Gawaya Tegulle
27 October 2007
opinion
It is often in the little things that the big names fail. So I concluded when I met Mercy, a cute, well-built, all-purpose American housewife in the city of Orlando, Florida.
Her house is an impregnable fortress. With CCTV cameras, advanced burglar and fire alarms and two or three guns within reach, Mercy is nothing like her name.
And for good measure, she is perfect with a gun and packs a good punch any day of the week and twice on Sunday. If she tells you to walk, run for your life.
As her guest a year ago, I had trouble trying to spot the fly in her soup- everyone has it. But after patient and quiet observation I soon drew a firm conclusion. Anyone who dared break into this house would be dead within minutes - regardless of what weapon he used.
But if you came with a cockroach and just showed it to her, she'd do or give anything you wanted. Crisis in her language is when a roach shows up. She will jump, scream, flee, call pest control and stay out of the house until she is sure the roach is dead.
Admittedly, for Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni, an analogy would have to be more generous- two or three flies in his otherwise good soup.
But the biggest of the flies is what I will call acute investoritis - unhealthy obsession with investors as a short cut to economic development, a syndrome that continues to leave him with egg on his face.
Anyone - or anything - dressed as an investor will sure fool the President in his rather ambitious, over-zealous and ill-advised attempt to achieve economic growth overnight through a magic formula called rapid industrialisation.
The debacles of Shimoni and Uganda Broadcasting Corporation land giveaways, the collapse of Tri-Star Apparels and many others in which the country has lost billions (some say trillions) are evidence that the concept of industrialisation has been misunderstood and mishandled.
In his attempt to "leave a legacy", the President is trying to find shortcuts to development but is paying too much attention to the outcome and neglecting due process by sometimes bending and often breaking the law.
A close look at the rapidly industrialised countries - Germany and Japan (the largest economies in Europe and Asia respectively, where I have carried out private research on how they developed so quickly after World War II) will tell you that industrialisation is bigger than just setting up factories and hotels.
And industrialisation is just a small part in the bigger sphere of development - which is a complex and intricate progression. For sustainable development to occur, it must not be hurried and hassled. Secondly, when you focus on the outcome and neglect due process, you will always make big mistakes. The general rule is that the process is more important than the outcome and in fact, as long as you get the process correct, the outcome is guaranteed to be successful.
Thirdly, a nation cannot develop unless substantial input has been made on its human resource development, especially by way of ensuring good health, good education and liberated minds. Japan has a literacy rate of 100 per cent, a life expectancy of 82 years (!!), plenty of civil liberties, etcetera. Little wonder that governments may change so often in Japan and the common people barely notice; for they themselves tell you that it is not politicians who run Japan - it is the people.
That means industrialisation only makes sense in the broader context of an educated, empowered people. If that is achieved, then investors become our development partners on a win-win basis.
If not, then you create a modern day slave trade, by importing investors who come and employ natives as unskilled, completely dominated, mistreated and badly paid workers- thereby making your people miserable and wretched slaves in their own country as is Uganda's case today.
If you jeopardise the education of 3000 children of Shimoni Demonstration School for the sake of one investor, you are creating slavery, not employment.
Like Mercy, despite getting it right in many areas, the President is losing it in a most unlikely one. It is often in the little things that the big names fail.
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