Prime
Rationalisation of UCDA: A great policy with a trust problem
What you need to know:
- Ugandans want government efficiency. Rationalisation gives them that
- The days when the President’s words were taken at face value seem to be fast receding in the mirror.
Coffee is a crop that has gone through the ups and downs and with it, either brought to fruition or killed dreams of societies. For aeons, the coffee value chain from the farm to the cup has been marked with complexity, diversity and contradictions.
It should, therefore, surprise no student of the history of coffee that the country is caught in a heated exchange over the best direction the government should take to shepherd this most important of Uganda’s cash crops.
Its role in building sociability, labour and economic mobility can’t be underestimated. It has been this way for ages. Coffee is the fifth most traded commodity in the world, only behind gold, petroleum, silver and copper.
In Uganda, coffee brings in about $1 billion every year and supports millions of people. The government looks at agriculture that employs nearly 70 percent of its working population, only being responsible for 24 percent of the GDP, as a clear invitation for improved efficiency, value addition and with it, a command for higher prices on the global market.
The same government is suddenly embracing austerity measures hitherto treated as an alien concept. Part of these austerity measures is the massively sold rationalisation of government parastatals that only years ago were being formed faster than one can imagine; against public sentiment.
The rationalisation train has reached the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA), an entity working at the nerve centre of the most prized of Ugandan cash crops.
Suddenly, we are seeing large sections of the public up in arms and fighting a policy that only a few years back, they would have cheered to the high heavens.
They’re now more embracing of outright lies and misrepresentation of the President’s message.
One of the most told lies is that somehow, UCDA is responsible for the high prices that have led to increased income to farmers. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As the President has explained in three online missives, extreme weather conditions in Brazil (frost), El Niño induced drought in Vietnam, drought and immigration-induced labour shortages in Latin America etc. have driven global coffee supply numbers down and thus led to increased prices.
Then you have a misrepresentation of the coffee seedlings programme, the distortion of the European Union-funded marching grant scheme, extension worker services and other initiatives, all aimed towards creating a narrative that without UCDA, farmers should expect doom and gloom.
Of course, this is wildly exaggerated and has met with fierce pushback from the President himself. Sadly, his voice doesn’t seem to be fully penetrating the walls fortified by recent utterances on the floor of Parliament by Speaker Anita Among as well as the intrigue and distrust that is a mainstay of our politics.
The days when the President’s words were taken at face value seem to be fast receding in the mirror.
It’s not a good place for our society to be but also, it isn’t shocking.
Through years of looking on helplessly as State institutions are essentially taken and turned into State-backed administrative outposts of private interests, it should not be surprising that Ugandans will treat with scepticism the government’s move to implement that which they’ve been asking for.
Ugandans want government efficiency. Rationalisation gives them that. It merges government entities and maximises efficiency. It’s the argument they made against the creation of UCDA back in 1994. It’s a winning argument that the country should embrace. The trouble is it’s from a hand they have grown accustomed to distrust and falsehoods.
Mr Anthony Natif is a team head, Public Square. @TonyNatif
