In his article entitled “World Bank lacks good intentions for Uganda” (New Vision of Monday October 29, 2007), Warren Nyamugasira launched a stinging attack on World Bank’s recent economic assessment on Uganda. He accused the international lending institution and other development partners of harbouring a hidden agenda aimed at stifling government response to spiralling poverty and declining economic growth.
This was after Wold Bank had released a Country Economic Memorandum, castigating the Ugandan government for loosing focus from its core development strategy – and instead diverting its attention to ad-hoc alternative interventions.
Compared with other developing countries, Uganda is exceptional in the degree it has made poverty the central focus of its intervention. It has a robust development strategy – the Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) which provides the long-term framework for catalysing and sustaining economic growth.
According to PEAP, poverty will be reduced through better macro-economic management; enhancing production, competitiveness and household incomes; improving security and governance; and investing in human development.
Boosting private investment; eliminating corruption; enhancing transparency and accountability; modernising agriculture, natural resource conservation, infrastructural improvements and private sector skills development are elements envisaged under PEAP framework to provide a platform for a private-sector led economic growth.
While income poverty incidence reduced in the 1990s, poverty prevalence has increased since 2000. Inequality has worsened since 1997; infant and child mortality have both increased; while the poorest hardly benefit from development. The gross failures in the government’s economic growth strategy are a universal concern.
Despite these failures, World Bank, and some of us strongly believe (to Nyamugasira’s distaste) that the current development strategy is robust enough to deliver economic gains; and that we don’t need a fundamentally new approach. Government only needs to address itself adequately to the core elements of PEAP.
Corruption and abuse of office is rampant; physical infrastructural facilities are rotten; while agricultural production and marketing systems remain in shambles. Trade policies – the few that Government have negotiated are irrelevant to the rural poor – and could in fact be fuelling economic inequalities.
Moreover, fiscal indiscipline is at all-time high – considering recent revelations that government granted and eventually lost trillions of shillings in unsecured loans to its confidant businessmen and companies.
Granted, Universal Primary Education has increased school enrolment but at the expense of education quality. Few people will disagree that Universal Secondary Education will further plunge educational standards in the country – especially given government’s disproportionate attention to education facilities; teacher training, facilitation and motivation.
World Bank’s considered opinion is that rather than dismantle the current economic growth apparatus, Government needs to focus more on inherent weakness therein; plug all the loopholes, and purge the debilitating factors.
Ad-hoc alternatives such as Bona Bagagawale (Prosperity for all) don’t constitute anything fundamentally different from what we have seen. The same government experimented with Entandikwa in the 90s– which ended in disaster. The Bona Bagagawale project will, as World Bank correctly noted, promote selective lending and therefore aggravate rural inequality and poverty.
Since 2001, government has been using NAADS as the main avenue for enhancing household incomes. NAADS has a unique approach that is all inclusive – mainstreaming gender and targeting the poor through its farmer fora mechanism. The only requirement for farmers to access NAADS services is for them to join common interest farmers groups – which as experience shows, tend to be all-inclusive.
NAADS may not be bringing riches to farmers as fast as anybody would have wished but it is, and might remain the best option for three quarters of the Ugandan population. Warren Nyamugasira should explain why more farmer groups are joining NAADS every year despite his assertion that farmers loath it.
World Bank is clear: Let Government give a chance to ongoing development mechanisms rather than animatedly shift goal-posts. Fundamentally, this calls for a sustained focus and concentration on the principles of PEAP coupled with self-cleansing. We don’t have to be like the Batwa (pygmies) of Semliki and Bwindi national parks who desert their forest dwellings every time some one dies in there. Truth is sometimes bitter, but government should heed World Bank advice!
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