Joachim Buwembo
9 November 2009
opinion
Nairobi — As Uganda's two-year leadership of the Commonwealth of Nations comes to an end, a recent series published by the New Vision illustrates how big a role Britain has played in Uganda's development.
The series, based largely on the Auditor General's report, showed how the nearly $200 million allocated for hosting the November 2007 CHOGM, the Commonwealth Heads Of Governments Meeting, in Kampala two years ago was spent.
This latest episode of Britain triggering a development leap in Uganda opened when Queen Elizabeth II accepted our invitation to come to Kampala.
But a flashback to a more fundamental British intervention in Uganda is in order.
It all started in the 19th century when the King of Buganda, Kabaka Mutesa I, wrote to his British counterpart and empire builder, Queen Victoria, proposing a partnership of the two kingdoms.
The partnership did not exactly take the direction the Kabaka had envisioned, complete with strategic romantic overtones, but it ended in the introduction of Western education, medical services and a formidable public administration system.
During the reign of Elizabeth II, Uganda got its first hydroelectric installation of 150 MW in 1954 -- switched on by the Queen herself -- as well as superb health and education institutions, radio and TV broadcasting systems, political independence complete with a flag and national anthem -- and Kampala municipality was upgraded to city status.
And when the Queen agreed to pay us a second visit (physically the third, because she spent a few hours in Entebbe on her way from Kenya 57 years ago when her father died and she was heading home to take over the throne) to preside over the Kampala CHOGM, she initiated a powerful new trend towards public-private partnerships.
As the New Vision series clearly showed, the Queen's visit enabled our government to foster and strengthen the concept that our development partners have been urging us to embrace.
So you had government people conceiving lucrative deals and passing them over to partners in the private sector.
Hotels were being encouraged to charge as much as four times their normal rates, were paid in advance by the government and were also given capital to build or expand existing units.
So willing a partner did the government turn out to be, that in some cases, as with the $10 million deal to provide transport for CHOGM delegates, it ignored its own rules to enable private-sector operators to get their hands on the money.
Our co-operative government even knowingly accepted three-year old vehicles as brand new, glossed over evidence that the vehicles were not made in Germany as purported, and thus chose to put the lives of leaders from four dozen countries at avoidable risk in order to help our private sector.
How much stronger can a public-private partnership get?
It had been a long time indeed since we had such an interesting episode showing creative criminal minds at work to amuse the public in our otherwise boring city.
There have been some big crime stories in the past few years, but they were the sordid type, involving child sacrifice and jealous men who shoot their wives in the head when the poor ladies find more interesting companions.
The CHOGM public/private partnership deals provided wholesome entertainment that could be enjoyed by the entire family, like excerpts from a Jeffrey Archer thriller.
As for the Queen, we cannot thank her enough for being the spur for such a major injection of cash into our private sector.
Had she not accepted the invitation to come to Uganda, a number of our millionaires today would probably still be ordinary people.
Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International Fellow for Development Journalism.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2009 The East African. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
