Was the middle income status within reach?

The campaign for attaining a middle income status for Uganda by 2020 is beginning to fade.
Not because it was out of reach, but because Uganda was unprepared to move decisively towards this target.
National Planning Authority has sent a clear message which comes after several warnings that unless we shape up, we will ship out.

Indeed we slipped up and continue to slip further.
Uganda has for the last three years had hopes to be ushered into the lower middle income bracket supported by the National Development Plan II targets.

According to UN, however, for a low developed country to cross into the middle income space, it must fulfill and surpass the targets set under three indices such as Per Capita Gross National Income, Human Asset Index, and Economic Vulnerability Index.
Uganda therefore must assess itself against these indices.

Per Capita Gross National Income
The target was set at $1,038. Uganda’s average per capita Gross National Income is $760 even after rebasing the economy two years ago.

The question is - can Uganda be able to make an additional $400 in a space of two years?
What are the drivers for this? Is it agriculture, manufacturing, tourism, or oil and gas? Each one of these is seemingly growing marginally in single digits.

Human Asset Index
This includes indicators such as infant mortality, maternal mortality, adult literacy, malnutrition, secondary school enrolment and dropout rates among others.
How well are we doing on each one of these? Again it is not exciting especially looking at recent survey reports from Uganda Bureau of Statistics.

Economic Vulnerability Index
This is premised on a number of factors such income poverty, population quality and urbanisation, among others. These can be examined as follows

Income poverty
This has slipped from 18 per cent to 22 per cent according to Ubos reports
Population quality

While this continues to grow at 3.2 per cent, the ecosystem on which it depends is not growing as fast. On the contrary, it is drastically being degenerated - forest cover, soil fertility, solid waste management, pollution, among others.
The extremely fast growing population has continued to pose acute pressure on economic, social infrastructure and the environment.

Level of urbanisation
While a number of small towns are beginning to grow, the capacity and levels of productivity in these towns and the cities including Kampala are still very low with underdeveloped value chains.

Export diversification
What constitutes our exports today compared to 10 or 15 years ago? These are still largely three items including coffee, tourism, remittances and a few non-traditional products.

Political governance
How tolerant are we at the political space and what is our level of democracy and civic awareness as a country?
What about the share in GDP of those sectors that employ most Ugandans, account for higher production and productivity, among others

A number of factors have seemingly explained Uganda’s inability to deliver a middle income status against our earlier plans and our citizenry must move fast to fix the following;

Patriotism and resilience for work
All the challenges of corruption, lack of accountability, tax evasion and bureaucracies, among others lie in here and point to one thing that many of us do not love our country.

This is why we must demand that government sets and enforces strong regulations to bring back order in this country.
Just look at the level of lawlessness. How do we build investor confident if this is not arrested?

Any country that does not make laws or have laws that are not implemented or enforced has very limited chances to transition to better welfare, improved livelihood and income wealth and investor confidence.

Tax collection and efficiency in spending
All Ugandans must know their tax obligations. The tax paying culture has remained low, coupled with inability for many to hold government accountable.

What we see now is merely a scramble for the little pie. Uganda has the potential to generate huge amounts of tax and non-tax revenue but they will go to waste without careful planning and deployment.
Attitude towards development
This includes investing in people and the environment. We must train our labour force, keep our population healthy and protect our environment.

The human asset and the environment are the two most important resources any country vying to transit into middle income must value. How we paid adequate attention to these?
Finally we must call for coordination across all government institutions and demand that they are all responsive to the national development plans.

Mindset change
The mindset for all or at least a good number of citizens, especially those in positions of responsibility, leadership and decision making must change. This will include behavioral change towards ensuring delivery service systems work. Uganda like other countries around us must have systems that work, procedures and regulations that are followed and consequences of not doing so should be clear.

Good governance and leadership
Uganda has no leadership structures at the grassroots except at the top. But service delivery in health, education, water and sanitation social as well as community development occurs at the decentralised levels.
As long as it takes forever to fix this leadership challenge it will remain extremely difficult to mobilise the population towards growth and development in Uganda.

The writer is the executive director of Private Sector Foundation Uganda