This weekend, Uganda commemorates the 48th anniversary of independence. Independence, attained on October 9, 1962, has over the years become a tiresome anniversary for most Ugandans. Most Ugandans today are too stressed out, poor, struggling too hard, with too many odds stacked against them, with crumbling national infrastructure all around them and domestic bills that overwhelm them, to even have the breathing space to reflect on what independence means to them.
Most spent yesterday, October 9, 2010, at their shops, salons, and other small businesses hoping to earn that extra Shs10,000 on just one more day, just to be able to keep going. Sunday and most other public holidays, for much of the business community, have almost ceased to be days of rest as profit margins reduce, business gets harder every passing month and life is a grinding battle.
Politically, as seen in the late 1940s, the subjugation at the hands of the British colonial masters had reached the point where Uganda’s small educated middle clerical and political class could take it no more. Early agitators like Augustine Kamya and Ignatius Musaazi led campaigns for self-rule and economic boycotts. The main justification for the struggle for independence stemmed from a feeling of injustice, of not being represented, of being humiliated at the hands of the British.
The agitation for independence was mainly a sentimental, political matter, with very little understanding of the complexities that involve the mechanism of a modern state. What was not adequately understood and foreseen was that running an independent nation required much more skill, resources, trained personnel and organisation than just a wish to see Africans run their own affairs.
Until 1956, for example, Makerere College had been the only institution of higher learning in East Africa. And yet six years later in 1962, the country could claim, without seeing the futility of this, to being ready for independence. A 1990 document on Uganda in the US Library of Congress described the overall strategic vision of the colonial administration:
‘Colonial rule affected local economic systems dramatically, in part because the first concern of the British was financial... The new Commissioner of Uganda in 1900, Sir Harry H. Johnston, had orders to establish an efficient administration and to levy taxes as quickly as possible... Johnston’s Buganda Agreement of 1900 imposed a tax on huts and guns, designated the chiefs as tax collectors, and testified to the continued alliance of British and Baganda interests.’
Enduring institutions
With this revenue raised from taxes on huts and guns, the colonial administration went on to create some of the most enduring institutions in Uganda - The Uganda Museum, Mulago Hospital and various other hospitals, electricity generation, cotton ginneries, extension of the Uganda Railway and Makerere University. Some of the most interesting and insightful books about Uganda, from its history, ethnic groups and customs, geography, economy, natural resources, and political systems are those written by colonial scholars, administrators and journalists of the colonial era.
In them, the picture is consistent and clear: the European colonisers for the most part were no mere plundering, looting, corrupt individuals or governments but brought to Africa the highest standards of scholarship, planning, and public administration.
Margaret McPhearson’s 1964 book They Build For The Future, on the history of Makerere University, is one of many books that captures best the whole world’s difference between the way the British colonial administrators laid out plans for their colonies and what Africa has seen since the independence period.
Everything was planned and every plan had a compelling, logical, short- and long-term reason and goal. Every policy responded to a need and every need was analysed and understood and every reason for creating a policy to address that need or crisis made sense.
Throughout the creation of what would later become one of Africa’s most respected universities, the sense of planning, studying, and systematically organising resources and people to create Makerere University is visible. Here is an example of how institutions in Uganda were created by the colonial administrators.
The clarity of the British thinking and planning and the reasons they gave for that are unmistakable:
“Dr H.B. Owen, who had retired from the medical service, was recalled to become the first medical tutor at the college (Makerere).
Patiently going forward step by step, in the first instance compiling simple notes and working towards a stage at which his students could assimilate simple text-books, grounding them in physics, biology and chemistry, he moved them on to the pre-clinical subjects got them in two years to the stage when they could move over to Mulago for clinical work.” (Margaret McPhearson, They Build For The Future, page 7-8).
The colonial administrator, Frederick Borup, introduced cotton to Uganda in 1903. Two years later, in 1905, the Uganda Protectorate exported its first bale of cotton to the world market with a value of £200; in 1906, cotton exports had risen to £1,000; in 1907 they were at £11,000, in 1908 stood at £52,000 and by 1915 Uganda’s cotton exports totalled £369,000.
Even in today’s money, £369,000 from a cotton harvest for Ugandan farmers would still be respectable export earnings. In 1915, that was an enormous amount of money.
So much did cotton alone contribute to the colonial economy that the British government ended its financial subsidy to Uganda and Uganda became financially self-sufficient, while Kenya - the largest economy in East Africa for the last 40 years - still continued to receive aid from London.
The colonial government of Uganda, in fact, used the country’s cotton exports as collateral to secure the loan that built the Owen Falls Dam in 1954. It was this Uganda or 1962 and before that is usually described as having been at the same approximate level as South Korea at the time of Uganda’s independence.
The British colonial rule can be faulted over many other things, but they left behind a world-class public administrative system that 50 years since the first wave of independence, no single African state has managed to reproduce. Even where European invaders set foot, for example the Italians in Ethiopia and Eritrea between 1935 and 1941, they built a fine road network and other public works that still survive to this day.One of the main criticism levied against the British was that they left Uganda with an army run essentially by semi-literate officers like Idi Amin, Tito Okello, Mustapha Adrisi, and Bazillio Okello.
If that is so, it says something about the genius of the British that the semi-literate soldiers of the Kings African Rifles who took over the Ugandan army in 1962 and the Ugandan government in 1971 proved to be much better administrators than the Ugandan army after 1986 that is dominated by officers with Masters degrees and advanced military staff and officer cadet training.
Under Amin’s eight-year rule, this semi-literate officer established the Uganda Airlines, Uganda Railways, procured Uganda House embassy buildings in Nairobi, London, New York and other European capitals and by the fall of his regime in April 1979, Mulago Hospital and all other government hospitals in Uganda still had a full store of drugs, and the Uganda shilling from 1971 when Amin took power to 1979 when he fell remained in value at between Shs7 and Shs7.50 to the US dollar, despite the economic hardships, the boycott and the sabotage and when Amin left office, Uganda did not have any foreign debt.
When another colonial-era, semi-literate army officer, Gen. Tito Okello, was fleeing Uganda in January 1986 before the advancing NRA guerrilla army, according to a Weekly Observer news report in 2005, the Okello regime left behind 40 military and police helicopters and Uganda Airlines, Uganda Railways, Uganda Commercial Bank, Uganda Hotels and other state-owned corporations.
Today, nearly everything that the colonial state left behind and even the semi-literate army officers like Amin and Okello were able to maintain or create, have disappeared. This alone demonstrates the positive impact that colonial rule had on Uganda, that they were able to see ability in men like Amin and Okello even though they were semi-literate and yet in Uganda today, the tendency is to view ability only in terms of the possession of academic papers and qualifications.
Internet companies
In the 1990s and 2000s, Internet companies like Yahoo!, Google, Facebook and others emerged to transform the world, often started by drop-outs from American universities. They proved what the British could see as far back as the 1930s: academic qualification is not everything in life.
Even politically and in the areas of human rights, many more Ugandans have died from independence in 1962 to 2010 at the hands of various actors of the Ugandan state than all the Ugandans who died in political and military violence in all Ugandan history before 1962, both in terms of actual numbers and as a percentage of the population.
It was most naive, then, for the first political party in Uganda, the Uganda National Congress and its leaders, to agitate for independence only or mainly on the basis of Africans’ right to dignity and greater participation in the monetary economy, without undertaking serious feasibility studies on whether or not a post-1962 Uganda had the capacity to run its own affairs and manage its finances.
Likewise today, neither the ruling NRM government nor the opposition political parties have an answer to how to create or re-create the Ugandan state to the levels of efficiency that it had before 1962.
Posts
