Colonialism was not the problem; years later we aren’t smarter

South Korean Ambassador to Uganda Park Jong Dae and Mayor of Mpigi Town Council Richard Ssenoga at the ground breaking ceremony of water works at Nsamu village in November 2017. PHOTO | SADAT MBOGO | NMG  

In Summary

• The only thing that is new here is that Ugandans are now being taught or inspired to learn the importance of self-help, self-improvement and self-reliance by Koreans or outsiders. There is a time in our history, however, when we knew how to do these things and did not wait for outsiders to teach us how to do them or give or promise us money to do them.

By FREDRICK GOLOOBA-MUTEBI
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Whenever we Africans reflect on how badly we have done over the past 50 or so years of
Independence, it is not unusual for us to invoke the history of the so-called Asian Tigers and their transformation over the same period.

For the most part, we invoke it to make the important point that our leaders have been at best incompetent, at worst uninterested in pursuing and achieving the kind of societal transformation their Asian counterparts have. Sometimes even the very leaders we seek to criticise engage in these kinds of reflections from time to time.

We ordinary people can be forgiven for lamenting and going on to do nothing to change the status quo. There is little we can do to change it. We do not have the power to make the big decisions needed for transformational change to happen. And we do not have money.

Our leaders have both. It is therefore obvious who should be doing something about this. There are, of course, many reasons why they do little or nothing, but this is no time to go into that.

These same reflections assaulted my mind last week after I learnt of something happening in scattered locations in rural Uganda.

South Korea’s bilateral development agency, KOICA, working with local communities with some input from the government of Uganda, is apparently causing something of a revolution in some people’s lives. The inspiration for the “development initiative” known as the Inclusive and Sustainable New Communities (ISNC) project is Korea’s own Saemaul Undong or “New Village” Movement.

Also known as the “New Community Movement” Saemaul Undong was a self-help initiative that Korea’s most controversial president Park Chung-hee, the architect of the country’s economic and social transformation, started.

His government used it as a tool to improve living conditions in rural areas and help narrow the gap in income and welfare with prosperous urban communities. That was as recently as the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In its first two decades, the movement was managed in highly centralised fashion, which apparently made it highly efficient in its delivery of rural infrastructure: Irrigation systems, bridges, roads and modern housing.

Its centrepiece was the direct involvement of communities in making things happen, with the government providing mostly construction materials and local people doing the rest, in a spirit of self-help underlain by diligence and highly organised collective action.

The Koreans, God bless their souls, are now exporting Saemaul Undong to countries across Africa, Uganda being one.

Uganda’s Inclusive and Sustainable New Communities project seeks to replicate the success of Saemaul Undong. Communities here and there, thanks to funding from KOICA, or inspired by the prospect of such funding, are mobilising themselves to do such things as communal gardening, opening up of local roads and cleaning up their own water sources.

Apparently, outcomes include rehabilitated village infrastructure, improved living conditions and improved household incomes deriving from small-scale projects. At the individual household level, there are reports of improved hygiene, sanitation, and increased food security. It has also introduced “smart homes” built “almost completely using local materials” and boasting sun drying racks for utensils and locally made eco-stoves.

Nothing new

Both the beneficiaries and government officials are gushing in their praise of what is going on in terms of championing local solutions to locally-felt problems.

According to one beneficiary quoted in a media report, “Before ISNC came we had a negative mind-set. We did not know about farming co-operatives and improving banana production and increasing value.” It all sounds rather novel; doesn’t it? But what really is new in this approach?

As far as I am concerned, the only thing that is new here is that Ugandans are now being taught or inspired to learn the importance of self-help, self-improvement and self-reliance by Koreans or outsiders.

There is a time in our history, however, long before Park Chung-hee launched Saemaul Undong, when we knew how to do these things and did not wait for outsiders to teach us how to do them or give or promise us money to do them.

We did them because we knew they were necessary, and because doing them was a matter of common sense which had been inculcated into us by leaders to whom leadership was about instilling values and pursuing collective well-being.

In the kingdom of Buganda where this was most pronounced, their Saemaul Undong was called bulungi bwa nsi (for the common good).

The British colonialists saw that it made a lot of sense and preserved it and even exported it to other communities that did not have it. By the time they left, 60 years or so later, it had become pretty much a national institution.

And then we became independent and aspired to become modern. In the process we abandoned even those traditional things on which we could have built our own context-specific modernity. Half a century after Independence, the inventors of Saemaul Undong, a much younger movement than our own bulungi bwa nsi are teaching us the value of self-reliance.

Not only that; they even have to give or promise us money before we do what we used to do as a matter of common sense. And we think we have become smarter since colonial rule ended.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: fgmutebi@yahoo.com