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Africa and her poverty have become the subject of a global debate. Our wounds and our failures are being beamed all over the globe in the expectation that the citizens of the G8 world will do enough campaigning to encourage their governments to find a way of getting us out of the mess in which we have been wallowing for the last four decades (or possibly 500 years, if you take the really long view).
One of the strong messages coming out of the aid-to-Africa debate is that we are expected to start doing things very differently from the way it is perceived we have been doing them in the past.
Relations between men and women will have to change and move towards gender equality; stealing of public money will have to be curbed; there should be more open and more regular elections, etc, we all know the list.
These are the necessary steps we are told to take to be able to move towards more sustainable development and a complete break with the culture of poverty.
However, the English say that "necessity is the mother of invention", and the best evidence of their belief in that saying can be found in what they and their colleagues in the G8 club have done here in Africa. Not just now, but in the past that is still with us.
The last two decades of the century before last found British society (as well as the rest of Europe's), very poor, sharply divided, crisis-ridden and constantly on the brink of revolt and revolution.
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POVERTY WAR: Leaders, taking part in the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, listen to British Prime Minister Tony Blair (C) on Thursday. AFP photos |
This was a direct result of their self-created industrial revolution that swept through Europe from the 1840s onwards, moving millions of people from an agricultural way of life into the mines, shipyards and factories, turning them into "wage-slaves", and destroying the remnants of village and community life that had managed to survive their feudal systems. The ordinary people reacted increasingly violently to this oppression and exploitation.
The Irish writer Oscar Wilde observed that England was simply "the first and the most deeply penetrated of all the British colonies".
As a way out of these problems, the Europeans found it necessary to find new territories to settle their growing populations and to create new markets for their goods as well as ever-cheaper labour to exploit.
Cecil Rhodes, the British inventor of Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe), explained it most clearly: "I was in the east end of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed.
I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for "bread, bread, bread", and on my way home pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism. My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e. in order to save the 40m or so inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced by them in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread-and-butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists."
This strategy enabled them to begin providing somewhat higher standards of living for their own people and even buy off a section of them, thus diminishing the threat of rebellion.
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| BASICALLY AGRARAIN: A Kenyan farmer plucks ripe coffee berries. |
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| Nigerois boys walk by grazing cattle on their way to help parents working in a field. |
It was a strategy of survival, where the capitalist counties turned themselves into imperialist, empire-owning countries – the beginning of globalisation – and has so far worked quite well for them, providing a new lease of life on which they as the G8 are surviving up to today.
Poverty question
This is where Uganda, and other places like it, comes in.
"Uganda" was invented in the 1880s as a necessary part of the solution to those British problems mentioned earlier, and politically imposed on our recent ancestors in 1894. From that day onwards, Uganda has been little more than a vast income-generating project for the powerful interests that drive the economies of the countries now known as the G8.
Today, Uganda ranks as one of the countries with the poorest populations in the world. It is this poverty that the G8 countries say that they are committed to resolving, all by 2015.
Our governments of the last decades have been supported and encouraged in carrying out policies that would, say the globally wise, make it easier to attract help, solve inequalities and create wealth.
In its current form, the Domestic Relations Bill (DRB), which incidentally predates the G8 initiative by a few decades – is a piece of proposed legislation that would address one of the concerns: gender inequality. The laws regarding land use and management are also of a similar vein.
The DRB's suspension in Parliament – due to the need to organise the payback of the Shs5 million down payment on some MPs' opinions through passing the kisanja thing – has provoked reactions of both joy and dismay, depending on what commentators feel is at stake.
However, certain questions remain unanswered, principally the issue of how to reduce poverty, especially at household level and across genders.
The current suspension of the progress of the DRB is therefore possibly a blessing in disguise. Many of us have not had the opportunity to reflect on the questions of where Uganda came from and why it was originally created, but we continue shouting for and expecting justice within its borders and institutions.
The question, therefore, is: what is the use of this former British project? Can it be used as a tool for solving these current problems? Is the idea of Uganda a just and legitimate idea?
My view is that the Africans here have no more chance of making this British invention solve our social and economic problems than the most experienced jet pilot has of making a kamunye minibus fly through the air, no matter how politically experienced, determined and courageous our leaders might be. Like the minibus, "Uganda" is simply not designed for the purpose to which those "at the controls" are trying to put it.
So, while it is not useful to rejoice that the DRB has stalled, since that only leaves us where we are right now – poor, divided and with women and orphans bearing the brunt of that poverty – on the other hand, it may not also be useful to clamour for the re-igniting of the DRB engine, as that was simply going to take us in hope along a journey to disappointment, packed together in the Uganda-Kamunye Airlines.
What then is the way forward? Let us think.
Factories and families
All human societies concern themselves with two priorities: reproduction and economic production, because these are essential to continued existence.
In industrialised Europe, the factory became the basic unit of economic production, while the family (increasingly nuclear) organised separately, concerning itself with reproduction, while becoming wholly dependent on the wages and profits from the factory.
It is partly for this reason that the subsequent decline (and even near collapse) of the factory system in the industrialised world since the mid-1970s that European social and family life finds itself faced with huge challenges of order, discipline and morality.
Beyond the mining industries that were found here by the likes of David Livingstone (and destroyed thereafter), Africa did not industrialise. This allowed for the saving of a lot more indigenous knowledge than was possible on other continents.
African indigenous knowledge is often understood or portrayed as being concerned with herbs and proverbs. Valuable as these are, they are not the whole story.
One thing that Africans have shown a great talent for also is social and political organisation. In terms of the economy, this meant a system where the family unit was also at the same time the economic unit. The family was also the factory. By belonging to a family, one also took part in production, and was entitled in one way or another to some of the proceeds of that production.
Looking again at the industrialised countries, we see a whole body of laws governing factory production, management, ownership and transfer of ownership. At any given time, it is clear to whom an economic unit belongs, how it should be managed, who is entitled to the proceeds from it (and in what quantity), who runs the unit and how ownership will be transferred should the need arise.
Such laws must be in force over any economic activity or the result will be chaos or at best, economic constipation, where nothing gets done due to endless disputes over who is in charge, who should be in charge and who is entitled to what, etc.
In societies like ours that were and are basically agricultural, such laws have to exist over the governance of the economic unit (the family) and the basic economic resource (the land).
Many such detailed laws did exist and operated to create viable (though not necessarily equal) societies that did not require foreigners to support 50 percent of their budgets and consider "cancelling their debts" in order for them to survive, as is the G8 challenge today.
Second and last part will appear next Sunday
Mr Serumaga is the regional director of Panos | 
