32 years on, Museveni staring at a political chessboard

In 2016, President Yoweri Museveni was re-elected on the basis of his promise to take Uganda to lower middle income status by 2020. PHOTO | FILE  

In Summary

• Old deficiencies of poor service delivery and raging corruption have characterised the regime, which President Museveni’s critics often cite to poke holes in his 32-year presidency.
• Although the president has a firm grip on power through control of the armed forces, Parliament and other state agencies, economic empowerment of Ugandans remains his biggest failure.

By JULIUS BARIGABA
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After 32 years at the helm, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni is staring at the political chessboard to fix an ailing economy, unemployment and a new wave of insecurity that stand in the way of delivering his promise for modernity under his “Kisanja hakuna mchezo” slogan. Loosely translated, it means “a term for no jokes.”

In 2016, President Museveni was re-elected on the basis of his promise to take Uganda to lower middle income status by 2020 through job creation and inclusive development — an ambitious call, given that 68 per cent of the nearly 40 million population is still locked out of the money economy, according to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics.

Just months after taking his oath, President Museveni took to the fields of Luwero with a bicycle, water can and used mineral water bottles to demonstrate how drip irrigation could fix the falling agricultural output — from 41 per cent in 1998/99 to 23 per cent in 2015 — and the sector’s contribution to the country’s GDP.

President Museveni has in desperation taken to wheeling jerricans on bicycles to the villages, and using discarded mineral water bottles, to “teach” peasants irrigation. PHOTO | MONITOR

To critics, this was a far cry from the fundamental change he promised in 1986 of “creating an integrated self-sustaining economy.”

The president’s drip irrigation ruse neither caught on nor reversed the agriculture output trends, according to Finance Minister Matia Kasaija who in his 2017/18 budget speech said sector growth output slowed to 1.3 per cent in 2017 compared with 2.8 per cent the previous year, on account of the ...
unusually prolonged droughts.

“Per capita income has been growing at only two per cent annually compared with the population growth of three per cent per annum. There is growing unemployment, especially among the youth; we are increasingly faced with the prolonged droughts partly as a result of environmental damage arising from destruction of wetlands and deforestation. Agriculture, the mainstay of the vast majority of Ugandans, is now at risk because of excessive reliance on rain-fed farming,” said Mr Kasaija.

Added to this are old deficiencies of poor service delivery and raging corruption that have characterised the regime, which President Museveni’s critics often cite to poke holes in his 32-year presidency.

Poverty levels

Although the president has a firm grip on power through control of the armed forces, Parliament and other state agencies, economic empowerment of Ugandans remains his biggest failure.

The 2016/17 Uganda National Household Survey report released in September 2017 shows that poverty levels went up by eight per cent, with 3.4 million more people slipping into poverty since 2012/13 when the number of people living on less than $1.25 was 6.6 million.

Earlier last year, an Oxfam report showed a growing gap between the rich and the poor. Oxfam attributed this inequality to meagre investment in health, education and agriculture, as well as blotted public administrative costs that starved the population of critical services, a situation critics say is taking the country back to where it was in 1986.

“What did you expect? We have come full circle,” said John Kazoora, a Luwero bush war veteran and now opposition figure, who fell out with President Museveni.

Such critics, the opposition and discontented urban youth keep the president staring at the chessboard contemplating the right moves to make to keep public disquiet at a minimum.

For instance, through Operation Wealth Creation meant to implement the four-acre land model for small scale farmers, President Museveni hopes to bring 68 per cent of subsistence farmers into the money economy.

“Our goal is to transform agriculture from subsistence to commercial farming through the four-acre model, which apportions land use on the basis of activities,” President Museveni says.

The model follows a concept of dedicating an acre of land to a perennial cash crop such as coffee, cocoa or tea; each of the remaining three acres will have fruits, pasture for dairy cattle and high value food crops for food security.

Under this plan, a homestead will earn a combined $7,200 per year from coffee, fruits, dairy farming or poultry or piggery, hence moving to middle income status.

READ: Top Ugandan official returns wealth creation cow after uproar

However, hauling the bulk of the country’s population to move Uganda to middle income status is not the only challenge facing President Museveni’s government.

Security, one of the indicators that showed the regime was in control since 1986, is no longer assured in the country’s main economic base in the central region, following a spate of an unresolved crime surge and gruesome murders by machete-wielding gangs that the police are yet to unravel.

But amid all this, with the numbers in Parliament, the 73-year-old president pulled off a victory in December 2017 when the House controversially voted to amend the Constitution to remove the age limit of 75 years, which would have barred him to stand for re-election in 2021.

Despite the contested manner in which the amendment was passed by a 317-97 vote, this checkmate move against his critics and the opposition should see President Museveni refocus his energies towards addressing lapses in the security, which is the main deliverable on which he has distinguished himself since 1986.