One important issue that causes some controversy concerns efficiency and effectiveness of the public sector and the overall government performance in Uganda. After all, the NRM from the outset established its legitimacy on the promise to ‘correct the wrongs’ and outperform previous regimes across all vital areas from peace and security to social and economic developments. Indeed, the past 30 years have seen a number of reforms designed to improve public sector’s performance and delivery. PFM reforms have been particularly characteristic in this respect, starting with introduction of a medium-term expenditure framework to enable predictability of the budget and harmonization of aid in the late 1980s, followed by establishment of the Uganda Revenue Authority to increase domestic revenue collection and expand fiscal space for service delivery and introduction of fiscal decentralization to improve allocation of public resources and strengthen public sector accountability in the 1990s, and results-oriented management reforms in the 2000s-2010s to upgrade budgeting from output-based to programme-based to outcome-based.
It was expected that these measures in combination with other civil service reforms (previously discussed) will create an effective modern public administration. However, Uganda’s reality demonstrates two conflicting narratives about the government’s performance over the past 30 years. Wiegratz et al. (2018) call these two narratives ‘Uganda as a success’ and ‘Uganda in crisis’. The official ‘Uganda as a success’ narrative (advanced by the government and shared by a number of influential international actors such as the World Bank, IMF and the UN) praises Uganda’s sustained economic growth and its steady progress in poverty reduction, social development and gender empowerment. The achievements are described as ‘admirable’, ‘impressive’ and ‘remarkable’. The Introduction provides a typical example of this upbeat narrative.
The second narrative is the narrative of the ‘people on the street’, political opposition, some sections of the academia, the media and some international thinktanks. This second narrative focuses on the state capture by a small group of elite close to the president, nonresponsive and aloof government, a corrupt and inefficient public sector. In the National Governance Baseline Survey (UBOS, 2014), 40 per cent Ugandans reported that politicians did not respond at all to people’s concerns and needs while 47 per cent of the respondents rated the performance of their local governments (LC VI and LC V) as ‘poor’ or ‘fair’.
To understand the reasons behind these two widely different narratives, it is necessary to analyse the performance of government along three dimensions: (1) the reality behind the achievements claimed by the government; (2) contribution of the public sector to these achievements; and (3) costs of these achievements (i.e., un- or under-reported socio-economic effects).
On the first dimension, a number of achievements appear to be inflated while others are misrepresented. For example, the official dropout rate in public primary schools was reported at 14 per cent and in secondary schools 34 per cent whereas an assessment by the UNESCO Institute of Statistics indicated a much higher dropout rate of 60 per cent in primary schools (Nystrand and Tamm, 2018: 167). As an example of misrepresentation, whereas school enrolment rates did increase, quality education remains a challenge. According to official statistics, at primary level proficiency in numeracy declined from 45 per cent to 40 per cent between 2012 and 2013 (Kasaja, 2016). Similarly, the better healthcare outcomes reported in official statistics are real but achieved primarily due to an increased coverage and immunization without substantive improvements in the quality of health services (Wane and Martin, 2013).
The second dimension requires an analysis of the government’s contribution, monetary and nonmonetary. It has long been argued that Uganda’s much touted economic growth was contingent upon aid inflows, which have enabled an expenditure-driven growth but also promoted elite corruption (Amundsen, 2006; Asiimwe, 2018). Donor financial support was particularly instrumental in the areas where the government claims most success, such as access to electricity, road construction and social services. According to UNICEF (2016), official development assistance (ODA) covered 24 per cent of total social expenditure including education, health (where it amounted to almost 36 per cent of the total budget), social development and water and environment in 2012-2016. There are healthcare sub-sectors entirely dependent on external financing, such as the HIV/AIDS response, 90 per cent funded by donors. Moreover, a large proportion of official aid (as much as 30% or even more in some cases) bypasses the government completely and is channeled through non-government organisations (NGOs) considered more efficient than the government (Assimwe, 2018: 147).
The third dimension is the one that fundamentally challenges the ‘Uganda as a success’ narrative from the perspective of the social and economic costs of Uganda’s economic growth incurred by the society at large. Most significantly, ‘the recorded growth and assumption of “trickle down” have not reflected in transformed production and local capacity, but rather accelerated poverty, inequality and unemployment’ (Asiimwe, 2018: 146). According to the Oxfam study of inequality in Uganda (Oxfam, 2016), even as the economy has grown, income inequality in Uganda, as measured by the Gini coefficient, increased from 0.365 in 1992/93 to 0.395 in 1999/2000 to 0.426 in 2009/10 and to 0.47 in 2014. Uganda has seen ‘growth with exclusion’, where relatively few have benefited from economic gains.
Uganda’s rapid progress in reducing poverty headcount (from 44.4 per cent of the population in 1999 to the record low 19.7 per cent in 2012) has been somewhat reversed to 21.4 in 2016 (UBOS, 2017). The initial estimate was as high as 27 per cent but after a few months of political arm twisting UBOS (Uganda Bureau of Statistics) revised the figure downwards. However, despite this impressive decline in the poverty rate, 43 percent of the population continues to live just above the poverty line and therefore remains highly vulnerable and at risk of falling back into poverty in the case of economic shocks (World Bank, 2016). Neoliberal reforms in education and healthcare have shifted the state responsibility to the vagaries of the market, leaving the majority of Ugandans stuck with poor quality basic services.
The present state of economy is characterized by growth without quality (Kanbur et al., 2019). The economic growth and improved social indicators do not translate into a more vibrant structurally transformed economy that offers more jobs. Subsistence agriculture remains the backbone of the economy employing about 75 per cent of population. This sector absorbs most of the 600,000 entrants into the job market every year as the formal labour market can offer only around 200,000 jobs, translating to 67 per cent un- or under-employment rate among young people (Oxfam, 2016: 51). Whereas the formal job market has been growing at 9.8 per cent on average between 2010 and 2017 (Kasaja, 2019), most jobs are low-paying and low-qualified.
Hence, the overall performance of the public sector appears less impressive than the official ‘Uganda as a success’ narrative suggests. Despite many, often genuine, efforts to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the sector through a succession of public sector reforms the results have been mixed at best.
References
Asiimwe, G. ‘The impact of neoliberal reforms on Uganda’s socio-economic landscape’. In Wiegratz, J., Martiniello G. and E. Greco, eds. 2018. Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation. London: ZED.
Kanbur, R., Noman, A., Stiglitz J. 2019. The Quality of Growth in Africa. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kasaja, M. 2016. Budget Speech Financial Year 2016/17. Theme: Enhanced Productivity for Job Creation. Kampala.
Kasaja, M. 2017. Budget Speech Financial Year 2019/20. Theme: Industrialization for Job Creation and Shared Prosperity. Available at https://www.finance.go.ug/sites/default/files/Budget/FY%202019-20%20Budget%20Speech.pdf.
Nystrand, M. and G. Tamm. 2018. ‘Social service provision and social security in Uganda: entrenched inequality under a neoliberal regime’. In Wiegratz, J., Martiniello G. and E. Greco, eds. 2018. Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation. London: ZED.
Oxfam Uganda. 2016. Who is Growing? Ending Inequality in Uganda. Kampala: Oxfam Uganda.
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Uganda. 2018. Uganda: Fiscal Space Analysis. Kampala : UNICEF
Wane, W. and G. Martin. 2013. Education and Health Services in Uganda: Data for Results and Accountability. Washington, DC: World Bank.