LRA as a terrorist organisation, forcing Khartoum to cut off support to Kony and allow the UPDF to take the fight to the rebels in Southern Sudan.

The LRA’s operations in Uganda ended around 2002 but the UPDF has continued to pursue and harass Kony and his bands through southern Sudan, eastern Congo and into the Central African Republic.

The war left in its wake a dislocated society and an economy on its knees.

Last week one foreign report warned that Kony still remains a menace hundreds of miles away from home.

With this background a case for the victims of the war is not difficult to sustain, if only to prevent a future generation growing with bitterness in their hearts and vengeance on their minds.

"No amount of money can replace the lost childhoods of these young mothers or the unimaginable suffering they endured in the bush or the irreparable damage to their kids who have lived their formative years in a state of hunger and deprivation, their future prospects already compromised...

But as a gesture of the country’s solidarity with the region and collective determination to overcome the horrors of the insurgency it is as good as any.

"Capturing or even killing Kony will serve only as an opportunity for political chest thumping, it may even serve as an opportunity to poke around his mouth and study his unique case of psychosis but it does nothing to set the issue to rest...

When we recognise that, progress can begin to be made.

Unfortunately too our brothers in the north have learnt the habits of theft and corruption and funds being channeled to the reconstruction of northern Uganda are finding their way into the pockets of a few connected Kampalans. They shall get their just rewards. 

But we should not dismiss it as their problem, because as long as one part of the country is not benefiting from the economic growth, is the extent to which this progress is not sustainable. Poverty is a recipe for instability and without stability there can be no economic growth or development.

The honourable lady member from Pader MP Lowila Oketayot couldn’t have said it better when she said, “guns have gone silent, but the war is not over.”