{"id":19173,"date":"2021-10-09T16:10:40","date_gmt":"2021-10-09T16:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/uganda\/?p=19173"},"modified":"2021-10-09T15:45:54","modified_gmt":"2021-10-09T15:45:54","slug":"how-we-can-re-imagine-a-prosperous-uganda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/uganda\/all-news\/how-we-can-re-imagine-a-prosperous-uganda","title":{"rendered":"How we can re-imagine a prosperous Uganda"},"content":{"rendered":"

Africa-Press<\/a> – Uganda<\/a>. <\/strong><\/span>It\u2019s independence anniversary time. At a minimum, there is at least some symbolism of being an independent nation. The pride and honour is priceless. But for some Ugandans, independence is meaningless. Others go a notch higher to clamour to be recolonised. This is not without basis.<\/p>\n

In some respects, our current rulers treat Ugandans worse than colonialists did to our forefathers and mothers. Some Ugandans are far more repressed and oppressed than our ancestors under colonial rule.<\/p>\n

Yet it is utterly na\u00efve to hunger for an outside solution to our problems. A great legacy of our colonial past is the mentality of yearning for a saviour, preferably a foreigner.<\/p>\n

It is a sheer crisis of confidence that leads us to think that the magic to fix our problems lies with a white person possessing extraordinary abilities. Wrong!<\/p>\n

The bad news is that it is difficult to find any society that transformed from poverty to prosperity because of external benevolence.<\/p>\n

For the most part, quite to the contrary, outside influences and intrusions do more to fuel distortions and disruptions that hurt indigenous agency and ingenuity necessary for social transformation.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t matter whether this is done directly through colonial conquest and military invasion or indirectly through imperialistic machinations like dictating economic policies through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or installing a puppet ruler via military coup as happened during the Cold War.<\/p>\n

One of the most important redoubts against true African liberation and genuine national independence is precisely the mind-set that sees foreigners as saviours.<\/p>\n

The National Resistance Movement government\u2019s obsession with seeking and literally chasing down foreign investors at all costs and regardless of past experience is emblematic of this foreign saviour mentality.<\/p>\n

The energy and enterprise that will give us the Uganda we desire will have to come from Ugandans, and we have it in us to do it, to design and build the country we want.<\/p>\n

But this cannot happen under the current conditions where mediocrity gets a pass, incompetence is rewarded, nepotism and favouritism trump merit and fairness.<\/p>\n

Today, Uganda is in a bad place in many ways. Re-imagining it means a radical political reset but also a critical cultural rebirth. We need to end the poverty of our politics and we have to start with things as basic as being serious and purposeful.<\/p>\n

We have to relentlessly dig in and get dirty. We have to fight, literally.<\/p>\n

Forget the romantic and nice-sounding talk of working smart, \u2018working remotely\u2019, the knowledge economy, blah, blah. No! We won\u2019t jump from being a subsistence agrarian society to one that competes in the knowledge economy. This is as illusory as they get.<\/p>\n

Our social values and ethos have to shift from soliciting for handouts and engaging in parasitic speculation to living earned lives through actual production.<\/p>\n

Without a value system that rewards actual work and performance, where those who excel get duly rewarded, we are never going to overcome the tragedy of our collective impoverishment.<\/p>\n

We can fuel the future by rejecting the current culture-scape that approves of quick grabs through scavenging and extracting without adding value, something that applies to many among today\u2019s business classes who are politically or nepotically connected.<\/p>\n

Uganda is a hugely endowed country. This is something many Ugandans don\u2019t quite adequately appreciate. Our combined natural and human resources should give us collective prosperity not pervasive impoverishment.<\/p>\n

As our overall population has soared in recent decades, growth and expansion in total material wealth has scarcely kept pace because we remain stuck in low productivity and miniscule national output.<\/p>\n

To turn around, Uganda needs radical social change but it also requires wholly different philosophical and organisation principles.<\/p>\n

A new menu of thinking must entail doing things with a sense of urgency, demanding that one performs or is punished, and insisting that only those who actually deliver on their output get rewarded.<\/p>\n

This has to be modus operandi in business, in managing public offices and even at very basic social unit of the family.<\/p>\n

We urgently need to repair a broken political system, but so too we need to refashion a totally different sociocultural milieu.<\/p>\n

For the former, we have to build a system that assures accountability and prudence in public management, a system that rejects politics of schemers, charlatans and wannabes. For the latter we must install a social regime that demands hard work and solid results not lacklustre and quick fixes.<\/p>\n

[email protected]<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Africa-Press – Uganda. It\u2019s independence anniversary time. At a minimum, there is at least some symbolism of being an independent nation. The pride and honour is priceless. But for some Ugandans, independence is meaningless. Others go a notch higher to clamour to be recolonised. This is not without basis. In some respects, our current rulers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":19172,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,8],"tags":[233,240,234],"class_list":["post-19173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-news","category-files","category-homepage-english","tag-africa-press","tag-africa-press-uganda","tag-uganda"],"yoast_head":"\nHow we can re-imagine a prosperous Uganda - Uganda<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It\u2019s independence anniversary time. 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