For several weeks, this column has explored very basic tweaks that could improve service delivery, economic growth, and expand opportunities, including jobs. None of the tweaks proposed, from reprioritising job numbers and quality, expanding electricity generation to stay ahead of the demand curve, to cheaper, longer-term financing to get more people on the property ladder, are new or even particularly clever.
Much of it is common sense. A lot of it is well documented in policy briefs written by clever technocrats. The reason much of it does not get implemented, or quickly, with value for money and in tandem with other moving parts, is that the post-independence Ugandan state has mostly exercised the wrong muscles; those that throttle innovation, free enterprise, and are generally only useful for keeping the natives at bay.
This problem is not unique to the current government, but contemporary examples are more useful than anything from forty years ago. Here is an example you should think about but not try at home: if you post a particularly vile comment on social media, threaten or otherwise incite violence, you will most likely receive a knock on the door from security agents within 72 hours, even if you are using an anonymous account.
The reason is that the state has built up its offensive capacity to sniff out people who use the internet and social media in uncharitable ways.
If, on the other hand, you have a fire in your home and call 999 you will be lucky to get a response, and it would be a miracle if a fire tender turned up at your house within two hours.
This is not surprising. As the state has grown long in the tooth, it has invested more in areas that allow it to snuff out dissent, and less in making that dissent less likely in the first place. One is more likely to see a convoy of anti-riot crowd control police vans being imported into the country than to see fire engines.
Sidle to the side of the road to make way for a blaring siren, and nine out of 10 times it will be a government official with a time-keeping problem, not an ambulance, fire engine, or police patrol responding to an emergency call.
The state’s investment in coercive power, be it cyber offensive capabilities or crowd control, has been at the expense of soft executive power to get things done. Fixing this, in my view, has now become the most important national task, up there with forging a new consensus about who we, as a country, want to be when we grow up.
This need not be grandiose undertakings like trying to manufacture cars or send astronauts to the moon. It needs to start with basic considerations like getting motorcycle riders and passengers to wear helmets or enforcing the ban on single-use plastic carry bags.
This ability to articulate, roll out and enforce public policies consistently — or bureaucratic competence, to give it its proper but often maligned name — is the gaping hole in the jigsaw puzzle of our national ethos and development ambitions.
Whether it is growing the economy 10x in less than a generation or making a qualitative leap into middle-income status (the latter promise always evokes images of triple-jumpers sashaying down the pit lane in fancy costumes), we cannot become great if we don’t learn how to fix the small stuff and do so consistently.
This need not be at the expense of the mega stuff. Building a standard gauge railway is great but figuring out how to run trains on time is potentially harder, yet much cheaper. A city whose existing transport system is chaotic and largely unregulated will ruin the best designed rapid mass transit system, even if it was installed overnight for free.
Having built up its coercive muscle, there are few problems that, to state actors, do not look like nails begging to be hammered. But you can’t hammer away at non-enforcement of the building code or use threats of force to build just-in-time supply chains for public projects.
Much of what we need to do is already known and has, in the main, been done by other countries. How to fix the small stuff is our biggest challenge — and opportunity. The brawn guys have had a long runout; how do we prioritise the brains and build our problem-solving muscle?