Forget Vision 2040; give me Vision 2016 or give me siasa

President Museveni will not be in power in 2040, neither is the NRM likely to be in power. Come to think of it, half the politicians in power today will either be dead or senile. So who is expected to own the Vision when the current visionaries retire?

Do you remember the heady days as the Millennium approached? The fears of apocalypse; the grossly exaggerated fears of the Y2K bug which we were told would turn our computers into scrap, crash planes and generally thrust us back into rural Busoga (that is to say the stone-age)?

Then there were the expectant promises bandied around by NGO and UN types: ‘Water/education/health for all by the year 2000’, they shouted. Wherever one looked there was something being promised to happen “by the year 2000”.

Most of it passed without incident. We woke up on January 1, 2000 and, save for some serious hangovers, the world was still in one piece. Planes still ran (late) and many still did not have health, water, education or wealth.

The politicians simply moved the goalposts and gave themselves another quarter of a century. Those fancy things would now be achieved by 2025, they said, as we launched Vision 2025. We would all have money in our pockets, taxi drivers would indicate before joining the road, and small babies would stop crying on planes – well, not really, but you get the picture; the world would be a much better place.

You might, therefore, be surprised to learn that the government is today launching a new major plan, Vision 2040, to implement all those awesome things in the next three decades. One would have expected that we would try to achieve Vision 2025 before attempting to achieve matters beyond that but some of these things can only be understood by politicians with elections to win.

On paper, the plan is massively ambitious. Per capita income, for instance, is expected to grow from about Shs4,000 per person per day to about Shs66,000 per person per day by 2040. Factor in our population growth rate and the projection for our numbers to have almost doubled at that point and you will see the true scale of the ambition.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with ambition, and some countries have shown the ability to dream as well as act. China, for instance, is on course to double its 2010 GDP and raise its per capita income for rural and urban residents to over $9,000 by 2020. Without seeking to rain on the parade, let me share some misgivings with our grand plans.

First, while the plan, which I have read, is full of ambition, it is less eloquent when it comes to action. It talks about the areas that we need to focus on without telling us what we need to do differently to get there. So in some areas we are not very different from the village boys who sit by the roadside waiting for a soda truck and a bread van to overturn so they can feast.

Secondly, the plan is inspired too much by the success of countries like Malaysia, Mauritius, etc., and not enough by the failure of our own previous schemes. Failure sometimes teaches better lessons than success; understanding why we struggle with executing our plans is more valuable than trying to mimic the success of others.

Thirdly, the plan is too grand and the time frame too far in the future for us to hold anyone accountable for it. Whatever the advances in science, President Museveni will not be in power in 2040, neither is the NRM likely to be in charge. Come to think of it, half the politicians in power today will either be dead or senile.
So who is expected to own the Vision when the current visionaries retire? In China we have seen the Communist Party engineer internal change of guard while largely protecting the core market-based socialism. We are yet to manage internal transitions, let alone peaceful national change of leadership.

While this is not necessarily a dealmaker (as we have seen in Malaysia and Singapore, for instance), it is important for ownership and implementation. This is not to say that we should discard the Vision 2040 plan; what we should do is break up the plan into five-year and one-year plans that we can measure as independent parts and as constituent parts of the bigger plan.

That way we can keep our vision on the long-term goal but can measure ourselves against the annual pace of growth. If we can’t achieve the five-year plans we include in our party manifestos, how can we expect to achieve a 30-year grand plan? Thinking big and acting small sounds reasonable and comprehensible but politicians rarely trust the rest of us to have a vision.

dkalinaki@ug.nationmedia.com
Twitter: @Kalinaki