Uganda is frying its maize seed; there’s little left to plant

“MPs ignore Museveni, vote Shs420b for trips”, Daily Monitor reported. In a mid-April address to first-time Members of Parliament, President Museveni pooh-poohed overseas travel by parliamentarians as “lavish” and a form of “pure corruption”.

The MPs heard him, but didn’t listen. They went ahead and increased travel and allowance budget for themselves and staff by Shs20b to Shs420b, “in an era of subdued cross-border trips due to pandemic-related restrictions and corresponding uptick in virtual meetings”, Daily Monitor  noted naughtily.  

The MPs were always likely to increase their travel budget, in part because President Museveni and his State House with their massive and out-of-control expenditure and endless supplementary budgets, are preaching water and drinking wine, and therefore have zero moral authority to preach financial frugality.

A few days ago, Finance Minister Matia Kasaija said Uganda’s national wallet was in such dire straits, the country may approach its major creditors to negotiate a possible suspension of loan repayments amid a growing default risk. Uganda’s total public debt surged to $18 billion (Shs29 trillion) as at December 2020, a 35 per cent rise from a year earlier.

The MPs increase of their cut, is just a small part of the story of the capture phase Uganda is going through, and the shrewd passive resistance a citizenry that is being extorted by the State is putting up.

For MPs who are relatively honest, travel is their pork.  You get Shs2.6 million, you spend Shs248,000 per night in a Paddington bed and breakfast while on a study trip to the House of Commons in London, and on a single day alone your child’s school fees for one term is paid. And at that level, you are still living on half what a minister will pocket in a night on a foreign trip – yet he will be picked up and driven around by an embassy car, as you hop your way on the underground train. When the President travels, in a night we are talking billions. In the end, the political cost of the system denying MPs what, in comparative terms are crumbs, is too high to be worth the fight.

The other driver of this is that the economic expansion of the first 20 years of the NRM has peaked. There are many reasons for that, including global ones and, now, the Covid-19 pandemic that cannot be blamed on the government, However, one key reason is that mega unproductive state expenditure, has sucked resources away from the real economy and help stunt growth. In other words, the state is frying more and more maize seed and eating it as “mberenge”, instead of planting it to grow more maize to feed the rapidly increasing number of new mouths.

To get more money, the government is staging further raids into captive areas like fuel, and internet services, to name a few. The surprising thing is that the government seems oblivious to the impact. For example, the social media tax (now binned) and predatory digital legislation, has led to some of the leading innovative minds in Ugandan tech (they shall remain unnamed) to either move outside the country wholly, or divide their operations, leaving the smaller portion at home. 

Many domestic investors are also moving domestically in areas where there is low or no tax, like the agro-economy or the green sector. There is a positive effect to this, with sections of the agricultural economy showing impressive results, and also the beginnings of what looks like a clean energy revolution, but the downside is that these sectors are reaching over capacity. A good example is what has happened in the private education sector, and how its fragilities left many exposed in the pandemic. The number of schools (several unfinished) that have been repossessed and been put on the chopping block by banks is simply dizzying.

It’s not sustainable. We might want to take a leaf of the Dutch book.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, most times rides a bicycle to work. Not too long ago, there was quite some noise when his office sought to buy a new bicycle for him worth a few hundred dollars.

Some years ago, the Dutch were the largest bilateral donor to Uganda, pouring in hundreds of millions of dollars. They still donate millions. On their Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, they lists some of the following outcomes from their 2019 spending in Uganda:

•More than 80,000 Ugandans increased their access to justice.

•More than 7,300 jobs created in the agricultural sector.

•More than 200,000 Ugandan school children have benefited from school milk programmes.

The President and MPs might not need to ride bicycles to work, but they could sure use a bicycle mentality. It gets you those type of Dutch aid results. The path from there to national wealth, is too obvious to belabour.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. 

Twitter: @cobbo3