Uganda@60: A big house built on a weak foundation
Author: Francis Mwijukye. PHOTO/FILE/COURTESY
What you need to know:
- Indeed, looking at these, one would see that there is progress being made. This is normal because even a human being at 60 should have produced some children or built himself some grass-thatched house, but would this be enough justification to chest-thumb that there is progress?
Last Sunday, Uganda celebrated 60 years since independence. On such a day, the discussion has always centred on the achievements in social and economic development. This includes issues such as roads, hospitals, universities, factories, exports, and military power, among others.
Indeed, looking at these, one would see that there is progress being made. This is normal because even a human being at 60 should have produced some children or built himself some grass-thatched house, but would this be enough justification to chest-thumb that there is progress?
Whereas these developments are important, they form the hardware part of a country’s development and not the software. The hardware looks at development while the software looks at the quality and sustainability of this progress.
If I was to use a telephone as an example, the hardware is the physical phone, you can touch it and feel it while the software is the data, airtime, and an application like WhatsApp, and they are intangible.
A physical phone, no matter how expensive, can only have value if it has the above-mentioned software.
For a country, the roads, electricity, schools, hospitals, buildings, bridges, railway, airports, telecommunications, etc form the hardware while issues such as justice, democracy, constitutionalism, rule of law, transparency, moral values, accountability, patriotism, free and fair elections, respect for human rights, among others form the software.
So, a country that boasts of infrastructure development without the above-mentioned attributes I referred to as software is like an expensive phone without airtime.
To put this into context, we have seen countries that had good infrastructure crumble just because they built their developments on a weak foundation. Countries like Libya under Muammah Gadaffi, Somalia under Siad Barre, and Zimbabwe during the early days of Robert Mugabe, Iraq under Saddam Hussein to mention but a few crumbled despite having made huge progress in the infrastructure part. The challenges the world is facing today as a result of the Russia – Ukraine war stem from poor management of the software issues such as the use of dialogue as a conflict resolution mechanism.
The challenges that Uganda faced from independence to date that led to the demise of over a million people in endless wars did not stem from a lack of good infrastructure development, but from a lack of democracy, failure to have free and fair elections, lack of transparency by leaders, and intolerance to divergent views, among others.
The reason Gen Museveni went to the bush was not that Uganda lacked electricity or roads, it wasn’t because we lacked factories, etc., it was because of lack of democracy, failure to organise free and fair elections, lack of respect for human rights, nepotism within government.
A paper by Harrison Bardwell and Mohib Iqbal (2021) estimated that the world lost a total of $855 billion due to terrorism between 2001 and 2018, this is about three times the GDP of the seven countries in the East African community, but terrorism results from some people feeling a sense of injustice or unfairness. A young person who feels he or she has been denied a job on the basis of his or her tribe, does not mind whether the country has built flyovers and airports.
So, any country that wants to have sustainable development must focus on building those basics as a foundation for its growth.
The unfortunate thing is that for the 60 years since we got independence, we have never had a single peaceful handover of power, our elections are a battlefield between the military and the population, kidnaps and extrajudicial killings are on the rise, political space for citizen participation is narrowing, respect for human rights shrinking, impunity by the leaders at the rise, moral decay at its highest
Any developments achieved without building those basic fundamentals is like putting up a skyscraper on a weak foundation, it would be a matter of time for it to crumble.
Mr Francis Mwijukye is an MP for Buhweju and Shadow Minister for Trade and Industry.
