Resisting government intrusion: From rent, sugar to religion - Part I
It was Henry David Thoreau, in his book Civil Disobedience who wrote that “government is best which governs least”. I agree. Government shouldn’t intervene in the lives of its citizens any more than absolutely necessary.
In the America Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson argued that the only reason to have government is to protect the fundamental rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Any government that makes laws that are not directly connected to our safety and prosperity is one that is departing from the ideal kind of government.
I have said before that the Ugandan people are under-served and over-governed or over-regulated. A great government is one which doesn’t have to regulate too much of people’s lives. Such a government can be possible, provided the people who put it in place accept and take up their responsibility first.
There are examples of this: the economy will stagnate if the people don’t see it as a means to improve their lives and the lives of others but only to earn a wage. A teacher should not just look at the salary but also the overall benefit of knowledge to the society. Landlords who only look at rental income rather than the benefit of housing to the entire society cannot bring down rent.
No government can fight crime if citizens are hypocritical to the extent of condemning those who distort the law to get away with murder, but are comfortable bribing an officer to avoid a fine for a traffic offence.
In our circumstances, there has been a trend of the government seeking to over-regulate virtually everything. When the Sugar Bill was presented, the government, which claims to believe in the laws of demand and supply, wanted to determine how far away one sugar factory should be from another! Some lobbyists even wanted the sugar cane farmers to be compelled to sell their cane to particular factory owners.
Then came the Coffee Bill. For a country with the highest number of small farmers engaged on coffee growing in the world (some 1.7 million farmers in Uganda depend on coffee for income) this Bill is a thunderbolt likely to smother the small farmers. The proposed law imposes stringent conditions likely to fence out the poor small farmers. Multinationals will eventually dominate the sector. Basically, all on-farm and off-farm activities in the coffee value chain will be subject to regulation from the central government. In reality, all attempts at centralising the value chain oversight is unnecessary. Local government and cooperatives under the overall supervision of their apex cooperatives can do this job better than central government.
An infrastructure for self-regulation is better than a huge and costly Kampala-based bureaucracy.
Another busybody law is the one on landlords and tenants. One of the most ridiculous and unfriendly provisions in the law is the one that compels a landlord to tolerate a non-paying tenant for up to six months while waiting for court to authorise an eviction. The law imposes a fine of Shs5m for “unlawful eviction”. Because of this and other obnoxious provisions the law received a resounding disapproval from stakeholders.
In case anyone thinks I am too critical, let me say, for the record that no lesser an authority than executive director of the National Planning Authority, Dr Joseph Muvawala, said the landlord and tenant law, the sugar law and the Coffee Bill are devoid of any “transformative aspect” whatsoever. I agree totally with Dr Muvawala. His utterance is a symptom of a disjointed government. How can a key government agency like the National Planning Authority not be part and parcel of lawmaking?
In the next part of this article we shall tackle another proposed law that threatens freedom of worship - the Religious Societies and Places of Worship Bill - and the fire it is likely to draw.
