The tribulations of being a local sangoma – Part II
Last week I told you about the tribulations of being a local ‘sangoma’. Just as in biblical times, you are mostly disregarded and ignored as a ‘half mad’ fellow who cannot dine with the wabenzi. Maybe that is why the smarter ones head to ‘Zumaland’. They have lots of proof to show that their enterprise is paying off! Just check out how they do it over the Christmas holiday or when opportunity knocks.
Alas for me and a few other ‘sangomas’, our lot is tied to a miserable weekly column for which our employer pays a ‘pittance’. But if it is our lot, history will exonerate us for we must challenge the received wisdom. So I must respond to our brothers and sisters who claim we shall be the ‘fastest growing economy’, come 2025.
First let us look at our (Uganda’s) population growth.
Population growth is not necessarily a bad thing. Reproduction is necessary for a stable and manageable population replacement. Ideally, a replacement fertility rate for developing countries would be about three children per couple. That is not the same as an average fertility rate of seven children per woman, which we have right now. This is walking down the road to disaster, prodded along by interest groups I don’t want to tangle with right now.
Let us for arguments sake assume that our population is currently about 38 million people. That means in 2020 we will be about 42 million people, given an annual growth rate of 3.2 per cent. Extending the same calculation to 2040 (assuming all other factors are constant) we would be about 78 million people. So yes, one can’t argue that (with tongue in cheek like the sangomas of Harvard have said) we would be one of the fastest growing economies!
On the side of economic growth, if we assume that we have a GDP of $26.7 billion (Shs96 trillion), then for 38 million people we have an average income per capita of $700 (Shs2.5m) per person. If our growth rate is assumed to be about 5 per cent per annum (it was 3.9 per cent in the last year), then our income per capita will be $810(Shs2.9m) per capita in 2020. Extending the same argument (again all other factors being constant) means that we can only achieve middle-income status by 2038 ($1,006 per capita)!
So I don’t know what the forecasters of this so-called Economic Complexity Index smoke in their free time (maybe shisha from Acacia Avenue) but they have two things going for them. They are foreigners (and therefore exotic) and can reduce our existence to an econometric (predictive) model. Who does not want to be associated with Harvard University anyway?
On a serious note we can achieve middle-income status by 2024, but we would have to grow by about 9 per cent per annum based on the data that I have seen. What has got us here will not get us to middle-income status. We must be doing things differently and deliberately. Even if we do nothing about the rate of population growth, we must be investing more in the socioeconomic conditions of our population. A more educated population has higher aspirations beyond procreation and that on its own may lead to a reduced fertility rate.
Beyond econometric models, there are only two measures that are important to an economy.
These are (1) the number of jobs created every period (quarter) and (2) the productivity of people that are employed.
The former means that more and more people have an income, and the latter means that gross domestic product (and therefore capita incomes) are increasing at an increasing rate. In other words, government must improve allocative efficiency and raise the rate of return on private investment. But I am just a local sangoma. Why would you take me seriously?
Prof Sejjaaka is country team leader at Abacus Business School. [email protected]
@samuelsejjaaka
