Why President-for-life Museveni is ‘good’ for Uganda’s progress

In case you were busy distracting yourself from the troubles of our world with sports on Friday, the Lagos-based Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) announced the 3,050 successful applicants for its 2019 Entrepreneurship Programme. For the 2019 cohort, TEF received 216,000 applications, and its finalists were 58 per cent male, and 42 per cent female.

Naturally, the Nigerians were by far the largest group of finalists. But representing a trend that we have seen in TEF in recent selections, Ugandans were the second largest.

You will probably get dizzy looking at the final full list that is available online, but it is worthwhile. And look not just at the Uganda entrepreneurs, but any other from an African country you know well.

The first most obvious one is the gender spread. In the TEF and the growing such innovation and enterprise awards, women get a fairer shake than they do in African government-run things. Also, these awards are less sectarian and more merit based than, in our case, the “Entandikwa” and the slew of “wealth creation” ones doled out by the NRM government and from President Yoweri Museveni’s money sacks and envelopes.

Apart from narrow political factors, part of the reason is that Museveni will never go walking in the majority of parts of Uganda with his money-sack-carriers following him, so he can hand out money to people on the roadside.

That form of distribution in itself limits who will get the money. You look at the Ugandans in TEF’s 2019 Entrepreneurship Programme and you chuckle. There is no way on earth a Uganda government enterprise list would have a finalist list looking like that. It would never be so

But there is something bigger going on, and to appreciate it, we need to look to Nigeria. Nigeria on some mornings looks like a failed State. Africa’s largest oil producer has squandered or stolen most of that wealth.

Africa’s largest economy, at least on paper, is now at a point where its estimated $50 billion a year entertainment industry, Nollywood, is the second largest employer after agriculture.

It all happened without the government putting in a single cent. A complex ecosystem of dogged filmmakers, no-nonsense financiers (including tough market women), enforcers with baseball bats, and pirates and smugglers who eventually created the lucrative distribution networks for it around Africa.

From the horror of 1970s corrupt, cruel incompetent, and parochial, military dictatorships and ethnic one-party rule, a generation of parents who learnt to get by without helpful State intervention, seem to have produced a new type of children, and in turn grandchildren, who are remaking the continent in very different ways than the immediate post-independent generation.

If your parents had to make sugar from sugarcane in their kitchen in the tough days of Idi Amin and Obote II, and pound washing soap from pawpaw leaves, they are not likely to raise you to expect a job or a house from the government. In Uganda, many haven’t seen change in three decades, and don’t expect it in Museveni’s next 10 to 20 years, so they factor it in.

It undermines the momentum for democratic demands, and fuels middle class political apathy, yes, but in the long-term could be beneficial. There is still a lot of noise, especially if you get your view of the country from reading and watching mainstream media, asking government to solve problems. But that is not at the core of how Ugandan society, and modern Africa, is organised today.

When you have countries like Uganda where an overwhelming number of parents take their children to private schools of all types, they are not doing so so that they can get government handouts. They are raising them to be hustlers, innovators, and to look away from politicians – and likely to the wider world - for solutions.

That is why as soon as you have jobs, scholarships, innovation awards, that are not controlled by the State, you get winners who are very different from those usually picked by the government. This is how last year, then 24-year-old software engineer Brian Gitta (his mother is a businesswoman and he went to the private Bright School, Kawempe) and his team won the £25,000 Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation, for their malaria testing device Matibabu. The prize was founded and is run by the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK.

There is a related radical shift happening in the funding space. Apart from growing African philanthropy, there are different types of foreign innovation funds giving prizes in Africa. They are smaller, give modest sums, and are more independent than some of the international NGOs, and bigger foundations like Rockefeller Foundation. They don’t have big offices in the countries they operate in; most times their own presence is through the web. Often their interest is data, to improve their apps. In the next five to 10 years, we shall see their cumulative impact. And many in power will be left asking, “what the ****?”

Mr Onyango-Obbo is the publisher of Africa data.
visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site. Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3