Our politicians have to take advice some time
By Anne Mugisha
Oct 9, 2003
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A friend of mine who rejected Musevenomics as soon as the President introduced the policy of barter trade has been giving me a few lessons on why we need economically astute policy makers to lead the country. He concedes that they may not make the best politicians but if only the politicians could listen to qualified professionals it would serve the county well. He decries our reliance on the wisdom of self-acclaimed enlightened leaders who lead the whole population into poverty and under-development simply because they refuse to take the advice of experts and then refuse to acknowledge that they were wrong. Barter trade was so wrong that now we can all look back and wonder how it jumped out of Museveni’s head onto a policy document. Remember how Ugandan beans were exchanged for Cuban refrigerators. Surely, those who closed the deal could not have been oblivious of the amounts of real paper money that changed hands in the process of completing the deal. Lorry transporters, air carriers, shippers and other merchants who were involved could not have accepted gunny bags of beans or even cowrie shells for their services. How could the economists in the Ministry of Finance and Bank of Uganda have implemented what was really a fallacy to start with? I believe that the implementation of the barter trade project is really an indicator of just how willing Ugandans were to give Museveni and his brand of leadership a blank cheque in 1986. A decade and a half later not much has changed. Museveni’s ideas on the economy, governance, social services, defence and any public policy area are still embraced and implemented by an array of accomplished professionals with hardly a question on their feasibility and effectiveness. My friend resurrected his quarrel with Musevenomics after the recent World Trade Organisation (WTO) saga after Museveni once again issued a missive justifying his unpopular position at the WTO conference in Cancun, Mexico. The trigger for his reaction this time round was not the matter in which Museveni threw out the laborious negotiations that go into making group positions in multilateral negotiations, but rather his position on India. This is how he viewed the matter: “For argument’s sake… if India was to remove all tariffs on Uganda’s primary products namely tea, coffee, cotton or even textiles; our products would still be too expensive and not competitive compared to India’s locally grown primary products or textiles. Any economist worth his salt should point out that India’s economies of scale and a highly productive population, and if you may add, democratic governance would lock Uganda out of her market. Our goods would still be too expensive without tariffs in India.” I leave it to the economists in the Ministry of Finance and the pseudo-economists in the watering holes otherwise known as “bufunda” to debate the common sense in that statement further. But let us face it, the zeal and gusto with which I advocated for privatization of public enterprises hardly makes me the right person to be criticizing Musevenomics. After all hasn’t the Director for Information at the Movement Secretariat, Mr Ofwono Opondo consistently tried to tie my name to the ill-fated Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB) sale? The fact is that even when economic policies were based on sound economic principles, their implementation was hijacked by corrupt politicians with dubious motives leading to disastrous consequences. I can hear you asking but what did you do about it? You just sat there and enjoyed your per diem and now that you are languishing in exile you have changed your tune. Maybe you are right. Many who worked with me at the time could say we were powerless in the face of political coercion and manipulation. But even that is not completely true and I suppose that as part of the team that was involved in the first privatization of UCB I tend to carry a disproportionate share of the blame from Opondo because of my political inclinations. Maybe just to make amends for my past, I will tell you the story of my trip to Johor Bahru and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia as part of a team that carried out due diligence on the infamous Westmont Bank. Hopefully when I am done telling my tale the security services will not torture my father with snakes and crocodiles as a result. Ms Mugisha is a member of the Reform Agenda political pressure group |
© 2003 The Monitor Publications
Anne,
You should have come clean on this one ages ago! What took you so long?
Gook
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