{UAH} Uganda : When big men attempt to plant rice and uproot poverty...

Museveni himself is all for putting money directly into the pockets of the poor.

    

Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni gives money to a farmer in eastern Kamuli district as part of a poverty eradication "Prosperity for All" programme in 2011. PHOTO | PPU 

Some years ago, at the height of his power and influence, and at his invitation to his office, I had a chat with Uganda's former vice-president, Professor Gilbert Bukenya.

The invitation, delivered over the telephone by his then press secretary, came out of the blue. Professor Bukenya had invested much time and energy in popularising "upland rice." He wanted farmers, poor farmers especially, to start growing it across the country.

Traditionally, rice in Uganda is grown in swampy areas that have lots of water. The variety that the medical doctor and academic-turned politician was promoting, however, could grow in non-swampy (upland) areas without much use of water.

Professor Bukenya, who by then had acquired the moniker "Mr Upland Rice" before he later became "Mr Mahogany" for reasons that are irrelevant to this discussion, was crisscrossing the country, in areas where rice had never been grown before, urging peasant farmers to embrace the 'high-value' crop.

Underlying his crusade was the idea that the fast-maturing rice variety, adopted from Asia, had great potential for filling poor farmers' pockets with cash. This was in turn based on a simple and rather neat assumption: If farmers embraced the crop, they would make a lot of money, as there was a ready market for it locally.

Also, by extension, Uganda would become a major rice exporter, bringing in foreign exchange to finance the government's development ambitions. It was all part of the Museveni's government's longstanding obsession with poverty eradication.

President Yoweri Museveni himself has spared no effort conjuring up ideas for putting money directly into the pockets of the poor. And given the enthusiasm with which many politicians and officials seek to imitate him, almost everywhere one looks, in rural and urban areas, there is some big person promoting and financing this or that "income-generating project" for this or that group of poor people.

It can be impressive and rather touching. However, this approach to tackling poverty and promoting prosperity, experience now shows, is long on display and short on durable results.

So why did the good professor seek me out? He wanted a chat because, unlike commentators who were gushing about his campaign, I believed it was problematic for a number of reasons. One, I wondered why it was that he, a medical doctor and politician, was the one promoting this new crop.

Why, I wondered, was it not the Minister of Agriculture and the relevant experts in that ministry who I figured knew better the ins and outs of doing the sort of thing he was trying to do?

It was not obvious from the media stories about his campaign that he was working in collaboration with the ministry and experts. So, what would happen were farmers to embrace the crop and then encounter challenges that were very specific to growing and possibly marketing its product?

Uganda's agricultural extension system as we had known it in the past, had collapsed and left poor farmers without access to the free services it had originally been meant to provide. Who would be at hand to respond to the need upland rice farmers might have for expert advice? And given it was a one-man crusade, what would happen to it and to the new rice farmers once he left office?

I believed the vice-president's efforts and those of others like him, although well meaning, were misguided, and that their results could only be short term, for they lacked a basis for sustainability. I said so in a newspaper column that he read and reacted to immediately. Thus, the invitation to go and see him.

Without going into the details of our long conversation, the short explanation for his and Museveni's solo anti-poverty efforts, it turned out, was that the public service their "revolutionary government" had inherited from its predecessors, who in turn had inherited it from the colonial regime, had been a disappointment.

Apparently, the way it functioned encouraged sloth and rigidity. Public servants loved complex procedures that served only to bog down initiatives that had to be implemented quickly to achieve the desired results. It seemed as if the obvious antidote to all this was "reform." But, for political reasons, this was easier said than done.

Many years later, it seems Bukenya had a point. For all its vaunted revolutionary credentials, the Museveni government has lacked the grit to remodel the public service and get it to do the things it ought to do and do them quickly, consistently, and effectively.

These reflections came to mind recently as I read unflattering reviews of the evolution of other, on-the-surface excellent anti-poverty ideas whose implementation has taken place outside the ambit of public organs that should be responsible for, if not their implementation, monitoring and supervising their implementation.

It is almost certain that, as with the upland rice initiative, the failure to channel anti-poverty initiatives focused on eradicating poverty through the youth, women, the disabled and other vulnerable groups will, despite their potential and positive impact here and there, condemn them to certain death.

Once the big persons that drive them lose the necessary personal influence, there is no one left to push them.

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

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