Youth Fund merely chicken look-alike

Makerere Students On strike such people are the ones for whom the Fund is Meant

The first week of February, 2012 had strangely related and intriguing coincidences.
In one issue of Bukedde, the paper had profiled the late Kawalya Kaggwa and one notable feature was the ridicule he received, after he asked the British government to construct the Owen Falls dam for electricity and a piped water supply network for Uganda.
The lyrics of the song ridiculing him ran that as Buganda’s Prime Minister, instead of awarding territories and doling out appointments of chiefs, he could only give water and lamps. On the same day that we read the Bukedde profile on Kawalya Kaggwa, we were in Amuria, disseminating findings of a study we had conducted on agricultural funding in local governments.
In the course of the discussion, the issue of The Arrow Boys tractor hire scheme came up. In the same week, Finance minister Maria Kiwanuka announced the release of Shs 22bn, from the Shs 44bn Youth Fund announced in the budget of the 2011/12 financial year.
What is common in these three apparently unrelated events? It is the populist element of all government programmes, plans and projects. And as the Kawalya Kaggwa case testifies, it takes a leader with a strong will, ready to be ridiculed, not to dance to the short-term popular expectations of giving people what they want, instead of what they need.
If he had sought populism, he would have been content with doling out appointments to county and sub-county chiefs, in return for the allegiance that goes with it.  The Youth Fund, to which the Arrow Boys in Amuria are entitled, is a typical populist project.
That the Arrow Boys tractor hire scheme failed points to the two sides of the deception in such schemes and funds: the government well knows that such projects will serve virtually nothing, besides populism, and the beneficiaries, if convinced that this is the best government could do for them, soon realise that they were given ekiishamutuutu, in exchange for their chicken.
This scratching bird, called tutuma in Luganda, is the size of a small chicken, and can be mistaken for one. Thus the genesis of the Runyankore saying that ku oyaka omwana enkoko, omukwasa ekiishamutuutu, literally meaning that if you snatch a kid’s chicken, give him its look-alike.
This is exactly what government has done in the Youth Fund. Anchored on the famous Article 108(iv) of the Budget Speech 2011/2012,  which talks of designated places in the markets in Kampala and other towns for the youth to carry out manufacturing, the scheme is high on rhetoric, but devoid of tangible substance. What kind of manufacturing did the framer of this phrase have in mind, as he put pen to paper?
So, Youth MPs and councillors, the focus of the struggle should be to make government revisit its current economic policy that renders this country a huge shopping mall. The chickens you are throwing away in return for short-term, populist biishamutuutu include the following:
• The skills, careers, and professional prospects that would accrue from government investing in transformative industries, as basic as textiles and leather. These not only have potential to employ millions along the value chain, but equally offer opportunities for career and professional development in virtually all fields. The fashionable jeans and sneakers we import can easily be made here, but only if government does serious investment.
• Our modern lifestyles and consumption habits only serve to create a growing market for imported consumer foods. These are not only cheap in price, but come from multinational firms, whose quality any Ugandan ‘manufacturer in city markets’ may not match.
• The case of the Pioneer Easy Bus should be a learning point. With only 522 buses, it has already created 4,000 jobs directly. If government invested in the PSV transport sector, well structured and formalised, how many would be employed directly and indirectly, besides skills and innovation development?
The list is endless. You, therefore, must not sit and get satisfied with the chicken look-alike, which itself will not be enough to afford each a drumstick. Root for the real chicken.  One danger to be cautious about are these misnomers of ‘self-employment’, ‘job-creation, not job-seeking.’
This is a false start on two fronts: one, jobs are not ends in themselves. Government must employ people in line with its long-term development strategies. If all go into self-employment, who will be the teachers and civil servants of all categories?
Two, as management guru Charles Handy puts it, a fresh graduate needs an ‘elephant’ on which to attach, learn and only fall off after he has acquired the experience, the skills, which he can only learn in a working environment. His fresh knowledge alone from college is not enough.

The author is a partner at Peers Consult Ltd.
bukanga@yahoo.com