How to create a magical Uganda by boiling it down

Former Monitor MD and Bukhooli Central member of Parliament Wafula Oguttu used to hold a simple but powerful view. That, in Africa, and Uganda in particular, governments shouldn’t try to do many things across several sectors at the time.

They would fail, either because they would spread meagre available resources too thinly or they needed to have the skills to do many things at a go.

I don’t know if he still holds that view, but several years later, I find it still compelling. I think that from a programmatic point of view, beyond fighting corruption, building infrastructure, and things like security, if I were an all-powerful president in Uganda with a large subservient majority in Parliament as President Yoweri Museveni has, I would do mainly four things for two years.

First, I would tackle education.

I recently viewed a viral video of former Forum Democratic Change (FDC) Dr Kizza Besigye talking about what ails Uganda and what might be done to turn it around. 

He spoke about the state of its education, illustrating how shambolic it is by comparing what was being spent on a single student in primary school in Uganda relative to other countries.

Norway, he noted, spends $12,680 per child per year. In Africa, South Africa spends an average of  $1,700 per child. Egypt spends $300, and Rwanda spends $57.

He said that Kenya spends $14.20, and Uganda a miserly $5.20. That $5.20 is terrible, but it is not Africa’s lowest.

 If one wants data that explains why Africa is still so woefully underdeveloped, nothing could be better than Besigye’s figures (they have changed slightly since but remain in the same ballpark).

I would immediately reverse the creation of districts, which are soon nearing a record 150.  The cash-strapped government no longer has money to run them, and its employees and bills are going unpaid for months.

The current freeze on district creation has come too late.

The idea of “bringing services close to the people” has great merit, but giving every clan its district is the worst possible way to go about it.

What might work is to create regions based on services.

The first service would be to create Education regions or zones; Northern Education Zone, Western Education Zone, Eastern Education Zone, Southern Education Zone, and Kampala Education Zone. Their leaders would be cabinet-level figures sitting in the regions.

We get all the money being spent on districts, add part of it to the existing education budget, and divide it among zonal education authorities.

 Their goal would be to rebuild all dilapidated classrooms; retrain and recruit teachers; buy a minimum level number of textbooks for the schools; increase teacher salaries by 50 percent; and task them with improving student study outcomes by the same 50 percent in two years.

Sub-regional parent teachers associations (PTAs) would be established and given democratic oversight of education and its budgets in the zones.

Secondly, I would do the same for Health. Thirdly for Agriculture (and the environment). And fourthly, for public infrastructure. I would abolish ministries like Science, Technology, and Innovation, and a few others, and turn them into executive authorities like Uganda Revenue Authority.

I would also dismantle the large cabinet and have only 20 ministers and 20 ministers of state. All these sub-ministries and ministerships like Karamoja Affairs, Luwero, Northern Uganda, and Teso, I would throw out of the window.

How would the schools and health centres be rebuilt? Because we are the second youngest country in the world, with some of the highest levels of youth unemployment, I would create a massive National Youth and Emergency Services Corps.

I would unleash these young people to rebuild schools, go and clean and patch up health centres and hospitals – and do the same for Police and Army barracks.

Additionally, they would be trained to be a national response service for emergencies, like mudslides in Bugisu and Kasese.

To reduce corruption and spur efficiencies, I would push through a law that provides that any zonal authority that completes its tasks ahead of or on time and under budget share the savings among themselves – and the youth - and eat it. In two years, Uganda would be magical.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3