Mathias Walukaga in Ekyatusomosa Lweera, Herman Basudde in Mweraba Ngenze, and Kazibwe Kapo in Sigwa Jajja Wo all sing about a common Ugandan phenomenon – the migration of people, often as individuals, on a lonely search for economic opportunity, from rural to urban centers. Whereas the central message in each of their songs is different, they all sing about work and in the process aspects of rural-urban migration filter through the message, showing how one’s fortunes usually change for the better when one leaves their villages to work in towns.
In the broader processes of national development and transformation, massive rural-urban migration, as opposed to individual migration, facilitates structural transformation in the economy, society, and politics. No country developed without experiencing increased migration of people from rural areas to urban centers with the attendant shift from subsistence agriculture to industry and service delivery as the major sources of employment and livelihood. The message in Walukaga, Basudde and Kazibwe’s songs is that rural-urban migration is economically transformative.
China is a notable example of a country which developed by systematically organising its rural–peasant population within national projects of state modernization which saw its rapid socio-economic transformation.
China harnessed its vast rural labour force for national development to enable it to transition from an agrarian economy to a global industrial powerhouse in what is known as the Great Leap Forward. Whereas the social and human consequences of the Great Leap Forward were an astronomical failure, in the end, the Leap set China on a course for long-term industrial growth. I am not suggesting the adoption of a Great Leap Forward for Uganda, but I carry the understanding that forms of violence have been central to the development process in all nations. Karl Marx, by far the greatest political economist, was cognisant of the brutality of the process of development as involving forced dispossession and coerced transformation of peasants into providers of free labourers in the process of “primitive accumulation.” Marx did not think that the peasant should be saved from this fate since the peasantry was “a relic of a past mode of production now on its way out: unproductive and, mostly, politically backward.”
More recently in the early years of this century, China set out to stimulate economic growth with rapid urbanization as its key strategy. How did China turn rural land into urban centers at an accelerated pace?
Firstly, unlike in Uganda where leaders are preoccupied with politics and power, one of the most preoccupying issues among leaders in the People’s Republic of China is solving “China’s Agrarian Question.” China’s leaders share a long-standing ideological goal of driving industrialization and urbanization.
Like China, Uganda urgently needs to modernize the countryside, reduce poverty and transfer rural peasants into the urban economy. This process will enable us to shift large droves of our population from tilling the earth in villages to being integrated into higher-value employment in industry and service sectors.
Countries which have most of their people employed in sectors of service delivery and industry are wealthier as opposed to those reliant on agriculture for employment. The current disaster in Uganda and many African countries is that agriculture still employs over 70 percent of our labour force which definitely contributes the least to our national wealth/GDP. In contrast, the world’s biggest economy – the United States has over 77% of its GDP derived from the service sector, 20% from industry and just 1-2% from Agriculture. In China, the GDP is distributed between the service sector, industry and agriculture at approximately 54.6%, 38.3% and 7% respectively.
To return to the question of how China increased urbanization in recent decades, let’s first observe the fiscal reforms of the early 1990s. The Chinese government reorganized national budget allocations by reducing the financial support it extended to local governments. This forced lower-level governments to find means to be financially self-sufficient. This consequently fundamentally altered how local governments managed revenue generation and land use in the countryside.
Additionally, local governments turned to land as a primary source of revenue. In China, rural land is collectively owned by village communities whereas land in urban areas is owned by the state. Under the new fiscal system, local authorities began systematically converting rural land into urban land which allowed them to lease the newly classified land to developers for a profit. This became an essential strategy for generating revenue since land sales to private investors and construction companies provided large sums of money that could be used for local development projects.
These policies increased pressure on rural land and the consequent economic challenges in the countryside propelled more people to migrate to cities in search of better opportunities. Indeed, this was a migration trend that had already been underway with China’s broader economic reforms, which opened it to foreign investment and turned the country into the “factory of the world.” As industrialization expanded, the cities became economic hubs that offered higher job opportunities and wages compared with the countryside. The mixture of rural economic distress and the pull of urban job opportunities accelerated rural-urban migration.
The rapid urbanization fuelled by land conversion and migration contributed to China’s economic boom, as its cities became the centers of industrial production, commerce, and innovation that we know today.
Whereas these processes faced widespread resistance from villagers, as would be expected, they were and are inevitable and necessary processes of modernisation. This is how China uprooted its peasants from agrarian modes of livelihood.
The more I commit to understanding development discourse, I find that the only way for underdeveloped countries to achieve socio-economic transformation is through undergoing ruthless processes of converting their mass populations of peasants involved in farming into workers in industries and service sectors. I have not yet known any process where this happened in peace and harmony. Except for a handful of countries that sat on mega oil reserves which simply pumped oil out of the ground to grow their economies, all the world’s nations, regardless of how much mineral resources they had, had to undertake significant land reforms in the process of “depeasantization.” That’s the missing conversation in Uganda’s political talk.
The writer is a senior research fellow at Development Watch Center.
