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An Antonov cargo plane takes off from Old Entebbe airport, the Airforce base, and crashes about 15 minutes later killing the six people on board, two of them Russians, last Saturday.
Sure as night follows, two days later good old Monitor reveals it was conducting illegal trade operations without the knowledge of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).
The Monitor revealed that the plane had been carrying passengers and goods to and from DR Congo without permission from the Defence ministry, CAA or the Uganda Air Cargo Corporation. And the story goes on, and on. Why is everyone not surprised?
Ideally, the Old Airport should be the most secure in the country. That a plane should operate out of there without the authority of the Ministry of Defence, tells us a lot about the shift of real power in Uganda. What has been happening in Uganda is what some people
have called the “privatisation of the state” – the state and government are turned into the private property of a few people with powerful positions in the ruling party (NRM-O) and State House. They are above the control of the formal government bodies, and they use their power to enrich themselves.
In Uganda this has happened in many ways. The one that interests here is how privatisation and economic liberalisation were manipulated by the powerful to create this situation. The privatisation process has been abused in Uganda so much, that in many cases most state companies and resources (like licences) have not gone to bona fide businesses, but to friends and relatives of the Big Men. These fellows have either then sold the licences for a killing, or built up the business with a respectable foreign investor (with them remaining as silent shareholders).
It is for reasons
like these, that privatisation has got a bad name in Uganda. This has led commentators like The Monitor’s Andrew Mwenda to argue that liberalisation and the free market have been discredited in Uganda, because they have only ended up in creating new patronage networks for the regime. Well, yes, and no.
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| BIG BUSINESS AT UCHUMI: Liberalisation has brought in many foreign business institutions, some paying high taxes into the government coffers. Some, however, dodge taxes because of having links with big men in govt. |
The case of the tragic Antonov carrying allegedly smuggled goods, suggests that what is happening in Uganda is different. Because at this stage in Uganda, the people who hold most key jobs are pro-government fellows, you would expect that they should not be bothered that the businesses owned by other pro-government business people are not playing by the rules.
But CAA, for example, sounds unhappy that the Antonov was flying without its permission, and the Ministry of Defence, the citadel of the ruling Movement loyalists, also doesn’t know, and they are not bothering to cover up.
This is because what happened in Uganda, at first, was the conversion of government bodies into partisan organisations. What happened is that some key leaders in key regulatory and executive agencies like the CAA, the URA, the Communications Commissions, the Privatisation Unit (PU),
and the Central Bank were selected on the basis of their being good Movement cadres and regime loyalists.
The reality is that while elements in PU might ensure that a privatised company goes to a regime cohort over and above the deserving bidders, some Movement cadres at the URA will, at some point, have to collect taxes from some of these pro-government companies.
The CAA finds that it must, in some cases, insist that airlines operating in the country meet the rules. If they didn’t do, the cadres at URA would soon be out of a job as there would no money to pay their salaries. And the ones at CAA would have to go home, because if you are not regulating the aviation sector, then why should you exist? The logic of the state, even where its functions have been privatised, is that they must perform some of the roles they were set up to do, or else the government they are serving would cease to exist in the long run.
Therefore Big Men have been quick to realise that
even when you privatise the state, and turn liberalisation into a redistribution programme to party loyalists and relatives, there still remains enough tension and controls to interfere with your ability to have absolute power. The result is that about four years ago they came up with a new plan to “de-institutionalise” the state instead.
De-institutionalisation in Uganda is the process by which the regulatory powers of the state are being transferred to private businesses owned by selected regime supporters. This is different from just having private businesses owned by ruling party people operating above the law. Take the broadcast industry. There is talk of privatising the granting of broadcasting licences, for example.
The industry, I am informed, however believes that this is designed to put the control of the airwaves in the hands of a company owned by relatives of
the leaders. Thus instead of having an FM station that is pro-government, in the future all the Big Men will need to tame the industry is that the power to give and take away broadcast licences will be held by a company owned by the son-in-law of the vice president or Movement chairman.
The de-institutionalisation process is in the first stage. In this stage, it has successfully set up parallel structures to that of the government; a ministry of Finance that outside the ministry of Finance, an army that is outside the UPDF; a Foreign Affairs ministry that is out the ministry of Foreign Affairs; an aviation authority that is outside the CAA.
The second stage might start just before the 2006 election, and blossom after because the likely introduction of multiparty politics will create even more pressure to have organisations of state that function outside public democratic
supervision. In this second stage, the private businesses will come out of the shadows and assume the functions of the stage.
I say 2006, because the first critical need will be to have a shadow electoral commission, take over from the formal Electoral Commission and deliver victory to the Kisanja candidate.
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