Author: Moses Khisa. PHOTO/FILE
I want to pick up from last week, starting with a disclaimer: I’m no economist. I was trained to teach, research and write about politics. But politics is economics, and economics is politics. As a student of politics, I pay close attention to broad economic trends but not the technical details and minutia that is the business of trained and professional economists.
Last week, I noted that Uganda’s economic performance over the last close to four decades is quite modest, not a miracle, contrary to what President Museveni and his supporters tend to project.
There are a few headline facts worth underscoring, perhaps the most important being that Uganda has had an uninterrupted growth trajectory for all the time President Museveni has been in power. There is not a single year when the economy did not grow. But growth is never uniform or constant, it has booms and bursts, slowdowns and accelerations, strong performance in some sectors and lacklustre in others. The bottomline is that every year since 1987, overall economic growth has been positive.
That is the broad good news anyone looking at the data or who takes interests knows all too well. The bad news is that the growth isn’t good enough, not the kind that brings about noticeable and fundamental transformation in the structure of society and economic outlook.
Even more dispiriting is the fact that, broken down sector-by-sector, Uganda’s growth has mostly been in the ‘wrong’ sectors – the sectors that have done well are not the core for a poor country and do not include majority of citizens.
After these many decades of touted economic performance, Uganda is still largely an agrarian society, most citizens living off the land using rudimentary tools and techniques of agriculture, getting along in a subsistence manner with little engagement in the market.
Uganda’s economy is largely Kampala-based. While greater Kampala, including the districts of Mukono and Wakiso, has less than one-fifth of the total national population, it accounts for more than three-quarters of our Gross National Product (GDP), our economy.
In fact, it is estimated that more than 60 percent of our GDP is concentrated in Kampala’s central business district, a tiny radius with a negligible number of actual residents! This wouldn’t be much of a problem if the countryside too had a substantial chunk of the economy in relative terms such that people’s actual livelihoods at a minimum can modestly improve.
The people who toil in the scotching sun all day, working the fields to grow food and other agricultural produce, get paltry returns in cash value and wealth accumulation. These are the vast majority of Ugandans. They work so hard but earn very little.
Practically, they are not very different from the masses of the unemployed in urban centres. Both those working the fields, but with very little actual output, and the unemployed masses do little to add to the stock of the economy; their contribution to the national GDP is miniscule if not entirely zero.
The growth that the president trumpets is concentrated in areas with very few Ugandans, largely under the dominance, if not altogether total control, of foreign capital and business interests. I must pause to note that all these problems with the economy are not entirely unique to Uganda as they apply to most African countries, albeit to varying degrees, the same way that Uganda’s GDP growth figures are not that different from the record of other peer-countries.
The point is to disabuse the president and regime supporters from conjuring up a picture of impressive economic performance that doesn’t square with the data and actual lived conditions of the country.
Today, we are a country of huge socioeconomic-dependence such that a citizen with some income must necessarily shoulder a huge burden of supporting especially relatives but also friends who have no income at all! Only a tiny fraction of Ugandans have a decent monthly income.
In most of rural Uganda, biting poverty and all the dehumanisations that go with material deprivations are stark and sobering. While nominal poverty head count, the percentage of Ugandans living below the so-called poverty line, has declined significantly over the past couple of decades, the reality remains that we are patently a poor country.
Part of the root cause of our mediocre economic performance, with positive GDP growth figures but no marked transformation, lies in the ideological conviction that Mr Museveni and his NRM imbibed from international financial institutions – neoliberalism is its name. This is the fiction that free-market economics on its own delivers miraculous economic transformation. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have been the foremost purveyors of this solemn article of faith, for which Mr Museveni became a most vociferous convert. But the IMF and the World Bank, or other believers of this faith, cannot point to a single country around the world that moved from being poor and socially backward, to economically transformed, through the neoliberal blind-faith in free markets. It is to this that I shall turn next.
Mr Moses Khisa, [email protected]
