President Museveni, what you say isn’t what is done

Your Excellency, I would like to begin by thanking you so much for the brilliantly written end of year message 2023. You took time to carefully point out a couple of issues affecting our economy and how you believe they can be addressed.

However, it is worth noting that some of the issues you point out are mere rhetoric and will need more than these glorified speeches if they are to ever see the light of day.

You identified the need to get into commercial agriculture by undertaking both extensive and intensive approaches and even gave examples of success stories.

In all this, you insinuate that you are doing a lot in telling us what to do but we are either just stubborn or lack the interest in following your advice. While your advice is  welcome, it lacks the requisite ingredients to see us through. The examples you gave of people that have made it are not representative of the average Ugandan. These are individuals with exceptional resources at their disposal, your family inclusive. 

Intensive agriculture is indeed the way to go for land constrained households in densely populated districts like Butaleja. However, it requires more than just lip service.  Identification of location appropriate ventures is usually the first requirement. This is followed by stakeholder buy-in, skills transfer, implementation, value addition, collective trading and concluding with market access eventually. 

Unfortunately, the value chain is crippled at various stages due to inefficiencies in the operations of the respective government officials at all levels.

I do request that you focus on why there is no transformation of what you say into action on the ground despite the numerous projects that have been put on the ground. You highlighted the high employment in Agriculture as a sign of backwardness and propose that we focus on joining industry, services and ICT. While this is a good observation, do not forget that when it comes to development, there are no shortcuts. For Ugandans to wake up one day and transition into these sectors shall require us to follow the Darwinian approach to evolution.

The development of an industrial society is always a sequential process starting from the agricultural and artisan stage to the proto-industrial stage and so on. For proper industrialization to take root, there are no shortcuts.  There is a tendency to adopt economic theories that make us attempt to leapfrog into embracing advanced capital-intensive industries only for such top-down approaches to violate the historical sequence of industrial revolution hence leading to deformed capitalism.

As a country, we seem to have good plans, but implementation is topsy-turvy by nature. The very Agriculture you say is keeping us backward is currently our competitive advantage and as we yearn to transition to the industrial stage, we can still change livelihoods significantly at this level.  You are a champion of value addition. If for example you redirected the resources that have so far been dumped into Kiira Motors, Lubowa Hospital and other ventures targeting a few capitalists into more value-addition opportunities across the different agriculture sectors, wouldn’t we have a more inclusive development approach? The way you did for those Dairy farmers of Kiruhura and Kazo that you are going to meet.

For successful industrialization, we shall need as a nation to effectively equip our people with the appropriate skills as opposed to the current mad dash for meaningless university degrees.

Mr James Wire is an entrepreneur & business consultant. 
Wirejames.com