During his katebe days, current East African Cooperation Minister Eriya Kategaya was reported to have castigated Museveni and his regime for glorying peasantry at a time when other developing countries are striving to eliminate it. Kategaya based his assertion on the unwillingness and inability of government to tackle poverty in a manner that would create a meaningful livelihoods change among the peasant community. His outburst is indeed supported by budget statistics which indicate that NRM government has never allocated to the agriculture sector, more than 5% of the annual national budget despite the sector employing 80% of the population.
The inevitable consequence of this neglect has been a steady decline in agricultural output, hunger and poverty owing to inadequate agricultural extension support; lack of access to quality technology and germplasm; declining soil fertility; crop pests and diseases; severe exposure to vagaries of weather; and perhaps most importantly, poor or lack of agricultural processing and marketing infrastructure.
It should be recalled that in the immediate after math of the five-year NRA bush war, government liberalised agricultural markets (among other things) and abolished commodity-marketing institutions under the guise of eliminating monopoly and ensuring better returns to farmers. Sadly, it chose to overlook the imperfect market conditions pertaining at the time and ever since, which would never allow perfect competition to flourish.
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. Neither government, nor any other authority, has adduced evidence to show that farmers’ returns have improved following agricultural market liberalisation. To the contrary, disorder, chaos and frustration have marred commodity marketing over the last several decades.
Moreover, the strangling of agricultural cooperatives by the same government could have been the critical catalyst for burgeoning poverty and peasantry. 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. Without the cushioning effect of cooperatives, rural farmers were inevitably bound to plunge into poverty.
Government might have had a point when it accused cooperatives of being corrupt. However, it grossly blundered by prescribing that they be abolished. I wonder whether cooperatives could have been so incurably defective that the only plausible management decision was to abolish them!
Without doubt, the 2007 UNDP Human Development Report contains very bad news for a government that has been pedalling a rosy portrait of the fastest economy in the developing world. According to the report, Uganda had become poorer by ten points on the global Human Development Index over 2006/2007 alone, while more Ugandans had lost their agricultural livelihoods. Logically, its hopeless for farmers to carry on with the increasingly risky, loss-making, poverty-entrenching agriculture and as a result, they have abandoned farming even though they have no other livelihood options.
Undeniably, this sets the stage for sustainable peasantry – especially in the rural areas. Instead of ensuring increased funding for the agricultural sector to alleviate the plight of peasants, Museveni has reportedly remarked on several occasions that his votes are with peasants. Has he found solace in the peasants’ predicament? As we all know, neither do peasants complain about, nor have the voice to challenge the status quo. Does this give credence to Kategaya’s assertion that Museveni’s government glorifies and sustains peasantry?
