Michael Twaddle, Inc. NetLibrary. Developing Uganda. Oxford: James Curry, 1998. ix + 293 pp. ISBN 978-0-585-07695-9.

Reviewed by Edward A. Miner (Indiana University Libraries, Indiana University)
Published on H-Africa (June, 2001)

Painful Transitions in Museveni's Uganda

Painful Transitions in Museveni's Uganda

This latest in the "quartet or quintet" of volumes edited by Hansen and Twaddle surveys economic, political, public policy, and cultural aspects of Ugandan development issues in the aftermath of the Constitutional Assembly of 1993-5. The preceding volumes included Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development (1988); Changing Uganda: The Dilemmas of Structural Adjustment and Revolutionary Change (1991); From Chaos to Order: The Politics of Constitution-Making in Uganda (1994); and Religion and Politics in East Africa: The Period since Independence (1995). The first three and latest volumes attempt to present a snapshot of the respective historical moments at which they were published. Developing Uganda looks at a Uganda that is in the process of implementing the 1995 Constitution and its key provisions in areas such as decentralization, land tenure, the role of traditional leaders, protection of women's rights, and the supposedly transitional movement system of no-party democracy. On the basis of this Constitution, presidential and parliamentary elections were held in 1996. Several years later, Ugandan public discourse is dominated by debate on what promises were made, whether they were kept, and how long it should be before they are realized.

In these exercises, the NRM government has sought to both give Ugandans greater voice in the reform of their national political culture while maintaining some control over its direction and time frame. This has often put the NRM in ideologically difficult positions on issues such as the privatization of parastatals, the autonomy of NGO's, the linking of AIDS prevention with a broader population policy, and the extension of participatory democracy to the national level. Throughout the issues that the individual authors survey, the increasing marginalization of women, who are in many ways the most productive section of the population, emerges as a recurrent theme. Although women have made great strides in constitutionally guaranteed rights and their actual levels of political participation, many of the studies document the various ways in which the social costs of the structural adjustment policies (SAP's) mandated by donor organizations have been mainly borne by women. The benefits of the economic recovery since 1986 (a 37% growth in GDP between 1986 and 1992) have been realized by a relatively narrow sector of the population. The editors observe that this recovery "has taken place at the expense of social expenditure, and in disregard of the poverty suffered by the poorest 20 percent of Ugandans" (p. 14). Increased social insecurity in the wake of donor mandated economic policy is compounded by the continued devastating effects of the AIDS epidemic on financial and human capital. As documented in several essays, women suffer disproportionately from these social costs as well. Viewing these costs from a political perspective, several authors argue that women have essentially ensured whatever success donor and governmental developmental policies enjoy.

The editors' introduction contextualizes the nineteen studies against the background of the two decades of perceived military ethnocracy and economic decline that preceded the ascension of the NRM to power in 1986. They point out the remarkable level of military demobilization and rapprochement with former adversaries that helped to build perceptions of a broad-based, civilian-run government. Also discussed is the turnabout in NRM economic policy which by 1987 had been harmonized with the austerity conditions imposed by western donor organizations. Drawing on the observations of the various essays, the editors note that both donors and the NRM have recently become more responsive to multiple, sometimes conflicting notions of what constitutes development in the Ugandan context. In contrast to the to the western experience, broad-based development in the African context might necessitate a greater level of direct state involvement than donors have anticipated. The editors observe: "It is this acceptance of the state as a partner in national development, rather than as a hindrance or irrelevance, which the World Bank advocates in its World Development Report: The State in a Changing World" (p. 16).

The second major section of the collection foregrounds the continuing costs of the collapse of the formal economy in the 1970s and early 80s and the increasing importance of the informal economy that has emerged from the survival strategies of individuals and families. Collier and Pradhan, in their chapter "Economic aspects of the transition from civil war", argue that Uganda's current historical moment presents an unprecedented opportunity for the implementation of radical measures. Their thesis is based on the notion that "economic consequences of the civil war in Uganda are not primarily related to material expenditure and material destruction, they are about the removal of legitimate authority" (p. 20). With a current dearth of models for legitimate authority, they see a rare opening for new models to assert themselves. Marshalling an impressive array of statistical data, Livingstone asserts in his chapter that sustainability in Ugandan industry necessitates a focus on small-scale, resource-oriented, needs-based production for local and immediately proximal markets. To maintain this focus, Livingstone advocates strong structural linkages between industry and the agricultural sector. Tukahebwa's chapter offers a critique of development policy that focuses narrowly on increasing GDP. He notes that the 7-8% annual growth rate that has followed the (SAP-mandated) privatization of parastatals has not translated into a decrease in unemployment or overall poverty levels, or a significant expansion in indigenous, middle-class ownership. Tukahebwa concludes: "Privatization might not be the only option. Both PE's [Public Enterprises] and market solutions may fail. One alternative might be to devote more emphasis to ways of monitoring PEs rather than focusing on the ownership structure or privatization alone" (p. 71). In this, he leaves open the possibility of a constructive role for direct state involvement. As argued by Jamal, the collapse and uneven recovery of the formal industrial sector make acutely relevant the explosion of the informal economy in both rural and urban areas. He argues the importance of two questions in particular: "(i) what kind of research agenda is suggested, and (ii) what are the implications for policy formulation?...What we need to establish, given the context of informalization and the present-day context of structural adjustment, is just what the sources of growth in the Ugandan economy are" (p. 85). In his essay, Maxwell presents the results of survey data on the reasons that urban households in Kampala engage in various levels of agriculture. He finds that farming has taken on increased importance as a urban household survival strategy since the fall of real wages in the 1970's. Moreover, it "is largely the effort of urban women to provide, for themselves, their children and their households, some degree of food security at least partially separate from cash incomes and markets" (p. 99).

The third major section focuses on the implementation of the 1995 Constitution and the culture of political participation which has accompanied it. In his essay, Hyden recognizes the uniqueness of Ugandan participatory democracy in Africa, but warns that sectarian tendencies continue in all sectors of society. The principles of the 1995 Constitution are not deeply entrenched in political practice, and it will take Uganda years to grow into them. Hyden notes that positive foreign influence on the process "requires a careful balancing between consistency in position on key issues and sensitivity to the sovereignty of local actors" (p. 119). Tripp's study finds that women have both participated in the exercise of new forms of collective political action and guarded their autonomy of action in what remains a patriarchal political culture. In her case studies, she found that women "were at one and the same time taking advantage of new political opportunities afforded by the NRM regime, while also taking advantage of the autonomous space they had carved out for themselves and their organizations earlier, both to exert pressure in order to make the public realm more inclusive and participatory and to carry out their activities undisturbed" (p. 131). In her chapter, Mugenyi is more critical of the NRM government's silence on cultural attitudes which continue to circumscribe women's political participation. In particular, she criticizes the "gender-neutral" language and perspective of much government action: "For example, is it possible to have gender-neutral policies in education when in actual fact boys and girls have unequal chances in getting education and training? Can it be possible in agriculture where even when women contribute much of the needed labour, they have little control and ownership of the factors of agricultural production (land, technology, information and training, etc.)? (p. 136)." The limits of collective political action in the new political environment are addressed more fully in Dicklich's account of the tenuous relations that indigenous non-governmental organizations (NGO's) have with the NRM government. She argues that the government "recognizes it needs NGO's [for service provision], and consequently attempts to balance its need for help and its need for controlling the political and economic climate in Uganda" (p. 155). In her analysis, NGO's have maintained themselves in relevant autonomy from the government because they focus on service provisions and avoid politically sensitive issues.

The third major section includes studies which focus on several contentious public policy areas. The most contentious during the Constitutional Assembly of 1993-5 was the relative strength of the central government vs. local or traditional authorities. When the proponents of federal political arrangements were defeated, the NRM regime floated a compromise policy of dencentralization, or the devolution of key administrative functions to district-level governments. Reviewing the 1995 Constitution, the RC Statutes of 1987 and 1988, and the Local Government Statute of 1993, Regan concludes that the "NRM has set itself broad goals of changing both the role of a previously dominant and oppressive state and the nature of political forces in Uganda in such a way that not only will conflict to control the state be less likely, but also the society will change in ways which may enable it to limit the actions of the state" (p. 172). Regan does not actually describe the bitter sectarian discourse that characterized the so-called federo debate, and so casts decentralization initiatives in a better light than they might otherwise appear. Another contentious issue during the CA exercise was how to unify the multitude of cultural practices that govern land tenure and inheritance in Uganda. This issue bears crucially on the continued impoverishment of women under structural adjustment, because there is little customary control accorded them over land on which they prform the great bulk of agricultural labor. In their essay, Marquardt and Zziwa survey the land tenure issues taken up in the CA, and the kinds of tenure recognized and codified in the 1995 Constitution. Kirumira argues in the following chapter that economic recovery has been made a piority by donors at the expense of population issues. He attributes the NRM's own avoidance of broader population issues to the historical political sensitivity of demographic data, which has been used as "evidence" for competing ethnic and religious claims for influence and access to resources. While advances have been realized in the areas of maternal and child health and AIDS education, successful initiatives in population planning will await a depoliticization of the population issue. The following chapter by Lyons surveys the donor activity and multisectoral effects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Lyons walks through the evident and projected effects of the epidemic on human and financial capital, population growth, increased numbers of dependents per household, decreasing productivity in the labor force, and an increasing burden on the NGO's which provide the bulk of health services. Rearticulating several other chapters, it is projected that the higher rate of HIV infection among women will have particular consequences for future levels of agricultural productivity. Viewing the HIV/AIDS epidemic from a gender perspective, Obbo argues that prevailing cultural practices place women at particular risk of infection. Apart from the increased risk due to female disempowerment in negotiating safe sex practices with men, Obbo declares that Africa faces a further "epidemic, involving the deaths of infected carers, who are being infected because of ignorance and personal poverty...This task falls heavily upon the shoulders of women because of social and cultural expectations" (p. 207). In recognition of this emerging phenomenon, the author calls for increased government subsidy of home-based care and protection for caregivers. Finally, Amis presents an empirical study on municipal service provision that argues the importance of living wages in increasing the productivity of parastatals and public institutions.

The final main section of the collection presents a series of four ethnographic studies which view development issues at a local level. Whyte and Whyte explore the tropes of development in discourse of ethnic Banyole, who live near the Kenyan border. They find that development is conceptualized at the personal, family, and universal levels, and that these respective conceptions may coincide with or contradict one another under different conditions. Behrend contrasts the discourse of moral and religious reform of the Holy Spirit Movement, headed by Alice Lakwena, with professed secularism of the NRM's development program. She argues, moreover, that it was a reform discourse that addressed the particular spiritual needs of the marginalized north. The theme of marginalized identities is explored more fully in Southall's historical account of the experience of the Alur diaspora throughout northwestern and central Uganda. This chapter, together with that by Behrend, provides an important corrective to the overall focus of this edited collection on primarily southern Ugandan realities, and takes a historical perspective on the question of uneven development and its consequences for contemporary political issues. Lastly, the chapter by Mbowa provides an important account of innovative approaches to development education that root themselves in local cultural practices. Taking a Freirean approach, her narrative details the experience of two theatrical initiatives in local consciousness-raising workshops.

While criticisms might be made about gaps in its coverage, particularly in areas that are likely to reflect badly on the NRM regime, Developing Uganda provides an extremely useful survey of Ugandan realities as the nation struggles to live out the principles of the 1995 Constitution. Important aspects of the constitution-making process and its aftershocks are left underaddressed, however. These include, crucially, the federo issue which engendered much ill feeling towards the regime in Buganda and elsewhere; the new status and roles of the restored monarchies, which command considerable sociopolitical capital; the role of born-again Christianities in shaping public discourse; the regime's military adventurism in the Congo, and the subsequent emergence of ethnic xenophobia, especially against "Banyarwanda"; lessons learned since the introduction of Universal Primary Education; the extreme marginalization of Karamoja; and the developmental prospects offered by regional integration. It is hoped that the editors will see fit to address the these and other aspects of Uganda's development in yet another edition.

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Citation: Edward A. Miner. Review of Twaddle, Michael; NetLibrary, Inc., Developing Uganda. H-Africa, H-Net Reviews. June, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5221

Copyright © 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.