By Oweyegha-Afunaduula
When I do critical thinking and give critical analyses of government programmes, policies, legislations, judicial processes, and strategies in development, some people who hate critical thinking and critical analysis, or who do not know anything about the two essentials in development and have no intellectual capacity to think critically and analyze critically, are always quick to tell me:
“You are negative about everything to do with NRM and all that it does”.
But this is not true, and I forgive them because they do not know, and need to know, what I have been doing for the last 31 years since I came back to my country. I am sure I have been tolerated because I tell government what others can’t say: the truth.
President Museveni Launching The Parish Development Model
They are fond of telling lies, yet for meaningful and effective development you need to put the truth at the center of the development process. At least future generations will say that when Oweyegha-Afunaduula was on the Earth, he tried to put sense where there was nonsense, to restrain the present generation from taking everything for itself, leaving nothing for them.
I am interested in the Parish Development Model because of the very many failed development programmes designed to liberate the people from poverty. I want to know if it will succeed where the other failed. Its designers have the goal of integrating people in the money economy as a strategy of liberating them and their communities from poverty like those other programmes designed to liberate humanity from poverty, which failed.
Because the strategy was the same: money bonanzas to a select few. Misappropriated money was never recovered. Those who got the the money it was for appreciating them for the political support they gave President Tibuhaburwa Museveni.
For the purposes of this article I will define a money economy as “an economy that preserves money as the medium of exchange of goods and services that are sold or bought using money as the medium of exchange. This economy subordinates people, their communities, ecology, environment, ecosystems, cultures to just being commodities to be bought and sold to make more money.
Commodification of everything conceivable, even water, oxygen, human life, organs and tissues for money, is the ultimate goal.. What does not make money is, whether people or communities, are useless and can be excluded from the money economy.
Indeed, currently water (in rivers and lakes)and land have been so commodified that the people and their unity, oneness, land, cultures, bioecology, communities, environments, ecosystems, climate, morality, ethics and futures have been distorted by the money economy as it gets emphasized at the expense of humanity.
And this is where my first questions come in: How does integrating people into the money economy liberate them from poverty? And is this new? Isn’t it a global ideal to which the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been committed to achieve since they were created at the end of War by giving loans to countries?
If the Parish Development Model wants to give money as loans to select people to spur them to enter the money economy, how much more will it succeed to recoup the loans without generating corruption instead like the other government programmes and the World Bank and IMF have done at the national and global levels?
The Parish Development Model was launched by President Tibuhaburwa Museveni on 27th February 2022 When Corruption Rank in Uganda had increased from 142 in 2020 from 137 in 2019. It was expected to reach 151 in 2021. Corruption index was expected to reach 26.0 by the end of 2021.
It must have spiraled much higher given that a lot of the Covid 19 funds resources internally and externally were misappropriated. The poverty rate, which was 56.0% in 1993, had risen to 21.4% in 2016, but then it short up again to 41% in 2020. In 2020 37.2 million people, of the nearly 45m, were in poverty, approximately 3.3 million more than in 2019.
As government launched it’s 2021/2023 national Budget on 17 September 2020, 1.8million people had sunk into the abyss of poverty, a 25% increase in the number of people living in poverty. By November 2021,Uganda’s poverty rate had risen by another 10% points.
That was the effect of Covid 19, which pushed many, especially small businesses, into poverty. Many expected Government to use the vast Covid 19 funds to bail them out of business inactivity, but instead thieves got access to the funds and used them to construct hotels, supermarkets, mansions, petrol stations, etc. as our people sank further into poverty
It is against this background that we are being told that the Parish Development Model is the answer to Uganda’s mushrooming poverty. We must ask whether another money bonanza (handout), in the name of Parish Development Model, has a chance of pulling Ugandans out the now debilitating poverty.
During the launch of the Parish Development Model, the President said it was a multi-sectoral programme based on the following pillars:
-Production
-Storage
-Processing and marketing
-Infrastructure and economic services
-Social services
-Mindset change
-Parish management information system
-Governance and Administration
He said he regards the Parish Development Model as a kind of cooperative through which government support will be channeled. May be let me start by critiquing this idea. Historically, cooperative societies have not been innovated in a top-down fashion. They start from the bottom, and have no government burdening. They generate their own money through hard work, not through money bonanzas.
It is high time government allowed our people to form meaningful and effective societies of the Bugisu Cooperative Society type, a relic of the Cooperative Societies and unions that existed before 1986, but which collapsed because they were ransacked by rebels. They had their own bank, the Cooperative Bank.
They engaged in effective production, storage, processing and marketing, , financial inclusion, infrastructure development and economic services, and they had their own management and information system, governance and administration right from the parish level. If they had not been destroyed by the rebels, we would not be wasting resources to do things that had already been done. We would only be adding value.
The issue if multi-sectorially is a good one, but it is old-fashioned. We are in an era of New and Different knowledge production, which many universities around the world have taken seriously, but our universities are still stuck in the past, busy producing human resources disciplinarily who do not love sectors interacting but prefer them to be parallel and closer to each other rather than interacting.
New and different knowledge and professionals are being produced inter-disciplinarily, trans-disciplinarily, cross-disciplinarily and non-disciplinarily. This way, people who value genuine interaction are being produced to work across, not parallel, to sectors, which is the case in multi-sectorality.
The President has a lot of influence onto our Universities through his wife who is is Minister of Education. Let him spur them to accommodate new and different knowledge production, and of new and different professionals, which Mbarara University of Science and Technology embraced long ago, and is producing the kind of professionals we need in the 21st Century.
Otherwise, doing things the way we did them in the 20th Century will push the Parish Development Model into the dustbin of history, its focus on integration of people in the money economy notwithstanding.
Another likely pitfall of the Parish Development Model’s effectiveness could be political burdening of the model. In the past, all the other failed programmes designed to pull Ugandans out of poverty but only targeted individuals that professed being members of NRM.
It will be surprising if all the people appointed as parish chiefs to manage the parish funds for the Model are not NRM cadres. If they are this will mean the 10594 parishes will be in the hands of NRM as manager and beneficiary. The political and financial capital accruing to the party in power will be great.
Lastly, since the Parish Development Model does not target whole communities, and targets only 39% of the population, environmentally-speaking it, and its money economy, will be like pollutants if the rural economy.
It will disintegrate the communities further and generate even more poverty since government will do completely nothing for the 61% of the population not targeted by the Parish Development Model funds. The model will be like a divide and rule tool, just like all the programmes before have been. The greatest resource of the communities will be their poverty.
For God and my Country.
The Writer is a Ugandan Scientist and Environmentalist
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