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A National Shame We Must Get Rid Off

The Monitor (Kampala)
EDITORIAL
January 16, 2005
Posted to the web January 17, 2005
Kampala
It is scandalous that Uganda today should be getting any food aid from anyone,
even if it is to feed people in camps in northern Uganda. It is even more
scandalous to contemplate the idea at all that we might not have enough food,
as a special report in this paper shows. The people in northern Uganda have
been in camps many years, why can't we feed them? It is largely because we do
not have any food reserves to deal with such situations even though the
Constitution commands us otherwise.
government officials claim that food reserves are too expensive to maintain and
that, in any case, the treasury has a special fund to deal with any
emergencies. If we have all that money, what is it doing? No wonder junior
finance minister Mwesigwa Rukutana could not even state how much it is - as if
we were asking about his private money.
The minister's response leads us to consider a larger matter. That is the issue
of drought, famine/endemic deprivation, and hunger on one hand and democracy on
the other. The Indian Nobel economist Amartya Sen has eloquently argued that
drought, for example, only leads to famine in countries that are not, or are
less, democratic. Democratic countries are normally responsive and accountable
to the people (the electorate) and do respond quickly and creatively both short
term and long term to the first signs of drought and, therefore, go on to avert
famines.
If they do not, they will be voted out at the next election. Less democratic
countries routinely steal elections, so they are not bothered about what their
people are going through because they will keep power anyway whether the
electorate is angry and dying or not.
Given how fertile Uganda is, there is no reason we should be happy begging food
handouts from WFP or anyone. With some creativity all we need to do is irrigate
so as to move away from rain-fed agriculture, conserve the environment to check
declining soil fertility, use the right fertilisers, and, of course, shun war.
President Museveni can talk about zoning and modernising agriculture all he
wants, but has he definitively addressed the land ownership question to be able
to encourage commercial agriculture?
Other countries have taken this path to success. India and China's crop yields
have doubled and even tripled. And a number of Latin American countries, led by
Brazil, are quietly eclipsing the United States and western Europe as sources
of international food sales. We too can surely move out of our state of what
Prof. Sen calls endemic deprivation - "a more persistent phenomenon, forcing
people to live regularly and ceaselessly in a state of undernourishment,
disease and weakness".
But whatever the case, it is up to us Ugandans to elect governments that are
accountable, responsive, caring and prompt in dealing with public matters.

   

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