Creative Chinese encounter Ugandan inscrutability

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By Frederick Golooba-Mutebi

Posted Saturday, April 27 2013 at 12:43


A few years ago, a World Bank study revealed that Uganda was losing Ush500 billion a year to corruption, much of it in procurement of supplies and services. That is real money. One would have thought that the government of a poor country such as Uganda would have been spurred into action to end the rot. Although regarded as highly corrupt, the government is also known for creating a wide range of corruption-busting bodies. Cynics have long argued that their purpose is really not to fight corruption, but to give the government a weapon with which it can fend off criticism about not doing enough to curb the rampant stealing, misdirection, and misallocation of public resources.

In believing that anti-corruption bodies were established to serve as decoys, the cynics are too harsh. It is true, however, that the government finds it convenient to use anti-corruption bodies as evidence of its “determination” to fight corruption, in a context where the said determination is brought into question by increasing levels of corruption. That increase has recently been revealed by yet another World Bank study. Apparently, the country now loses Ush760 billion a year.

A few moments of reflection produced a bright spark: Look at the creativity of the Chinese, who decided that in helping Africa, dispensing cash does not work, and therefore opted for direct delivery of goods and projects, using Chinese companies and Chinese labour. One advantage of this approach, as we saw last week, is that no money will “float around” for local bad guys to redirect into their own pockets.

There are salutary examples of this approach bearing fruit in Uganda. More than two decades ago, the Chinese government donated to its Ugandan counterpart a large, then state-of-the-art sports stadium that the recipient later named after Nelson Mandela. The Chinese brought in armies of workmen and within a reasonably short time, certainly shorter than it would have taken a local contractor to deliver, the complex was up and ready for use. Stories doing the rounds in Kampala at the time suggested the workers were prisoners who had been brought to Uganda to serve out their sentences doing something productive. Human-rights activists may have had issues with that, but Ugandans generally did not; all we were interested in was the modern sports complex. Rumour has it that some of the labourers eventually stayed behind to do business and became local taxpayers.

More recently the Chinese have given us a new Ministry of Foreign Affairs headquarters, new offices for the president, and a spanking modern hospital located in one of Kampala’s more deprived neighbourhoods. And now, in a development that has set local contractors’ tongues wagging, the Chinese have shipped to Uganda an impressive array of road construction equipment that the government has allocated to local governments to enable them to build and repair their own roads. There are questions about their quality, but at least billions have not been lost in procurement deals.

We shouldn’t pop the champagne yet, though. The Chinese may have delivered, but what about us? It seems to me as if “the Chinese solution” were only part of a complex equation. The other half is ours to solve, but we seem unable to.

A local newspaper revealed recently that nurses at the now much-frequented Naguru Hospital were on strike because they have not been paid their salaries for three months. The hospital also lacks drugs and is forced to refer seriously ill patients elsewhere. Meanwhile, if you are observant and happen to go past Mandela Stadium, you will not fail to notice certain things about it. First, the grounds around it are overgrown and littered with rubbish. The fence around it has deteriorated, due to the lack of routine maintenance.

In a country where a wide range of sports have been dying on their feet over the past two decades, this is not that surprising, as the complex is seriously underutilised. There are stories suggesting that the responsible ministry together with what is left of the country’s government-linked sports associations are barely able to raise enough money to look after the stadium.

As for the road construction equipment, who will operate and look after it in a country where even private contractors are unable to find enough skilled machine operators and technicians? And where will cash-strapped local governments find the money to run and maintain them? Clearly, some local problems are simply too complicated for the Chinese to solve.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail:

[email]fgmutebi@yahoo.com[/EMAIL]

 

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