Christine Bako Abia
Ms Bako is Woman MP for Arua and Maracha-Terego districts and the Shadow Minister for Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries.
Ms Bako is Woman MP for Arua and Maracha-Terego districts and the Shadow Minister for Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries.
So it's now official. Makerere University Council has approved an award of an Honorary Degree to President Museveni. Reason: His exceptional contribution to promoting agriculture. Nothing could be closer to irony! Here is why.
Documented evidence shows that from 1981 to date, the agricultural sector has registered miserly improvements in real terms. The Uganda Bureau of Statistics reported in 2008 that performance in every agricultural sub-sector declined over almost the entire past decade. The fisheries sub-sector may be ticking at 2.66 but its share to the Gross Domestic Product awfully stands at minus 12.4, according to the National Development Plan, 2009.
The per capital contribution to GDP of food crops, cash crops and livestock have retrogressed to -0.08, -2.5 and 1.98, respectively. This means the overall monetary and non-monetary contribution of agriculture is slipping under watch of the NRM government of which Mr Museveni is the political high priest.
For starters, Uganda government is signatory to the June 2004 Maputo Declaration, whose Point 25 compels approving countries, Uganda inclusive, to allocate 10 per cent of their national budget to agriculture. Earlier in 2003, Uganda acceded to the Banjul (the Gambia) Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) through the APRM/NEPAD vision, embracing a similar commitment.
The government in Kampala has only made good on failing the farmers. Official statistics show that the allocation to agriculture last touched a 10 per cent ceiling of Uganda's national budget 30 years ago - in 1980. The allocation has today plummeted to 3.91 per cent.
It would be poisonous, intellectually tragic, if celebrated academics at Makerere University trade their worth just to appease a President. University professors surely should have a better bargain.
By international standards, some nine million Ugandans live below the poverty line! Life has become increasingly unbearable. Jiggers are still the millstone for a section of our population. One has to be intoxicated to believe the learned professors at Makerere University are no bootlickers by offering to reward the President for practically running down agriculture.
Ironically, NRM ideologues are trumpeting the failed "Prosperity-for-all" scheme, a central plank of President Museveni's 2006 campaign manifesto, as sort of a panacea to deprivations of poor rural households. The scheme assumes that by selecting a particular agricultural enterprise(s), each household would make at least some Shs20 million each year.
"In Uganda Prosperity has not yet been attained...," President Museveni writes in the foreword of the February 2008 Prosperity-for-all policy document. In other words, two years after the last elections, it dawned on the Head of State that his prescribed medication for poor Ugandans wasn't working. Not because it is a bad dose but its architects know not what to do.
It's worrying that this critical sector is being managed - or mismanaged - in a policy vacuum. As the shadow Minister for Agriculture, I recommended in an alternative policy position that a comprehensive national agricultural policy be developed and an agriculture development bank established to provide friendly credit to farmers. The state is also obliged to examine input trade dynamics; provide timely market information and infrastructure to strengthen the backward and forward linkages between the industrial and agricultural sector.
Scrap the NAADS programme and revive real extension service to all farmers through in-the-field and government-employed extension workers, among others.
Ms Bako is Woman MP for Arua and Maracha-Terego districts and the Shadow Minister for Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries
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