After Forbes’ Sudhir, now for poorest of Ugandans

How do we ensure some real trickle-down in our economy? Shouldn’t the Sudhirs and Mulwanas give out a little more? Philanthropy, though a short-term solution, does help

Forbes, the American business news and financial information source, has named our very own Sudhir Ruparelia as the wealthiest Ugandan and East African, weighing in at a cool $900 million. Good for Mr. Ruparelia, seeing how he has built a diverse portfolio of interests, but more so for pulling himself up by the bootstraps, having been a victim of President Idi Amin’s lunatic scheme of redistributing wealth by grabbing it from Asians in 1972.

Ugandans shall celebrate Sudhir, given our natural tendency to lionise wealth (hence the common phrase ‘mugagga wange’, or my wealthy prince/benefactor) and to idolise success (we like to follow achievement, hence supporting FC Barcelona and not Buikwe FC, and rooting for Barack Obama but not Bazilio Okello).

We love champions. But amid all the back-slapping that Sudhir may or may not notice, let us spare a thought for those on the other end of the financial/material spectrum. There is a need to stand up for the Buikwes, Bazilios and the poor of society, if only because their circumstances are not necessarily self-made, they are victims of situations beyond their control.

It has been repeated, many times, about how Uganda has lifted considerable proportions of its people out of poverty. It is a fact, stated well by the finance ministry’s Economic Development Policy and Research Department, that “the share of Ugandans living in poverty has reduced from 54.4 to 24.5 per cent (of the national population) between 1992/3 and 2009/10”. Or is it a fact?

The trouble with statistics is that they can be interpreted variously; the trouble with surveys like poverty reduction is that, spread over a long time, like this one over 20 years, the variables can be too many for one to draw definitive conclusions. Also different people – sociologists, political scientists, economists, politicians, and even we common folk – have different definitions for poverty and the attendant upward mobility to (lower) middle income status.

The variables include how to determine poverty - at one point in rural Uganda, the lack of a hand hoe indicated that you were poor. Today, it can be the absence of an ox plough that determines your poverty. But there are certain key indicators, like food as a share of total expenditure (the higher the proportion that a household spends on food, the poorer it is); literacy; electricity (less than 20 per cent use national grid electricity); piped water; percentage of people in rural areas (only about 20 per cent of Ugandans are town dwellers); and GDP per capita (Uganda’s is about $510, placing it among the world’s poorest) that are easy to compute. Then there are the common sense ones like the possession/wearing of shoes, use of a blanket, number of meals a day.
The verdicts of both the common sense and the key indicators are that we are still quite poor – you just need to travel a short distance out of any town to behold poverty in its inglorious fullness.

Last Friday, I went to the gardens where I get fresh food fortnightly. The little kids who swarmed around me had flies and snort on their bloated, half-naked bodies, were bare-footed, and most had evidently not gone to school. The volunteer loader had a rib cage-rattling cough under his waragi-laced breath. These were the definitions of poverty – when the loader asked for some pay to buy another drink, I declined, but left shs3,000 (much more money than he had probably seen in weeks, and to be increased, if necessary) in the safe hands of those who could ensure that he gets some treatment.

A constant refrain in analysing Uganda’s economic record of mixed success is that the gap between rich and poor is ever growing. What can be done to redress this? How do we ensure some real trickle-down in our economy? Shouldn’t the Sudhirs and Mulwanas give out a little more? Philanthropy, though a short-term solution, does help (Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, is regularly and happily giving away his billions.

Not unlike another happy giver, the poor widow who is the world’s most celebrated donor – the Bible records Jesus in Luke 21: 1-4: “As he looked up, Jesus saw the rich putting their gifts into the temple treasury. He also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins. “I tell you the truth,” he said, “this poor widow has put in more than all the others. All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.”)

The long term fix is narrowing the rural: urban divide through urbanisation and industrialisation. That is what the history of development of nations says. That is how poverty is tackled.

dsseppuuya@yahoo.com