Moses Khisa
Not unlike other African countries, Uganda is in the throes of a monumental economic and demographic nightmare: masses of especially young people unable to lead productive lives and pursue meaningful careers.
This week, taking a leaf from events across the border in Kenya, young Ugandans attempted to march to Parliament to express outrage at the nation’s state of economic hopelessness and hardship while the political classes and their accomplices steal from the public purse.
Unlike in Kenya, where there is a civilian and relatively democratic government, the military rulership in Uganda, with a knack for brutal exercises of raw power, couldn’t allow protesting Ugandans to express their constitutional right to assembly and free expression.
But raw, coercive power is difficult to sustain. There are limits. It is only a matter of time that the military and police forces fall short of stopping angry citizens demanding for better government and meaningful livelihoods.
After nearly four decades of free market fundamentalist policies, dictated by Western allies of the Museveni regime, Uganda remains a country with a tiny economy in the face of a surging population.
Contrary to stylised stories about skilling, and narratives that simplistically assign blame to graduates who study ‘wrong’ courses, supposedly merely theoretical and not marketable, the bottomline is that there aren’t many openings and opportunities in a small economy as ours.
Precise and comprehensive unemployment figures are not always readily available (polling and survey would help, but we just do not have much of that stuff in Uganda), however, anecdotally the struggle for meaningful employment cuts across training specialisations and skills-sets. Undoubtedly, the problem is pronounced in some fields and subjects of study than others; but limited opportunities pervade Uganda’s jobs landscape.
A large source of the problem is the dearth of production of tangible goods from where real jobs can be created. With the swift embrace of a neoliberal economic agenda came the dismantling and near death of Uganda’s traditional productive sectors including value-added manufacturing. Over the years, manufacturing has grown at a very negligible rate, far below the services sectors – the largest drivers of Uganda’s much-touted growth.
The bedrock of Uganda’s economy from the colonial times was always the production of raw materials for export. It is what the colonial apparatus set the economy to be – serve the raw material needs of the colonialising power.
With independence, the overarching economic strategy by nationalist-oriented leaders, of which Milton Obote and his first government deserve mention, was to industrialise, to move in the direction of value-added production of finished goods than the export of raw cotton, copper and coffee.
Whatever foundation laid by the first Obote government suffered erosion during the decade of Idi Amin’s rule, despite other positive economic steps, but especially got substantial pushback once the International Monetary Fund came into town in the early 1980s, then the subsequent full throttle once the current rulers took power in 1986.
With wide-ranging privatisation came the steady decline and ultimately near death of manufacturing, thus reverting to traditional extraction of raw materials for export and import of basic consumables and finished goods.
Also, a major outcome was the shift to a speculative services economy dominated by foreign capital in the areas of banking, insurance and telecoms. These sectors have delivered impressive growth figures but negligible jobs.
Little growth in the sectors that produce actual goods has meant that the masses of young people hunting for jobs can’t get them, many ending up in hopeless circumstances of outright unemployment or struggling in all manner of ways including the sad spectre of riding boda-bodas in a lawless environment.
If not humiliated by outright unemployment, Ugandans are pulverised by serving the profit interests of foreign capital, and doing so in a manner that strips us of our basic humanity and dignity. That is what is happening in the boda-boda sector, now a central feature of what has gone wrong and how not to fix it.
We can throw more and more passenger motorcycles on the roads, but Uganda’s unemployment problem will keep soaring until we return to the basics of what makes a poor country make breakthroughs on the path to socioeconomic transformation.
The resounding verdict of the neoliberal era is that, GDP growth and macroeconomic stability are not enough; on their own they don’t create jobs.
The government’s flirtation with reviving the cooperative movement and rebuilding its infrastructure points to the realisation that key components of the neoliberal agenda must be abandoned. The attempt to develop financing avenues for investment and production means the government has to face up to the folly of leaving access to credit to the whims and profit calculations of the ‘free’ market forces.
The reality though is that the current government and set of elite-actors are woefully incapable of undoing the neoliberal imprints and reversing course in ways that can bring about transformation. It will be a long, treacherous road ahead in turning around the current train and trajectory.
Moses Khisa,
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