Like the biblical prodigal son who “came back to himself” after spending a while in the wilderness of confusion, Government has finally made a U-turn and rescinded its unwarranted five-month suspension of NAADS.
By restoring NAADS, government has only corrected a deliberate fault and does not deserve any applause. In a country where farming is still entirely dependant on weather, farmers strictly align their activities to weather patterns. Whoever wants to support them must synchronise their support with their seasonal calendar. Government should therefore apologise for the gross disruption it caused on farming activities.
Moreover, government has never been convincing on why it banned NAADS in September 2007. The expert government panel which facilitated NAADS design consultations identified lack of farmer access to information, knowledge and technology as the biggest impediment to agricultural growth. It envisaged an agricultural transformation process maturing over at least 25 years and thus recommended that NAADS be given enough time (25 years) to build a firm foundation for sustainable, self-propelling farming enterprises.
However, government now wants to discount the projected achievements of the 25-year programme into two, three or maximum five years. By blasting NAADS for “having nothing to show” other than spending a lot on farmers’ education, government behaved like the impatient idealist, Obi Okwonko, whom Chinua Achebe portrays in his novel No Longer at Ease. Obi is out of touch with reality after spending a while in a western university and clamours upon his return, for space where he “can stand and move the world.” At the end, he becomes a victim of his impatient idealism. He is dejected, rejected by his own people, finally arrested and convicted in court.
Like the impatient idealist, government has expressed its desire to “give Uganda a new face” in the immediate term. It has reportedly completed a restructuring of NAADS so that it primarily focuses on agro input supply rather than information, knowledge, and farmers’ education. The restructuring has in essence converted NAADS into a relief organisation. How despicable!
While I appreciate that farmers are needy, NAADS objective was to fulfil the biblical philosophy: teaching man how to fish rather than give him fish” in accordance with expert panel recommendations. The “trained angler” would obviously need a “hook” to do a good job – which NAADS was providing through its enterprise promotion and technology multiplication strategy.
Obviously, the relief approach will not create a sustainable impact on farming communities. By their nature, relief programmes only provide a cosmetic end product. I have witnessed farmers cooking and eating hybrid seeds meant for demonstration and multiplication. In several parts of the country, there have been reports of farmers slaughtering imported exotic boar goats during Christmas, Easter and weddings rather than rearing them to cross breed with, and improve local goats. In Kabale, an innovative donkey initiative meant to alleviate constrained transportation of farm produce in remote, inaccessible villages ended disastrously when some malicious farmers poisoned and killed all the donkeys. Etc. Looking back, one key lesson learnt was that farmers were not adequately educated before introducing those technologies.
Government must realise that farmer education is the ignition key for agricultural transformation. The adoption process for any innovation starts with awareness. Only when somebody is aware about an innovation is he/she likely to develop interest. Interest will often be followed by a trial and evaluation phase before farmers choose to adopt or not.
Farmer education (demonstrations, seminars and workshops, music, dance drama, etc) catalyses the adoption process and creates necessary farmer demand for innovations. By restructuring NAADS into a relief organisation, government has effectively suffocated a vital catalyst for the adoption process. In the end, agricultural technologies will be thrown at ignorant farmers who will not know what to do with those technologies. Won’t that spell “business-as-usual?”
Let government be forewarned that if it must push more agro inputs to farmers, it ought to ensure that such a precarious detour doesn’t devalue the role of information, knowledge and farmer education. It is said, “You may force a cow to the river but you can’t force it to drink.” The onus is on government to avoid the predicament of Chinua Achebe’s impatient idealist!
20 December 2007
The first 10 years of Poverty Action Fund is woeful
I have always been complementary about Uganda’s policy and programmatic orientation towards poverty alleviation. We have a PEAP (Poverty Alleviation Plan); the PMA (Plan for Modernisation of Agriculture); NAADS (National Agricultural Advisory Services); Bona Baggagawale (prosperity for all); and other initiatives. All these poverty alleviation strategies are conceptually vibrant. What I find increasingly baffling though is how such vibrancy could fail to catalyse improved household incomes – especially in the rural areas.
Beginning 1998, Government created the Poverty Action Fund (PAF) to channel resources saved from the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt relief Initiative to PEAP sectors. Through PAF, Government pledged to increase direct funding for agriculture, infrastructure, health, and other social services. However, in contravention of the HIPC principles, millions of dollars worth of savings from international debt payments have continually been disproportionately allocated outside the PEAP thematic areas.
Consequently, PEAP and the PMA have largely remained paper tigers. On the other hand, NAADS and Bona Baggagawale have been catastrophically politicised with their funding hooked into Government’s political objectives rather than economic sustainability principles.
That may explain why poverty is escalating nationwide. More than 70% of the population in some regions (Northern Uganda) lives in abject poverty while one third of the country faces starvation. The recent (2007) UNDP Human Development Report for Uganda has confirmed that indeed Ugandans are in a poverty-freefall – having dropped 10 places on the global Human Development Index from 145 in 2006 to 154 in 2007.
At the programmatic level, the core assumptions underlying PMA, NAADS and Bona Baggagawale need critical re-examination. Farming remains a highly risky business. Seasonal price oscillations on farm inputs and outputs; continued lack of marketing infrastructure; absence of value-addition facilities accessible to rural subsistence farmers; and consequently the infinitesimal shelf life of agricultural produce – seem to have shattered farmers’ agricultural commercialisation dreams.
The reliability of the NAADS enterprise selection mechanism that ideally would orient farmer’s production activities to the market is compromised by vagaries in the market environment. Moreover, increasing land scarcity and fragmentation due to growing populations in some regions, coupled with widespread soil exhaustion have edged poor farmers out of the modernisation initiative.
This year’s Christmas and New Year pilgrimage to the Kigezi Highlands enabled me to interact with frustrated farmers who have given up hope of transforming their subsistence farming. I was struck by the rate at which enterprises (such as poultry and piggery) which had been appraised viable for land-constrained scenarios have been abandoned.
Poor farmers can’t meet livestock feed demands and have failed to expand their enterprises to economical threshold levels above which they would realise profit. In essence, the enterprises had become an added burden upon the impoverished households. Herein lies the evidence for UNDP assertion that more Ugandans have abandoned agriculture (UNDP Human Development Report, 2007).
Since more than 80% of Uganda’s population has nothing else to live on other than farming, abandoning farming without alternative livelihood options places the country into a historic predicament. As agriculture loses relevance to Ugandans, destitution will spiral uncontrollably out of hand. Are there any quick fix solutions to this quagmire? I don’t think so, but we are not stuck either!
Since infinitesimal, fragmented plots of land are economically unfeasible for farming, Government should address the politically unpalatable question of land consolidation. True, land belongs to the people but a package of appropriate incentives could trigger voluntary land consolidation.
A relatively shorter-term and easier solution could be to catalyse “block farming” – where multitudes of farmers with contiguous infinitesimal plots are incentivised to agree to a collective landuse plan. Block farming would build on farmer associations which NAADS is empowering; whereupon only farmers who agree to a block farming system would access NAADS and Bona Baggagawale funds. Setting aside an agricultural commodity stabilisation fund out of PAF would help farmers cope with the seasonally oscillating commodity prices.
Livelihoods diversification towards non-farm enterprises holds significant promise for resource-constrained farmers. Government however needs to devise and implement a regulatory and incentive regime to kick start non-farm business entrepreneurs.
With 10 years of a futile PAF, Government must reenergise the anti-poverty drive and address itself to the HIPC principles, which demand comprehensive commitments to poverty alleviation initiatives.
Published on: http://hdr.undp.org/en/nhdr/monitoring/news/2008/title,6807,en.html
Beginning 1998, Government created the Poverty Action Fund (PAF) to channel resources saved from the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt relief Initiative to PEAP sectors. Through PAF, Government pledged to increase direct funding for agriculture, infrastructure, health, and other social services. However, in contravention of the HIPC principles, millions of dollars worth of savings from international debt payments have continually been disproportionately allocated outside the PEAP thematic areas.
Consequently, PEAP and the PMA have largely remained paper tigers. On the other hand, NAADS and Bona Baggagawale have been catastrophically politicised with their funding hooked into Government’s political objectives rather than economic sustainability principles.
That may explain why poverty is escalating nationwide. More than 70% of the population in some regions (Northern Uganda) lives in abject poverty while one third of the country faces starvation. The recent (2007) UNDP Human Development Report for Uganda has confirmed that indeed Ugandans are in a poverty-freefall – having dropped 10 places on the global Human Development Index from 145 in 2006 to 154 in 2007.
At the programmatic level, the core assumptions underlying PMA, NAADS and Bona Baggagawale need critical re-examination. Farming remains a highly risky business. Seasonal price oscillations on farm inputs and outputs; continued lack of marketing infrastructure; absence of value-addition facilities accessible to rural subsistence farmers; and consequently the infinitesimal shelf life of agricultural produce – seem to have shattered farmers’ agricultural commercialisation dreams.
The reliability of the NAADS enterprise selection mechanism that ideally would orient farmer’s production activities to the market is compromised by vagaries in the market environment. Moreover, increasing land scarcity and fragmentation due to growing populations in some regions, coupled with widespread soil exhaustion have edged poor farmers out of the modernisation initiative.
This year’s Christmas and New Year pilgrimage to the Kigezi Highlands enabled me to interact with frustrated farmers who have given up hope of transforming their subsistence farming. I was struck by the rate at which enterprises (such as poultry and piggery) which had been appraised viable for land-constrained scenarios have been abandoned.
Poor farmers can’t meet livestock feed demands and have failed to expand their enterprises to economical threshold levels above which they would realise profit. In essence, the enterprises had become an added burden upon the impoverished households. Herein lies the evidence for UNDP assertion that more Ugandans have abandoned agriculture (UNDP Human Development Report, 2007).
Since more than 80% of Uganda’s population has nothing else to live on other than farming, abandoning farming without alternative livelihood options places the country into a historic predicament. As agriculture loses relevance to Ugandans, destitution will spiral uncontrollably out of hand. Are there any quick fix solutions to this quagmire? I don’t think so, but we are not stuck either!
Since infinitesimal, fragmented plots of land are economically unfeasible for farming, Government should address the politically unpalatable question of land consolidation. True, land belongs to the people but a package of appropriate incentives could trigger voluntary land consolidation.
A relatively shorter-term and easier solution could be to catalyse “block farming” – where multitudes of farmers with contiguous infinitesimal plots are incentivised to agree to a collective landuse plan. Block farming would build on farmer associations which NAADS is empowering; whereupon only farmers who agree to a block farming system would access NAADS and Bona Baggagawale funds. Setting aside an agricultural commodity stabilisation fund out of PAF would help farmers cope with the seasonally oscillating commodity prices.
Livelihoods diversification towards non-farm enterprises holds significant promise for resource-constrained farmers. Government however needs to devise and implement a regulatory and incentive regime to kick start non-farm business entrepreneurs.
With 10 years of a futile PAF, Government must reenergise the anti-poverty drive and address itself to the HIPC principles, which demand comprehensive commitments to poverty alleviation initiatives.
Published on: http://hdr.undp.org/en/nhdr/monitoring/news/2008/title,6807,en.html
Government is responsible for collapse of agriculture in Uganda
The 2007 UNDP Human Development Report contains very bad news for those who have been pedalling a rosy portrait of a country that has been having a near double-digit rate of economic development over the last 20 years. In addition to dropping ten points on the global Human Development Index over the last year alone (2006/2007), Uganda according to the report, has reduced its dependence on agriculture – not because farmers have found better livelihood options, but due to desertion of the increasingly risky, loss-making, poverty-entrenching farming enterprises. But why this contradicting state of affairs?
In the immediate aftermath of the bruising fiver-year NRA bush war, the former guerrillas were hasty to practicalise a “fundamental change” which president Museveni promised during his swearing in speech. Their phobia for anything and everything that related with former president Obote drove them into a universal loathing frenzy. They set about dismantling systems, procedures and mechanisms that Obote had ushered in – often without objective evaluation.
The impetus underlying the “fundamental change” seemed to have been to erase “oboteist” principles and policies from the post-Obote Uganda irrespective of whether those principles and policies were rational or not. For the young guerrillas who had won a gruelling bush war against all odds, they felt nothing could possibly fail their post-war revolutionary agenda. How wrong time has proved them wrong!
From the agricultural standpoint, the liberalisation of agricultural markets without adequate marketing infrastructure exposed farmers to “business sharks”. Under the liberalisation framework, government abolished commodity-marketing institutions such as the Coffee Marketing Board, Lint Marketing Board, etc – under the guise of eliminating monopoly and ensuring better returns to farmers. Sadly, government chose to overlook the imperfect market conditions pertaining at the time, which would never allow perfect competition to flourish.
Consequently, the vacuum left by abolished commodity marketing institutions enabled very few individuals close, to or within government to control agricultural trade with even more impunity. It was a case of replacing pro-Obote monopolies with pro-Museveni business entities; of driving farmers from the frying pan to naked fire fames!
Neither government, nor any other authority, has adduced evidence to show that farmers’ returns have improved following abolition of commodity marketing institutions. To the contrary, disorder, chaos and frustration have marred commodity marketing over the last decades. Farmers continually face the historical fleecing game in which they are relentlessly strangled by shrewd business intermediaries. For the poor farmers, it has indeed remained “business as usual” despite the fragrance of the “fundamental change.”
The abolition of agricultural cooperatives as another aspect of Museveni’s post war “fundamental change” agenda could as well be the single most important catalyst for the collapse of farming in Uganda. Where as government was correct when it accused cooperatives of being corrupt, it grossly blundered by prescribing that they be abolished. Typically, this blunder conformed to a classical case of a wrong medical prescription for a correct diagnosis! Were the cooperatives incurably defective that the only choice was to abolish them? Understandably, Obote had cultivated a close relation with cooperatives owing to their grassroot mobilisational power and influence. Was this symbiotic link between Obote and cooperatives the real reason Museveni terminated them?
Allegations of corruption not withstanding, agricultural cooperatives of the time constituted a collective voice for poor rural farmers; an avenue through which village farms linked with urban markets; a mechanism through which poor farmers negotiated and accessed agricultural tools and inputs.
Cooperatives were safety nets; the life-support for rural farmers – without which many were bound to fail. The fact that this failure was reported (by UNDP) in 2007; nearly 20 years after the dismantling of the cooperative infrastructure only means that Ugandan farmers are resilient. Unfortunately, resilience is not limitless and time bombs explode unless defused. Without doubt, the “fundamental change” of the NRM regime has graduated into fundamental disaster – at least with respect to agriculture.
Does government have a chance to salvage the ruins? I would respond in the affirmative – provided it’s ready to “repent” and redress its historical flaws. Being an optimist, I want to think that the recent talk regarding revival of cooperatives is the beginning of the repentance process and that it will yield substance.
In the immediate aftermath of the bruising fiver-year NRA bush war, the former guerrillas were hasty to practicalise a “fundamental change” which president Museveni promised during his swearing in speech. Their phobia for anything and everything that related with former president Obote drove them into a universal loathing frenzy. They set about dismantling systems, procedures and mechanisms that Obote had ushered in – often without objective evaluation.
The impetus underlying the “fundamental change” seemed to have been to erase “oboteist” principles and policies from the post-Obote Uganda irrespective of whether those principles and policies were rational or not. For the young guerrillas who had won a gruelling bush war against all odds, they felt nothing could possibly fail their post-war revolutionary agenda. How wrong time has proved them wrong!
From the agricultural standpoint, the liberalisation of agricultural markets without adequate marketing infrastructure exposed farmers to “business sharks”. Under the liberalisation framework, government abolished commodity-marketing institutions such as the Coffee Marketing Board, Lint Marketing Board, etc – under the guise of eliminating monopoly and ensuring better returns to farmers. Sadly, government chose to overlook the imperfect market conditions pertaining at the time, which would never allow perfect competition to flourish.
Consequently, the vacuum left by abolished commodity marketing institutions enabled very few individuals close, to or within government to control agricultural trade with even more impunity. It was a case of replacing pro-Obote monopolies with pro-Museveni business entities; of driving farmers from the frying pan to naked fire fames!
Neither government, nor any other authority, has adduced evidence to show that farmers’ returns have improved following abolition of commodity marketing institutions. To the contrary, disorder, chaos and frustration have marred commodity marketing over the last decades. Farmers continually face the historical fleecing game in which they are relentlessly strangled by shrewd business intermediaries. For the poor farmers, it has indeed remained “business as usual” despite the fragrance of the “fundamental change.”
The abolition of agricultural cooperatives as another aspect of Museveni’s post war “fundamental change” agenda could as well be the single most important catalyst for the collapse of farming in Uganda. Where as government was correct when it accused cooperatives of being corrupt, it grossly blundered by prescribing that they be abolished. Typically, this blunder conformed to a classical case of a wrong medical prescription for a correct diagnosis! Were the cooperatives incurably defective that the only choice was to abolish them? Understandably, Obote had cultivated a close relation with cooperatives owing to their grassroot mobilisational power and influence. Was this symbiotic link between Obote and cooperatives the real reason Museveni terminated them?
Allegations of corruption not withstanding, agricultural cooperatives of the time constituted a collective voice for poor rural farmers; an avenue through which village farms linked with urban markets; a mechanism through which poor farmers negotiated and accessed agricultural tools and inputs.
Cooperatives were safety nets; the life-support for rural farmers – without which many were bound to fail. The fact that this failure was reported (by UNDP) in 2007; nearly 20 years after the dismantling of the cooperative infrastructure only means that Ugandan farmers are resilient. Unfortunately, resilience is not limitless and time bombs explode unless defused. Without doubt, the “fundamental change” of the NRM regime has graduated into fundamental disaster – at least with respect to agriculture.
Does government have a chance to salvage the ruins? I would respond in the affirmative – provided it’s ready to “repent” and redress its historical flaws. Being an optimist, I want to think that the recent talk regarding revival of cooperatives is the beginning of the repentance process and that it will yield substance.
3 December 2007
It’s sadistic to ridicule family planning
In 1798, the Rev Thomas Robert Malthus raised a storm of international controversy when he anonymously published an essay on the principle of population and society. Through the essay, he warned that disparity between the rate of population growth and the slower increase in food supply would lead to war, famine, and disease. Malthus’s conclusions were dismissed then, and ever since as un-researched, misleading and illusionary.
More than 200 years later (1972), the “Club of Rome,” an elitist association of scholars, businessmen and politicians published an even more controversial report on “the predicament of mankind.” Their article modelled an ultimate uncontrollable crash of both population and industrial production due to exhaustion of physical resources such as cultivable land, minerals and the earth’s capacity to absorb pollution.
Critics to Malthus and the Club of Rome have found ammunition from the fact that unprecedented population growth over the last couple of centuries has been accompanied by an impressive growth of world economies. The standard of living in developed countries has steadily improved even though the Club of Rome had predicted the world will run out resources within 100 years.
The latest critic to Malthus is our own, President Museveni who has openly expressed his support for large populations. His views are based on what is a grossly misguided view that large populations boost development by enlarging markets. Not when: (1) the population lacks purchasing power, (2) government lacks capacity to fully exploit its resources, (3) government uses ad hoc, cosmetic development formulas, (4) a country glorifies, rather fights peasantry!
In the remote villages of Kigezi, and indeed else where in Uganda, congested families who can still harvest some yams and sweet potato tubers from their rapidly degrading gardens eat them raw because they can’t afford to buy fire wood for cooking. In Soroti, it has been reported that the only time UPE classrooms are full is during the fruiting season for wild mango trees. Only then would children rest assured of scavenging for wild fruits to keep them going throughout the day. Hunger keeps most children away from school during the non-fruiting season.
Latest statistics indicate that Uganda’s maternal mortality ratio is 505 per 100000 live births, implying that 16 women die every day due to pregnancy-related factors. Only 38% of pregnant women deliver in a health unit. Infant and child mortality are on the rise while income poverty is increasing.
With a population growth rate of 3.2% per annum, Uganda’s population could reach 130 million by the year 2050! By all indications, more than three quarters of this will still be living in a peasant household economy denoted by “hand-to-mouth” survival. It is inconceivable that governments which have failed to transform the livelihoods of 30 million people will succeed with 130 million!
Even if government intensifies utilisation of unexploited resources – including protected forests, wetlands and the recently discovered oil, we will at best, end up enabling a minority of Ugandans to become stinkingly wealthy – given the rate of income inequality. On the other hand, Iam tempted to think destitution will reach unprecedented levels, as crammed peasant households exhaust all the possible survival means.
This phenomenon has already unfolded in the dramatically developing countries such as India, China, Brazil and others. In China for instance, with a population of 1.3 billion people, only 400 million have a decent livelihood. Nearly 70% of the population, or 900 million Chinese are destitute. It is estimated that 80% of the Indian population lives precariously on the fringes of life and death – without access to government social services. For the record, India is one of those developing countries where quality of life for its elite population rivals that of Western Europe and North America.
Museveni’s assertion that a bigger population would lead to increased consumption and therefore bigger markets will remain utopian unless a miraculous, divine intervention improves the purchasing power of the destitute peasants.
While I believe Uganda’s economy will thrive, like India and China, only a minority of the population will enjoy the full benefits of economic growth. It would therefore be rational that we preach and reaffirm the importance of family planning to limit the number of households living on raw sweet potato tubers or wild mangoes for their dinner; or pregnant women and children dying for lack of medical care.
No person has been misunderstood like the Rev Thomas Robert Malthus. He simply argued against the widely held view that a nation's resource was determined by the size of its population and that fertility added to national wealth. The core of his reasoning emanated from his humane concern for the sufferings caused by overpopulation and thus recommended moral restraint against large families.
For a country like Uganda where the president’s word becomes national policy, Iam worried that Musevenis’s open campaign for a large population will undermine family planning efforts. If that happens, government will have condemned the lives of millions of Ugandans to eternal destitution and suffering.
More than 200 years later (1972), the “Club of Rome,” an elitist association of scholars, businessmen and politicians published an even more controversial report on “the predicament of mankind.” Their article modelled an ultimate uncontrollable crash of both population and industrial production due to exhaustion of physical resources such as cultivable land, minerals and the earth’s capacity to absorb pollution.
Critics to Malthus and the Club of Rome have found ammunition from the fact that unprecedented population growth over the last couple of centuries has been accompanied by an impressive growth of world economies. The standard of living in developed countries has steadily improved even though the Club of Rome had predicted the world will run out resources within 100 years.
The latest critic to Malthus is our own, President Museveni who has openly expressed his support for large populations. His views are based on what is a grossly misguided view that large populations boost development by enlarging markets. Not when: (1) the population lacks purchasing power, (2) government lacks capacity to fully exploit its resources, (3) government uses ad hoc, cosmetic development formulas, (4) a country glorifies, rather fights peasantry!
In the remote villages of Kigezi, and indeed else where in Uganda, congested families who can still harvest some yams and sweet potato tubers from their rapidly degrading gardens eat them raw because they can’t afford to buy fire wood for cooking. In Soroti, it has been reported that the only time UPE classrooms are full is during the fruiting season for wild mango trees. Only then would children rest assured of scavenging for wild fruits to keep them going throughout the day. Hunger keeps most children away from school during the non-fruiting season.
Latest statistics indicate that Uganda’s maternal mortality ratio is 505 per 100000 live births, implying that 16 women die every day due to pregnancy-related factors. Only 38% of pregnant women deliver in a health unit. Infant and child mortality are on the rise while income poverty is increasing.
With a population growth rate of 3.2% per annum, Uganda’s population could reach 130 million by the year 2050! By all indications, more than three quarters of this will still be living in a peasant household economy denoted by “hand-to-mouth” survival. It is inconceivable that governments which have failed to transform the livelihoods of 30 million people will succeed with 130 million!
Even if government intensifies utilisation of unexploited resources – including protected forests, wetlands and the recently discovered oil, we will at best, end up enabling a minority of Ugandans to become stinkingly wealthy – given the rate of income inequality. On the other hand, Iam tempted to think destitution will reach unprecedented levels, as crammed peasant households exhaust all the possible survival means.
This phenomenon has already unfolded in the dramatically developing countries such as India, China, Brazil and others. In China for instance, with a population of 1.3 billion people, only 400 million have a decent livelihood. Nearly 70% of the population, or 900 million Chinese are destitute. It is estimated that 80% of the Indian population lives precariously on the fringes of life and death – without access to government social services. For the record, India is one of those developing countries where quality of life for its elite population rivals that of Western Europe and North America.
Museveni’s assertion that a bigger population would lead to increased consumption and therefore bigger markets will remain utopian unless a miraculous, divine intervention improves the purchasing power of the destitute peasants.
While I believe Uganda’s economy will thrive, like India and China, only a minority of the population will enjoy the full benefits of economic growth. It would therefore be rational that we preach and reaffirm the importance of family planning to limit the number of households living on raw sweet potato tubers or wild mangoes for their dinner; or pregnant women and children dying for lack of medical care.
No person has been misunderstood like the Rev Thomas Robert Malthus. He simply argued against the widely held view that a nation's resource was determined by the size of its population and that fertility added to national wealth. The core of his reasoning emanated from his humane concern for the sufferings caused by overpopulation and thus recommended moral restraint against large families.
For a country like Uganda where the president’s word becomes national policy, Iam worried that Musevenis’s open campaign for a large population will undermine family planning efforts. If that happens, government will have condemned the lives of millions of Ugandans to eternal destitution and suffering.