How much does the Museveni show cost us, and Kenyans pay for Moi's things?
By Charles Onyango-Obbo
The race to rule Africa�s airways is shaping up as a battle between South African Airways and Kenya Airways.In Uganda, the only serious competitor to South African supermarket giants Shoprite and Metro is recent Kenyan entrant Uchumi over at Garden City.
Elsewhere, the South Africans either have no competitor or simply run their rivals out of town with better products and prices. One such blowout has been the news and entertainment channel M-Net. It has established a dominance in the African market that is unusual in this day and age.
The only challenge to South Africa�s economic conquest of the east and central African sub-region is from Kenyan businesses.
Nevertheless Kenyan capitalism does not yet have the imperial ambitions of South Africa�s. This seems to be partly a result of the self-doubt inflicted by the backlash it faced following the collapse of the East African Community, and its portrayal as a �man-eat-man� society by African intellectuals in the 1970s when �socialism� was vogue in Africa. Kenya remained alone in the region as the �capitalist� nation.
One would have thought that the South African companies would have been shy about Pan-African expansion because of the baggage of the old apartheid order. However, South Africa became free in the age of globalisation, and Nelson Mandela�s international appeal also brought with it a Madiba stamp of approval for South African goods and services.
To understand why we are seeing a South African-Kenyan commercial race in the region then, we need to examine why Tanzania, and particularly Uganda, are not in the race. Kenya is about 60 percent of the combined East African economy, Tanzania is 25 percent, and Uganda is third with 15 percent.
South Africa, Kenya, and Tanzania have one thing in common. They have or had a towering national political party in power: The African Nation Congress (ANC), Kenya African National Union (KANU), and Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM - Party for Revolutionary Change) re! spective ly. In Uganda, the Uganda People�s Congress wasn�t national in the sense of ANC or CCM. The UPC, which ruled twice and was deposed in a coup as many times, didn�t govern as long as CCM or KANU. The Movement that has ruled longest is not a mass party. It�s a state organisation.
These differences have far reaching consequences for the present economic standing of Uganda relative to Kenya and Tanzania.
In Kenya, resources tended to be allocated to entrench the influence of the party over the economy. That created pressure for market success because the party would always come around every five years to collect money to buy the elections. That gave the managers of these companies power to demand, first, that they be given the freedom to run the companies on a business basis to make money to pay off the party. Secondly, businesses needed the legitimacy of appearing neutral, so MPs, the president and his relatives had to be silent shareholders and not sit in the front office of the shop.
In Uganda, the only country to be directly ruled by the military in East Africa, during Field Marshal Idi Amin�s time, there were no elections, so the military didn�t need civilian business fronts. The officers became rich by murdering or robbing businessmen, or owning the enterprises and being the managing directors.
Because the Movement is a state-cum-military party, it relies on taxpayer�s money, and doesn�t have to mobilise resources from the market to support a civic organisation like a mass party does. Instead, it mobilises its political resources in form of government revenues, which is why business taxes are very high in Uganda � thus stunting the growth of enterprises. By the same token, individuals don�t need party links to secure big business; they require family connections. And so they reproduce the extractive behaviour of the regime by being predatory; i.e. taking over privatised enterprises without paying for them, sucking them dry, and grabbing the next one.
Since KANU never embraced socialism (! like CCM did), and remained a mass party paying its way by creaming money off the underbelly of the free market, it required a vibrant free enterprise to develop above the surface to feed it.
This is why the closely fought contest between the Rainbow Alliance (NARC) and KANU for the Dec. 27 elections could have far-reaching economic consequences. It could create one of Africa�s most competitive political scenes, thus ensuring that the cost of staying in power in future will be extraordinarily high.
For the private sector to be able to meet the new demands for political resources, the next government in Kenya must create conditions that allow businesses to make more money to afford it.
The next most competitive East African political scene is Tanzania, and that�s one reason it�s ahead of Uganda where continuous electoral victory for the Movement is provided for in the Constitution, thus eliminating competition. But we always knew it � that there�s an economic cost to pay for the political path you choose, didn�t we?
December 18, 2002 00:54:22
Gook
�We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of bad people but also for the appalling silence of good people". M.L.King
MSN 8 helps ELIMINATE E-MAIL VIRUSES. Get 2 months FREE*.
