President Museveni is right about Ugandans being lazy and foolish

In his heyday, the Good African coffee honcho, Andrew Rugasira, was quite popular on Kampala’s conference speaking circuit. He was – and rightly so – the authority on doing business in Uganda as a Ugandan, especially if you are producing for the export market.

He often talked about the farmers who grew and supplied the coffee, saying how most of the homesteads from which they came were those classified as living below a dollar a day. He would marvel at the creativity and effort it required for anyone to survive below a dollar a day. At the time, the dollar was about Shs2,500.

Rugasira’s in many ways, was the story of local enterprise. Creative, ambitious, and resilient. But, on your own. His business looked like it was set to fly but then started to limp soon after and eventually ran out of breath – mostly due to our structural deficiencies. The Uganda government, if it were a serious one, could have backed him to get his coffee, Ugandan coffee onto the shelves at Tesco and Walmart.

But they didn’t. Instead, they let him go hunting on his own, waited for him to get devoured by the hyenas, and asked for their pound of flesh even when they saw him bleeding out. A few years later, the same government is working overtime to hand the coffee sector to a certain Pinetti, who by all measures is unqualified to sell a coffee bean and will likely tank the business. If they had given even 10 percent of this grace to Rugasira, his and Uganda’s would have likely been such a Good African Story.

If you look around Uganda, you will still find those with Rugasira-like ambitions. You will also find millions of others living below a dollar a day; others in formal employment who don’t even make any more than $200. A couple of more hundreds of thousands who have chosen to emigrate to faraway places, and do jobs they would rather not do because there is nothing for them to do at home.

Many of them somehow still manage to invest bits of these morsels into a business of some sort. The common denominator is that they will not get a hand-up from the government. In fact, in some instances, the government will actively frustrate their efforts. But they won’t stop, because the Ugandan spirit is enduring and indefatigable.

Yet, it is confounding to continue to hear President Museveni refer to Ugandans as lazy and fools. Of course, there is no evidence to the fact, apart from what is an apparent and seemingly consistent disdain that Museveni seems to have for the people he leads. It is, in fact, counterproductive given that the foreign investors he is obsessed with would need to rely on the local human resource that he so often caricatures.

A friend once theorized that all things considered, President Museveni’s long stay in power is thanks to the abundance of two things which ironically, he can’t take credit for – food and water.  Interestingly, the President seems to think that those two are the reason why his people are lazy and foolish.

It actually takes a lot to be Ugandan, especially if you are not actively feeding off an ever-expanding yet inefficient state. In that regard, he might be right in surmising laziness and foolery because citizens in many other countries would probably not put up with the kinds of stuff that Ugandans have to deal with, especially from a government that has been around this long.

They see foreign investors get preferential treatment from a polity that is tone-deaf and seemingly out to get them. When they try to set up businesses, capital is unattainable and the markets work for those who can invoke his name. Instead, they are harangued for taxes and pay through the nose, only for them to watch them go to waste through profligate allocations to ruling party functionaries.

That abundance of food and water is the problem but not in the condescending manner in which President Museveni is framing it. It is not the reason why his economy cannot create jobs. It is not why Uganda has one of the highest school dropout figures in the world. It is not why his officials use taxpayer money to foot their medical bills abroad as their sponsors die from a comatose health system back at home. It is certainly not why city roads are no different from potato gardens.

Mr Rukwengye is the founder,                  Boundless Minds. @Rukwengye