The statistics of our country’s economy still rate Uganda as predominantly peasant.Peasant life basically entails trying to obtain livelihood from toiling for oneself on one’s piece of land. This is usually based on the use of rudimentary implements to work the land. The peasant income is always paltry, worsened by permanent strangulation from higher costs of living.

In the 1960s, public workers, who were ranked at the same level with policemen, primary school teachers, medical assistants, etc., used to earn monthly salary of Shs 311. The purchasing power of this sum of money by then was equivalent to 150 chickens, whose average price today at Shs 10,000, would currently translate to Shs 1.5 million. Graduate professionals, like doctors, administrators, cadet officers, etc., with a salary of Shs 1,100 would at today’s prices need a pay scale of Shs 4.5 million.

The meaning of these figures is that the pay-rate of these workers has over the years deteriorated towards the peasants’. The figures are even more diminished when compared to the current prices of a basket of industrial goods, like paraffin, motor fuel, clothing, bicycles, motor-cars, etc. These days, only an insignificant number of well-placed public workers or their relatives in cash-flowing lucrative agencies still retain a level of decency that graduates used to be entitled to.

The stark question facing us then is how we plan to lift this country out of this present predicament to the hope of a better life. Most of our humdrum politicians have ceased worrying over such a bothering question. They prefer to concentrate only on their own skins and personal prospects in the coming elections.

Their minds are full with devising schemes by which to fool the electorate with tit-bits: the offering of relief items to the distressed, jerry-cans to women voters, sauce-pans during funerals, etc., all of which they proudly tout as bringing development to the country.  It is now standard argument to attribute poverty of the peasants to their own foolishness, for allegedly sticking to a subsistence economy when they should have ‘adopted’ commercialisation.

The unemployed amongst our graduates are blamed for their wrong choices of courses. It is then proposed that things will get brighter if the peasant economy gets transformed to commercialised agriculture. The unemployed are promised to find jobs if investors come to build industries.  The seed for imagined ‘commercialisation’ of our agriculture was planted long ago during the colonial times, when the colonial authorities introduced “cash” crops and thence colonial control of our country’s economic life.

Since then, the peasants’ production has been increasingly exposed to world commerce while the commerce and industry of the colonizers was introduced to our agriculture. In the course of time, it was sensed by our people that the peasant life could only produce poverty. This is why the NRM struggle articulated developing an internal national market to stabilise and develop agriculture as well as to kick-start the process of building an independent, national economy that would free us from the vagaries of the colonial period.

The history of the developed world was itself preceded by a peasant economy. The relative present dominance of non-agricultural sectors did not rise as simple premonition or an anti-thesis to agriculture, but a result of its development.

Crafts and industry emerged in society to equip agricultural production and life. As agriculture churned out more commodities, the more trade and industries also grew. Industries flourished to supply others with materials and equipment, leading to general industrialisation. Agriculture was, therefore, a source of industrialisation.

Some of our politicians now allege that only foreign investors can be the basis of industrialisation. Yet, the foreign investors are attracted to a market only out of juicy income, not out of pity for the obtaining miseries of poverty.

The country ought to be debating whether the freezing of the pay scale of our public workers to slave conditions is justified. The claim that the state cannot afford payment of enhanced salaries seems to be spurious. There are everyday reports of enormous free-wheeling on public funds at all levels. The massive misuse of money on CHOGM demonstrates that there is no fear of bankruptcy.

It is probably safer to fund the needs of the public workers so that there is less money for fictitious commitments rather than keep denying it to them under superfluous pretexts. The increased purchasing power of the public workers would ensure a steady market for the agricultural production, enabling more prosperity and investment into it. This increased rural wealth would attract more industries, spiraling into the development process.

The author is a member of NEC (NRM) representing historicals
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