When Salim Saleh blew my head

The president’s brother’s insights about Uganda’s political economy and what it tells us about our country

THE LAST WORD | Andrew M. Mwenda | And so, on Monday this week I visited Gen. Salim Saleh in Gulu and we sat down to a long conversation about Uganda’s economic woes. Saleh has been studying Uganda’s history for a while, focusing a lot on our political economy. Over the years, he has become a policy wonk with a vast treasure trove of historic knowledge. This has made it possible for him to place policy debates in a broad historical context and hence give critical insights to the challenges of policy making. I have had many discussions with Saleh on Uganda’s political economy, but Monday’s discussion was profound.

Saleh said that to understand Uganda’s current economic dilemma, one must begin with the advent of colonialism. That sounded like his brother, President Yoweri Museveni, who often begins a discussion of Uganda’s politics from two million years ago. Yet Saleh was different. He said colonialism sought to take control of the economy of Uganda from the indigenous peoples and place it in British hands. The agency for this process was the formation of the Uganda Company founded in 1903 with British shareholders. The Uganda Company was to be the industrial arm of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), a “civil society” agency for British rule in Uganda. I had always thought CMS was only the ideological arm of colonialism, not an industrial and business agency. Saleh told me that BK Barrop, who introduced cotton seeds in Uganda in 1903, was one of the founding shareholders in this company.

The interesting twist in Saleh’s narrative was that, the first attempt at the nationalization of Uganda’s economy began in 1953. It was initiated by Governor Andrew Cohen and was occasioned by the creation of the Uganda Development Corporation (UDC). The aim of UDC was to be the industrial arm of the state of Uganda, which would work to serve the interests of Ugandans. Cohen, Saleh said, was a socialist and was serious about promoting the participation of Ugandans in the economy through the agency of the state. British socialists were committed to this policy.

To Saleh, after independence, the government of Milton Obote sought to accelerate this nationalization process. It created institutions like the Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB) and others. In 1969, Obote deepened this process when in his Move to the Left policy pronouncements, the state took 60% stake in all foreign companies especially in banking, insurance, manufacturing, large estates etc. To Saleh, this was a struggle by Ugandans to gain control over the economy. However, he said, Obote used it to also wrestle control of the economy from Ganda capital, after his fall out with Mengo. Saleh told me that Obote used cooperatives to acquire assets of Ganda capitalists, and therefore build a political base for his political party, the Uganda People’s Congress (UPC).

“Cooperatives therefore became the economic arm of UPC to control crop marketing and in the process solidify Obote’s political support among peasants,” Saleh told me. He said that Obote systematically undermined voluntary cooperatives and strengthened state-sponsored ones. “To understand the power of UPC among the peasantry, you have to study the influence of state sponsored cooperatives,” Saleh said, “But it also means that to dismantle UPC influence in rural communities necessitated dismantling these cooperatives.” I winked at this because it provides an important insight into the thinking that led NRM to dismantle cooperatives.

The third phase in Uganda’s economic evolution, Saleh argued, was indigenization. This, he argued, was carried out by Idi Amin and was occasioned by the chasing away of Indians and other foreign capitalists beginning in 1972. Their assets were handed over to indigenous Ugandans or to the state. However, Saleh added, Obote was earlier moving in that direction but in a more sophisticated and cautious manner. Amin’s approach was not just quick and decisive but also crude. His critic of Amin was therefore not the direction of change but the speed and manner of that change.

As I was chewing over these phases, Saleh delivered to me what I felt was the most revolutionary of his arguments.

He said that the fourth phase in the struggle over Uganda’s economy was liberalization and democratization that began in the early 1990s. For him, this was the effort by multinational capital to recapture Uganda’s economy. Its aim was to dismantle both state and indigenous control of the commanding heights of the Uganda’s economy and hand it back to multinational capital. It came with a strong ideological backing, presenting itself as neutral economics – privatization, deregulation, liberalization, and the independence of the central bank.

For Saleh, the return of foreign capital to control the state and economy of Uganda, needed the weakening of the state. While privatization took assets from the state, the insidious institutional innovation, he said, was agenc-ification and projectization. He said the main state bureaucracy was emasculated through the creation of agencies and other semi-autonomous government bodies. These were funded by international “donors” and took power away from ministries. Even within ministries, most money went to donor-funded projects where staff were paid better and therefore loyal to these foreign interests. He said democratization now allowed donors to sponsor “civil society” and the press, and thereby create an intellectual vanguard to justify multinational control of our economy.

I sat in silent wonderment, listening to this lion of a man discourse on our political economy from a reclining chair. I wondered whether he appreciated the magnitude and meaning of his historic tour de force. At a personal level, it was an indictment to the many things I had defended as a young journalist – privatization, deregulation, liberalization, democratization etc. But at a political level, Saleh had delivered the most stinging criticism of his brother anyone in Uganda has done. Basically, he was arguing that Museveni sold Uganda back to foreign capital. I was stunned and asked him if he has discussed this with Museveni.

It is a question he was not interested in answering directly and insisted we focus on the historical development of Uganda’s political economy. He said all he wanted was to dissuade me from the belief that ideas are interest neutral. He said they are interest begotten. When international donors sponsor policies, it is not because of their inherent merits but because of the interests that they serve. He said what Africa has lacked are strong indigenous and national economic forces with interests to advance and intellectuals to generate justifications for them. After more than four hours, I left thinking.

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amwenda@ugindependent.co.ug