By Richard Ssewakiryanga

For many years, civil society in Uganda has been criticized for lack of social and political imagination.  It has been mentioned severally that civil society is known only for the workshops we hold and the per diems we offer to participants.  As a result, several civil society organizations have become prisoners of this stereotype.  We all seem to be stuck in the notion that we can improve the living conditions of ordinary Ugandans through ‘technical’ interventions like capacity building, sensitization and a host of other jargon laden development interventions.

These frameworks are not only confined to civil society in Uganda, but also are a global phenomenon.  A case in point are the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which were founded on the principle that - by setting global development goals the world will follow and eliminate the targeted problems by achieving the targets in these goals.  So we all go out in all corners of the world with these noble goals prescribed to the poor and disadvantaged.  We descend on communities as multilateral and bilateral donors – who open and close our aid taps as and when we wish; as NGO workers who projectize everyday life; as consultants, we get people to tell us what they want to know and then we tell them what they know.  Like well-intentioned amateurs we descend on rural everyday life to provide ‘useful’ advice, money, education and training, and sometimes also apply pressure on rogue regimes in an attempt to make poor communities a little richer and the world a little better to live in.

By: Richard Ssewakiryanga

I am pleased to be offering a rejoinder to the wise words of PS Mark Lowcock on a very important subject of the post-MDG agenda in Uganda and across the world. As we speak now, the cacophony of voices is growing louder across the world with different groups holding consultations on the – world we want – and the post MDG agenda. In 2000, this date looked far off. But today all of us remember vividly the year 2000, when our world leaders promised to halve extreme poverty by 2015 with a global plan called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Thanks to millions of people taking action across the globe as well as here in Uganda, this massive global effort paid off. We have already made real progress. Uganda has made great progress in terms of reducing the proportion of the population below the national poverty line. The poverty headcount declined and now is at 25%. Using our national benchmark, this means that Uganda is well on its way to meeting the 2015 global target of cutting poverty in half. But while we celebrate this number it is also important to note that on the other hand, the share of the poorest 20% of the population in total household consumption has fallen and this is an indication of rising inequality. Coupled with the increasing inequality are some of the most dismal indicators that we have to contend with as country.

By Richard Ssewakiryanga, 

In the ‘cacophony’ of events that are pock marking Uganda’s political scene, one is left with one enduring question, how does one make sense of today’s Uganda? Every day we wake up to a dose of one more shocking piece of news. Like a person in a drunken stupor, we seem to be treating our hangovers with more intoxicators. What, with all these scandals, in Office of the Prime Minister, Ministry of Public Service, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health, Roads, Local Governments and several other institutions. While reflecting with colleagues on what seems to be the three big things that characterize the current state of play of life in Uganda today we came up with the following issues that characterize Uganda in 2012.

First is the collapse and run down public services. This is a big thing because for a citizen that pays tax and votes leaders into power – they are getting a raw deal. This is not just an NRM regime phenomenon, but it is one that comes from years of deceptive government investments. The colonialist worried more about investing for extraction and not for development, the post colonial government spent all the time fighting to maintain their grip on power and not caring about the citizen. Today what we reap is a total collapse of public services that even the post-1986 government has failed to fix. Children continue to go to school and learn nothing, mothers continue to die on hospital floors and poor roads continue to claim the lives of numerous Ugandans.

By Richard Ssewakiryanga

I read Dr. Louis Kasakende's article on January 13th 2012 and I was convinced that Uganda need new thinking if we are to get out of the current crisis. I would want to offer another perspective because we may be missing the point with the current debate on interest rates.

We have to understand that for two decades we have worshipped Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the official economic religion for Uganda taking a cue from the Bretton institutions (World Bank and IMF) that have led the 'world-GDP-evangelism'. We have maintained an impressive 5%-7% GDP growth for over 2 decades and we patted ourselves on the back. Today we have scratching our heads with an inflation running wild up to 30%. What went wrong?

By Richard Ssewakiryanga

I leave the City of Busan in Korea with a new development cliché - ‘country heavy-global light’.  That is the character of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation – which is the outcome document from the Busan 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness held from the 29th November – 1st December 2011.  This was the conference that formally brough the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness of 2005 and the Accra Agenda for Action of 2008 to an official end.  These two earlier declarations were supposed to define how the world was going to use aid and development cooperation resources to fast track the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.  It is interesting that we came ready to erase the words ‘aid effectiveness’ from the development vocabulary and replace them with the words - ‘development effectiveness’.  But we left with a more convoluted process and document whose title - ‘effective development cooperation’- had little to do with the aspirations of the meeting.  Nevertheless, we leave this high level forum with a nice collection of metaphors like; enabling environment, triangular cooperation, social entrepreneurship, results-focus - as new words that will define the new era of development cooperation.