China’s Example for Uganda’s Development Dilemmas

by Admin (Posted on January 8, 2024)

 

By Nnanda Kizito Sseruwagi

If you are to read only one line in this article, and merely for motivational value, it is that China reassures us of the possibility of changing the course of history. It did so. I don’t suggest we should copy and paste the Chinese model. I call that we learn from the wealth of Chinese experiences to answer our development dilemmas. Those experiences are so voluminous that a library of books wouldn’t consume their totality. So, I’m aware of the vanity espoused in attempting to express a substantial amount of them in this short Op-Ed.

China has continuously exceeded the 10 percent annual GDP growth ever since Deng Xiaoping instituted market reforms in the late 1970s, marking a substantial increase in living standards and a decline in poverty. World Bank data shows more than 850 million Chinese have overcome extreme poverty. Their poverty rate declined from 88 percent in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015 as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, which still applies. Note that PPP is the ratio of the price of a basket of goods at one location divided by the price of a basket of goods at a different location.

The first illustration China’s model reveals to Uganda is the centrality of the ruling party in the economic development of the state.  The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) leadership is a major feature in China’s economic system. The underdevelopment of a poor country like Uganda leaves us no choice but to have the government, as the biggest employer and consumer in a sea of small, rising, and often failing businesses, and a brittle market, to take serious interest in our economy. Like the CCP, NRM shouldn’t forsake our economy totally for the free market. The reality we have witnessed for decades now is that neoliberal globalization develops one part of the world at the expense of other parts. If the government maintains its apathy about business, Uganda will continue to be sacrificed on the altar of the global free market since globalization engenders poverty and inequality in developing countries due to our uneven incorporation into the world capitalist economy where we can’t compete.

Like China, the Ugandan state should maintain ownership of critical sectors of the economy such as energy, communications, and finance, to do the work of capitalism in developing the productive forces. If we leave these key industries to the magic of the free market for whatever excuses Western brainwashed economists might give, those magic tricks will only entertain multinational capital and consequently enrich their already developed parent countries at our expense. Our economy cannot work without state influence since markets are neither sufficiently nor fairly self-regulating.

China’s development was also driven by local governments (LGs) with strong incentives to pursue investment and growth. We can reshape Uganda’s LGs from merely assisting the NRM to mint votes as they are currently expediently gerrymandered, to pursuing its historical mission of the economic transformation of Uganda.

Uganda should also emulate some features of the developmental state that China was, marked by a late industrializer’s sense of urgency to catch up and prioritize economic growth through industrial policy. We need to get millions of Ugandans from subsistence farming and petty trading into serious manufacturing and value addition. The industries that do this should also be owned largely by Ugandans or must contract to train Ugandans and share technology to indigenize the skills and technology. I believe that if our political parties were obsessed about how to industrialize Uganda, and marched the streets demonstrating against NRM’s auctioning of our country’s development and future to Foreign Direct Investment and Multinational Capital, which have neither history of nor interest in developing us, we would be far. The obsession with grabbing power from one group to another will only change individuals who cream off the icing sugar of the national cake that is Uganda, while foreign businesses slice and dice the cake and shop it back home. The condition of the NRM/NUP supporter will not improve substantially without a paradigm shift in these macro factors determining the collective fate of our well-being as a country.

The political structure difference between China and Uganda further tells something about our development dilemma. China’s economic miracle partly emanates from its way of democracy – whole-process people’s democracy and governmental structure. As for Uganda, just like many African states, we followed and measured ourselves against the Western model, with its marked ignorance of problems cut genetically to the African experience. China’s political system is based on its history and tradition whereas we reject our workable systems as corrupt and just copy and paste the Western models. Consequently, we waste much developmental time fighting ourselves about the ideological wars of Bazungu.

Uganda’s unique experience means there is no example or theory we can copy and paste in totality. But in the wisdom of Chinese people, we could only “cross the river by touching the stones under water”. The incompatibility of political and economic policy adopted in Uganda has been and if not changed will continue to be a defining factor of our poverty and underdevelopment. We have the idea of what is wrong, let those responsible summon the political will to take action about it.

The writer is a lawyer and Research Fellow at the Development Watch Centre.

 

 

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