THE EAST AFRICAN-NAIROBI-KENYA
Opinion
Monday, December 16, 2002
Economic Heroes Mop Floors, Send Dollars Home
By JOACHIM BUWEMBO
As the year comes to a close, many Ugandan migrant workers are flying home for the Christmas break. Over the years, we have been seeing an increasing number of these December visitors who storm the city around this time of the year, buy houses, marry home girls and party hard before returning to their jobs abroad.
These emigrant workers, locally called kyeyo (big broom) are Uganda's economic saviours. The surprising thing is that they are helping the country that has done so much to frustrate them. Today, everyone will tell you how kyeyo is the country�s leading earner of foreign exchange. In the past, it used to be coffee, but that has long since been replaced by kyeyo, which now sends home half a billion dollars a year � several times more than the forex coffee fetches.
But the government had no hand in promoting kyeyo. Today, we have over 60 ministers, but there is no minister for kyeyo, the country's top dollar earner. Maybe it falls under the Ministry of Labour. But this is the most neglected and despised ministry here. I do not know who the Minister of Labour is. Many other people, better informed than I am, do not know him either and don't care. What we know is that whenever there is a Cabinet reshuffle, the minister sent to Labour is on his way out, to be sacked in the next reshuffle.
There is no single government office, manned even by a junior official, that promotes this vital sector. Our budget of over a trillion shillings goes to every other activity you can think of but not a single shilling is allocated to the promotion of kyeyo.
We allocate billions to agriculture and what do we get in return? One scandal after another! At times, the Ministry of Agriculture has actually been instrumental in increasing our foreign debt. A few years ago, for instance, Japan gave Uganda a grant of some $2 million for agricultural development. Ministry officials stole the money and the Japanese forced the government to refund the $2 million. The Finance Ministry had to budget for paying the $2 million debt to Japan the following financial year.
Now, if the Agriculture Ministry did not exist, the poor Ugandan taxpayer wouldn't have been forced to throw away such a big sum of money. And the government wouldn't have been made to look like a village thief being made to return a chicken he has stolen.
The Ministry of Education has not helped to promote kyeyo either. The big dollars are coming in not from highly educated Ugandans working outside the country but from less-educated Ugandans doing menial jobs abroad. Yes, it is those Ugandans who bathe invalids and senile wazungu in retirement homes who send us the big bucks. Because of their tangible aspirations (building a house, starting a business, marrying a home girl and paying relatives� school fees) they send their money back home.
The professors and professionals take up the Western way of life more easily and become assimilated in the society in which they work. Their salaries are paid into banks and they shop with credit cards, they are attached to their housing mortgages and their savings are invested in the stock exchange and for their children to go to college. They are completely Westernised and irrelevant to Uganda�s economy.
But the kyeyo chaps earn their money in cash, often from two or more employers who exploit their shaky immigration status to underpay them. They remit the cash home as fast as it accumulates under their pillows. The only thing they thank the Uganda government for is letting the currency market operate freely. This was meant to help big exporters but the kyeyo people took advantage and the country benefited.
Uganda's forex earnings would increase severalfold if the government reduced the money made available to the thieves in its ministries and devoted the savings thus realised to the promotion of kyeyo. This could take the form of making the currently expensive passport entirely free, and buying air tickets for intending emigrants.
An air ticket for a kyeyo emigrant would be more useful to the country than one for sending a sleepy bureaucrat or politician on a trip where his main interest is collecting per diems. Scouts should be sent to open up more kyeyo lands. Today, our people mostly go to Britain, America and Japan. Yet there are other places where they could earn good money instead of wasting away at home. It is time we got our spending priorities right.
Joachim Buwembo is Editor of the Sunday Vision of Kampala.
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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