Uganda: When Budget Reading is Merely Annual Ritual

The Observer (Kampala)

James Magode Ikuya

15 June 2011

Every year in the month of June, a ritual is performed, now called ‘Reading of the National Budget.’

The minister of Finance dutifully unveils a plan for the funding of activities in the subsequent financial year. The presentation is presumably to seek constitutionally stipulated parliamentary approval for the levying of the proposed taxes and incurring of projected expenditures.

No one can pinpoint the last time that Parliament ever withheld or varied a tabled financial bill. This last expiring financial year saw massive spending sprees on items that had not been tabled at all in the previous budget. No person was cashiered or reprimanded for it. Parliament approved the splurge retrospectively. A cardinal sin was splendidly canonized.

After this year’s reading of the budget text in a maiden debut of the newly appointed minister, Parliament will be expected to spend the next two months or so scrutinising and debating the finance bill before its passage. By past precedence, the government is virtually sanctified in doing whatever it desires.

The predominant discussion of the budget in our country is normally filled with “economistic” drudgery. The inclination focuses mainly on preoccupation with accounting lay-out, statistics and departmental allocations. Year in and year out, the budget rolls out exhortation of promises. The budget link to crucial questions is hardly explained.

While the budget makes commitment to cut down on wasteful expenditures, the provided solutions are frightfully cosmetic because the worrying maintenance of increased large bodies of superficial politicians in the structure of the state is given no cognisance. Nor have many issues, including the slave conditions of our public servants, been addressed.

The budget debate,, therefore, requires raising clinical answers to piling political and economic problems. It means basing it on serious diagnostic analysis of issues.

The government launched a development plan, portraying the intention to transform Uganda into a middle-class income country by 2016. The basic question for us would be to agree whether the sight set by the government is indeed realisable and how this year’s budget translates into the proclaimed ambition.

The name middle-class has its origins in pre-industrial European society. The social division then was largely between land-owning nobility, living by extracting tributes and tithes from their holdings, and toilers who worked the land and wringed in serfdom and submission to the landlords.

Within this structure, there gradually arose development of crafts and other skills, giving birth to artisans and a host of trades, eventually resulting in the emergence of merchants. These became known as the middle-class, being wedged under the power of the feudal aristocracy but frolicking above the deprivation and bondage of the lower enslaved lot.

With the increased accumulation of wealth by the merchants and the rise of owners of factories and banks, the status of the landed aristocracy declined. The moneyed gentry in industry became the new upper-class, while the capital-less segments toiled under them as the lower group. Within this clear-cut division, there were also the smaller property operators who were squeezed between the tycoons and the wretched of the earth, whom we now refer to as the middle-class in modern times.

The middle-class is not a creation of imagination. It is generated and grows from opportunity to scoop a livelihood from the tides of the oceanic flow of the world capital that is concentrated in the hands of a few entrenched barons and financiers from the rich world.

For Uganda to claim a place amongst the middle-class income economies, it has to show that the country is awash with opportunity to be out-sourced by global capital. So-far, the countries that are referred to as middle-class income ones have lifted themselves by dexterously tapping on the currents which were, for historical reasons, lapping on their shores.

For a long time in our history any group holding the power of the state swaggers as the upper cream, converting the state into their purported private capital. Lower appointees below them are perceived as the middle-class, even when they are plainly mere cronies. This is why our politicians have no remorse in assuming that the more of them that assume office, the more “middle-class” they become.

Only when the priority of use of public funds can enable support to real economic factors will there be a hope for correctly assessing the world economic environment and engaging in “okulembeka” (beneficial entrepreneurial actions).

The author is a member of NEC (NRM) representing historicals.

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