|
CHALLENGES OF GOVERNANCE
2006-11-17 ADDRESS BY
H.E. YOWERI KAGUTA MUSEVENI
PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF UGANDA
ON CHALLENGES OF GOVERNANCE
AT THE EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT DAYS FORUM
Brussels, Belgium,
17th November 2006
Your Excellency the President of the European Commission,
Your Excellencies Heads of State and Government,
Commissioners of the European Commission,
Ladies and Gentlemen.
CHALLENGES OF GOVERNANCE:
I have been in leadership for the last forty one (41) years (since 1965). As a student-leader, a community-leader - leading peasants in the struggle to transition from a traditional (non-monetized) lifestyle to commercial production, as a leader of resistance fighters against neo-colonial despots and, more recently, as a state leader.
What leadership challenges have I noticed and how have I, along with my colleagues, addressed them? Rather than enumerating the specific challenges we faced in the successive phases, let me distil the common elements in the methodology we used to address them.
I would like to compare leadership challenges to medical work – the work of a doctor. A doctor listens to a patient describing his sickness, carries out investigations (physical examination, examining the samples from the body, etc), diagnoses the sickness and, then, he makes the prescription. Thereafter, the doctor keeps reviewing the patient to see how he/she is responding to the prescribed treatment. This is, more or less, what we did with our situation in Uganda. Since we had been born and grown up in our society, we knew the dynamics of our society.
Uganda, in the past, did not have the phenomenon of extreme poverty mainly because the population was small and the natural resources (land, water, etc) were plenty. The main problem, therefore, was not accessing modern techniques of living. Our people were depending on the traditional techniques as shown by the following examples: labour (the hand hoe); for locomotion they relied on walking bare footed or with traditional sandals for long distances; for power they relied on the bio-mass in the form of fire-wood; untreated poles and thatch for building; fetching water from the streams and wells on our heads, etc. All these techniques were either inefficient or even hazardous.
Take, for instance, relying on untreated water from streams and wells; not only was it tedious and time-consuming, but, sometimes, the water would carry water-borne diseases.
As the population has increased (from 41/2 million in 1956 to 28 million today), the natural resources per capita that were taken for granted in the past are reducing especially if we maintain a pre-industrial mode of life. The greatest challenge we faced and still face, therefore, was the one of transformation of our societies from the remnants of the traditional peasant, quasi-feudal society, with a sprinkling of a small comprador bourgeoisie created by colonial and neo-colonial conditions, to a middle-class, skilled working class society as has happened in Europe in the last 500 years.
I often hear clichés about “sustainable development”!! How can you have sustainable development without transformation? How can one have a sustainable pregnancy without that pregnancy transitioning into a baby, a child, a teenager, an adolescent, an adult etc? We have long observed that the obstacles to this transformation in Uganda have been both endogenous (within Uganda) and exogenous (from outside).
On the 8th-10th of June 2004, I addressed the G.8 Summit at Sea Island-Georgia as part of the African Union (AU) delegation of Heads of State, a document that can be accessed on the internet (www.statehouse.go.ug). I identified eight (8) strategic bottlenecks that have caused Africa to lag behind.
In this short statement, I will highlight only five (5) of them:
(i) The political fragmentation that enabled the Europeans to colonize us in the first place;
(ii) The curse imposed on us by colonialism of “producing what we did not consume and consuming what we did not produce” by relying on the export of raw-materials;
(iii) Lack of human resource development through improved health and education for all;
(iv) Building a capable democratic state with the necessary pillars such as army, judiciary, civil service, etc; and
(v) Emancipating the private sector through a Private Sector-led Growth Strategy.
If we take, as an example, some of these five strategic bottlenecks, one can see that: -
(i) The balkanization was sustained by the African chiefs and worsened by Colonialism;
(ii) The reliance on the export of raw-materials and disruption of the internal cohesion of our economies was a colonial creation maintained by a neo-colonial mind-frame and interests.
In the case of Uganda, we defeated the rump of the colonial state, built our own democratic state with the necessary pillars – that is why we have been able to survive and even prosper in the turbulent Great Lakes Region that also neighbours Sudan. On the side of human resource development, we have introduced Universal Primary Education (UPE) and Universal Secondary Education (USE) – the literacy rate in Uganda is now 70 percent. Above all, Uganda took the lead in emancipating the Private Sector from the threats of nationalization and we are trying to remove other bureaucratic obstacles to business. The other obstacles are also being addressed with our African brothers and sisters.
One of the biggest challenges African freedom fighters have faced in the Struggle to identify and deal with these bottlenecks has been external meddling in decision-making, even after independence.
Of course, the Africans are slowly defeating this. It has, however, consumed a lot of our time as well as energy and caused a lot of losses in terms of human lives. Currently, Uganda is facing a power shortage. This shortage was caused by external meddling, among other problems. My plans of building more dams on the Nile were interfered with by external forces that argued that Uganda was in a new danger: “the danger of having too much electricity”!!
Challenges of leadership are, therefore, contextual in terms of time and place. In order to have World peace and universal transformation, we should respect the rights of all peoples to decide their destiny themselves without meddling. If you think you have got a good model, let others copy it because of its attractiveness not because of coercion or manipulation. In the bible, in the book of Mathew Chapter five (5) verse (16), it says: “In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in Heaven.”
In the specific case of Uganda, we have, since some years ago, achieved minimum economic recovery in the sectors of transport, housing, macro-economic stability, supply of manufactured consumer goods and services etc. Uganda has never had shortage of food even in the worst of times.
In addition, we have expanded Universal Primary Education (UPE) and are introducing Universal Secondary Education (USE) starting 2007. By relying on Private-sector-led growth, therefore, the economy, growing at an average of 6.5 percent per annum for the last nineteen (19) years, has not only recovered but has also expanded in sectors and enterprises that need low investment (of about US$ 1 million), low technology and higher returns.
Therefore, you get a lot of hair saloons, bars, petrol stations, motor transport companies, private schools etc. Some private companies have come into the telecommunications sector – pushing telephone lines from 28,000 in 1997 to 1.5 million lines now.
On account of low savings, however, our people do not have enough money to go into investments that require US$ 20 million per unit like you need for textile mills, processing coffee, building modern abattoirs (about US$ 10 million), leather treatment plants, etc.
We have attracted Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) in fish processing – eighteen (18) factories bringing in US$ 140 million of forex earnings per annum; some investments in flowers (bringing US$ 40 million) per annum; some tea factories - bringing in US$ 37 million per annum; some sugar factories – saving us US$ 120 million per annum;
a cobalt factory – bringing in US$ 11 million per annum; gold processing – bringing in US$ 61 million per annum, etc.
However, in the other sectors we continue to export raw materials (coffee, cotton, tobacco, leather, coltan, gold, etc). By so doing, we are earning only 10% of the ex-factory value per kilogram of the concerned commodities. If you take coffee in raw-material form, we earn US$ 1 per kilogram. After processing the same coffee in the Nestle factories in London, the same kilogram earns US$ 15, at least. By the time of the retail, that Kilogram can go up to US$ 70!! On account of this, the coffee business in the world is now US$ 71 billion. However, the coffee growing and exporting countries only earn US$ 5 billion of this. We are slowly addressing this inequity; this modern slavery of Africa. When some groups talk of “aid”, this is a mockery. Who is aiding who? Uganda has been aiding the outside world for the last 100 years by contributing, at least, US$ 10 in every kilogram of coffee or cotton exported.
In some years, Uganda exports 180,000 tonnes of coffee per annum. Do the necessary calculations and see the hemorrhage Africa has been suffering from.
Nevertheless, I salute President Bill Clinton, President George W. Bush, the European Union (EU) and, recently, China. After much pressure, these countries have opened their markets for African products with tariff-free, quota-free access arrangements in the form of African Growth Opportunities Act (AGOA), Everything But Arms (EBA) etc. The United States has allowed, under this arrangement, for 6,500 products; China, recently, allowed 440 products. In respect of European Union, this act of opening your market to African final products, not raw materials, is the greatest act of solidarity between you and us in the last 500 years. Much of the other years, the interaction was parasitic, in favour of the West – slave-trade, Colonialism, Neo-Colonialism, export of raw-materials etc. I salute you, therefore, for this belated act of real solidarity.
A country like Uganda, given what we have already achieved, especially the education levels of our society, can use this stimulus of market access, to quickly transition from Third World to First World, from quasi-feudal, comprador bourgeois, peasant society to middle-class, skilled working class society like Europe did in the last 500 years.
In the case of Uganda, in addition to what is already being done, we need three things:
(i) Cheap electricity, using our hydro and geo-thermal resources;
(ii) Lowering the cost of transport to the sea – especially using the railway system through Kenya and Tanzania; and
(iii) Value addition to our wide spectrum of raw-materials (coffee, cotton, leather etc). The value-addition would increase our forex earnings, at least, ten times; create jobs, widen the state’s tax base, etc. Assist European companies to invest in value-addition in Uganda and Africa in general or stop interfering in our efforts of doing so including using a mixture of public and private investment to solve this problem of modern slavery for Africa.
Recently, our scientists, after work of nineteen (19) years, have discovered Petroleum in Uganda. The first refined products will come on the market in 2009. The earnings from this product will, of course, make our transformation from Third to First World much faster.
Instead of endlessly haggling with a multiplicity of actors about our future, we shall just move under our own power. Then, the only action from the West, China, Russia, India, etc., will be to keep their markets open to our products tariff-free, quota-free.
I thank you.
17th November 2006
Brussels.
..End. |
