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The president gets elected but he comes with a new team. Then we had another new team in 2001. Then we have a completely new team in 2006.
So I will mention the period when I was with the teams. And of course I will not fail to mention what happened after, because I watch.
When people say that this government, really there has been several governments since 1986. And also, let me refer to the earlier governments. It is wrong to think that earlier governments achieved nothing. They achieved a lot.
 
For example, under Obote I, a lot of schools were built and equipped. If you went to a school that had just started, your chances of passing were as good as those who went to schools that had started earlier. The hospitals were built and equipped. Roads were made. The Mbarara - Kabale Road, Mbarara - Kasese, Kampala - Gulu, they were made at that time.
I think they also built the Karuma and Pakwach bridges, although Pakwach was largely under the East African Community because of the railway crossing. Uganda hotels, including the Sheraton, were also built under his regime.

A number of things were achieved even under Idi Amin. There are certain things he did that nobody would have dared to do. I think he is the one who introduced colour television in Africa and the system of presidential jets.
I will not tell the story Mzee Obote told us that he was blocked from coming back to [Uganda] in 1971 until the coup was complete. So when Amin came in, he sorted it out by buying a presidential jet so that wherever he was, in any corner of the world, he could be home within hours.

He also completed the Conference Centre and Nile Hotel (now Kampala Serena Hotel). He hosted the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and became its Chairman, and recognised the MPLA government in Angola.
And he also introduced ferries on Lake Victoria to ease traffic. You know water is the cheapest means of transport. I have already told you how JC. Kiwanuka and Brig. Kili influenced me. But for us we look at water as an obstacle rather than a means of livelihood. If we don’t establish a culture of recognising the achievements of those before us, then who will recognise ours?

NRM time

Let me come to our system. Of course peace and security is now much better, especially in the southern part of the country. Now fortunately, thanks to everybody, although there were some people who were benefiting from absence of peace, internally and externally, peace covers the whole country.
Of course there was peace before. We have not introduced peace, but there is that peace of mind. Education has expanded, health services are not as good, the road network has expanded, of course the railway system has collapsed. And the cheapest means of transport anywhere in the world for bulk cargo is water and railway. The road transport is much more expensive.
 
I remember when we came to power, there were a lot of KENATCO lorries. I used to stay in Bugolobi and see KENATCO lorries at the Bugolobi factory. And we took a bold decision that everything must go by railway.
I remember Emmanuel Mutebile was a PS, he is one of those who did the calculation that transport to Mombasa by railway was about a third of what it is by road. Now we are back to trucks when the East African Community is back to make the railway network easier!

Police is better disciplined; the army is better disciplined than what it was before, but that is not enough. The police should be improved, for example this ‘Kiboko Squad’. Which of us leaders would be proud to receive his son in the evening reporting that he is tired because he was busy whipping people? We are dehumanising the canner and canned. 
When my father educates me properly up to primary, I cannot say because you taught me primary education that is enough, stop there. You would like to go to secondary and if the primary school teacher wants to follow me and teach me in secondary, I will say no, you are good enough for primary but not secondary, I need another teacher.

So we have achieved a lot but also a lot is there to be achieved. When Mbarara High School was developed from a junior secondary school into a senior secondary school, some of the teachers wanted to teach us at senior level. I recall one of them saying that he would teach us and that if we failed, he would kill himself. Our reply was that we will have failed, and so what would his death help us?
We had a strike for qualified teachers. The following term we had qualified teachers recruited from the UK, Canada and the USA. In the meantime, Adonia Tiberondwa and Kishaija stepped in.                    
One of the few shortcomings I will mention is that which I had a problem with - this policy of head-hunting for Balokole. My belief is that yes, you can head-hunt a few people because some people come to you who are knowledgeable. But if everybody who is knowledgeable must come to you, you the minister, you the president, there is a problem! So there must be a system which is transparent.
Where people apply, they are vetted and when they take a job, they have pride in themselves. They owe it to nobody but their country and its future. Rather than creating clients who say, without you where would I have been?
 
Privatisation

Then we had a problem with privatisation. We had agreed that funds from the privatisation of assets should create an industrialization fund. This fund would finance industry, according to priorities of the country. I think somewhere somehow, this can’t be explained. We had also agreed that when we sell these public servants’ houses and assets, a fund should be created to assist the young civil servants since the salaries are poor, even if they were not poor, to access long term low-interest money to build a house. You know one of the main necessities of life is shelter and shelter in Kampala is still far out of reach. Many private houses have come up but many people are not housed because since Obote I (I had forgotten that they had a big housing policy), no serious houses were built till about 10 or so years ago.

They established these estates in Bukoto, Kireka, Bugolobi, and these were supposed to be complete units. When you go back, you don’t have to come back to Kampala. You will find a supermarket there, you will find a playground there, there will be a school there, a place of worship! But all these have been seized by the so-called developers and we now have them as potential slums.
 
Of course we had that funny way in which we tried to privatize UCB in the first place. First, we had agreed that we should get what they call core investor and sell the balance of shares to Ugandans. They have sold some shares eventually, but it would have been a different situation if they had sold at first, so that our citizens have a stake in the economy and development of the country. During an official visit to Malaysia, and I was talking to the Minister of Education - my host - , when we were having a private chat I told him that we are having investors from there and one of them is coming to buy UCB. When I mentioned [the name], he said “no, no, but that company has never been in the banking business! They have been in shipping and other areas. They are trying to start a small bank and it collapsed when there was that money slump in the region.”

There was evidence to show that these people who were trying to buy UCB were not bankers, they were just fronts and it led to the resignation of one of my friends, and that was not enough. And if you see how people went to loot UCB within hours of the attempted sale! You begin to wonder where we are headed.

Then this policy of handouts, my view is that we should have a firm investment economic policy. Where is our niche? Which areas of the economy are we strong? They tell us about comparative advantage. In which areas can we make easy break through?

I was talking to a friend who works in Tunisia and he was telling me that in Tunisia they saw that they don’t have oil but can attract tourists. They went out to zone and train people to be good attractors of tourists. And it is a Muslim country as you know, so they don’t drink [alcohol]. Yet most of these tourists are Europeans and they like their wine. So they created the infrastructure, trained the human resources, etc., to attract tourists.
Now, what is our niche so that when you choose it, the resources are available, people compete for them and you train the relevant manpower accordingly?

This business of complaining that Kenyans are dominating us! Even me, if I have a small business; if one wants a hotel manager, farm manager, a Kenyan, stands a good chance. One, they are trained, two, they have work ethics, and three, they have had practice. But here, where would you have practised hotel management between 1976 and 1990 even if you were trained? Where would you have practised your architecture when no building was going on?

Some of these complaints are shortcomings of not being foresighted. Instead of complaining, you should be working harder to put in place well structured and professionally manned institutions to train the necessary skilled labour as the Uganda technical colleges and MUBS are supposed to. Or use the existing institutions in the neighbourhood, like Utali in Kenya, and avoid unnecessary and harmful duplications and competitions, since we are committed to regional integration.
 
Hand-outs

Handouts have never and will never develop a nation. People you give handouts are grateful to you but they owe nothing to the country.

You create a business [class], some of whom are like being on economic drip or oxygen. They are meant to think or believe that they are so dependant that they fear change and cling on for they have not been helped to stand on their own.

So create a fund which is accessible to everybody, compete for it. If it is a plot, the person with the best programme or the best plan gets it, and there is a system to access the plot, access the money, account for it and develop it to established plan, accountable to a known and credible body set up for that purpose.

But I am sure most of people who receive development money, these handouts, if you are to trace them, I think some cannot account for it.
I remember a simple but illustrating story. The President had gone on a country tour in 1989 or there about. He was accompanied by 15 ministers and bureaucrats. Among other things, he was promoting developmental projects. While in Mubende, a group of women claimed that they were involved in a self-help brick making project. He promised to visit them the following morning. He could not make it. So, he sent James Wapakhabulo (RIP), Victoria Sekitoleko and I on his behalf. When they saw our cars, they became very busy, mixing soil and water to make bricks. As we approached, you could clearly see these were Kampala women on a gold digging mission. Their newly acquired kanga or bikoyi, their smooth hands, well plaited and tied hair, were quite impressive. And the site was really fresh! They could have formed a great scene in a play by the Bakayimbira Dramactors or Alex Mukulu’s ‘30 Years of Bananas.’

When they saw no President, you could see disappointment on their faces. We thanked and encouraged them. But that was no replacement for the expectations. About three hours later, the President’s convoy drove past the site; it was already abandoned. Not even a single woman!
That system may make a few people rich, will make people owe me allegiance, but really they are not repaying the country, and we are not using our money transparently and in a focused way in order to create a well-rooted entrepreneur class.

The same thing applies to scholarships, and I don’t agree with these districts being created to access places at Makerere University. It should be a question of merit. If a particular area is not getting people passing well, what you need to do is go there and establish good primary schools, establish good secondary schools, put facilities in place. Three or four years down the road, those places will perform as well as schools they always talk about in Kampala.

This policy has other potential dangers. What if students from under resourced schools/ areas compared to students from background schools fail, shall we also insist that passing exams or 1st class honours or admission to highly priced faculties should be by quota system?
What we need is to establish a bursary system based on need, which means that students from poorer families will be given priority over those from richer ones.
 
I speak from experience and I wait for certain questions to be asked and I’ll answer them fully, so that we can get an informed and engaging debate on this matter.  
There is this question of roads, we had a debate in the late 80s and 90s in Cabinet; should we build say 50 kilometers of road every year and build it firmly, so that when you finish that piece over the next 30 years or so it is solid? Then every year you continue and it may take you seven years to get to Kabale, 10 years to get to Arua? But you know that the piece you have from Kampala to Kafu, from Kampala to Iganga is going to be there for the next 10 governments! Or should we patch up roads and please everybody and then five, ten years later we are back to zero. The second opinion prevailed.

I remember when I visited Ghana in 1994, there had been this accusation that Kwame Nkrumah had squandered public money building a road beyond Africa’s needs. That he had also built a dam which was a white elephant. I requested the Minister of Education, an old man called Harry Sawyer; they gave me a ride from Accra to Takuradi on the road Nkrumah built in the early 60s. It is up to now there and has never been repaired, you get me! And I went to the Akasambo dam; I was shocked that on that small river, they built a dam which at that time was giving 900MW of electricity compared to our Nile here, the mighty Nile which was producing 80MW at that time!
 
Those are some of the issues. You must decide from the start to build short distances at a time that will last, or long ones that won’t last long. A few well founded faculties at a time or open up so many and admit so many and end up with questionable products!

Term limits

Then of course at the peak business was the term limits. I still believe it was wrong. I will not go into it now; I want to sit down and write my many reasons as to what are the benefits of having leaders who come and go, and benefits of a leader who stays there forever under [the claim] that the people have a right to choose.
 
Let me compare it with African and Asian businessmen because I remember sometimes I talk to some of my Asian friends. I will not mention their names. When an Asian is doing a business, by the time he is in his 50s he has trained his children to understand how the business runs and he sees those with acumen to do particular aspects. By the time he is my age of 60 or so, the son is doing most of the things and the father is in the background, giving the covering fire. By the time he is in 70s, he is more or less retired but coming in once in a while to see whether things are going right. By the time he dies, the children know the inside and out of the business and they have even expanded it. Because they come with new ideas and the father also cautions them on where to be more careful! You can look at what Nelson Mandela did and what takes place in Bostwana. All is not lost. We have success models.
 
Compare with the African business, not all but quite a number. The father sits on the business and does it alone. It is a secret [hidden] from the children. Even when he dies, there is no will. The first thing that the children do when he dies; if he has a farm, the farm manager will be the first to loot things and the children will come just to test what their father denied them.
 
You can apply this to politics. In some countries when a leader retires, there should be a crop of successors groomed by the system to choose from. And the former leader or leaders are available. When you have like three or four former heads of state in the background, there is no way instability can come to the country. And we Africans don’t have a sense of jealousy. When there was this September 11 bombing of America, I was watching TV. I think President Bill Clinton was in Australia. He was summoned back. George Bush Senior was summoned. You could see them lining up, there was Jimmy Carter, I think Gerald Ford was still alive, Ronald Reagan was still indisposed. Then there was George Bush Junior. You see a queue of them standing firm in defence of their motherland in solidarity. For us we will go to the graves and curse others in the event of that!

And when I was in Tanzania, I went to one of the functions and they had put a big billboard – Tanzania a place of peace, democracy and stability. There was a picture of Julius Nyerere, followed by the picture of Hassan Mwinyi and followed by the picture of Benjamin Mkapa. And in your heart you say, what did we [Ugandans] do to the world?
I was a student in Britain. Whenever there was an event, you see these former prime ministers lining up. And they learn how to put their differences apart when there is a national crisis. These are the events we miss.

It is like an orphanage, you know. You are born, you are an orphan, when you become an elder you die and your son becomes an orphan. That is how Uganda has been; every president, every first lady is an orphan. There is nobody to refer to. And that is absurd.
 
I was present when President Mwai Kibaki was being sworn in. He had no kind words for President Daniel arap Moi. And I think President Museveni tried to defend him a bit but the crowd, in ignorance, shouted at him. But along the way, President Kibaki starts asking for guidance and ideas from his predecessor, President Moi. You get me. Yet in elections you would not believe they would ever talk to one another!
Everybody who has been a leader has something to let the new generation learn from. So, we miss that opportunity and I have given you my few ideas. And it is not too late.

Don’t forget that the President addressed a meeting in Ishaka in 1985, giving the three main reasons why we went to fight. There are many but the three. He said one was misuse of office; when we were accusing some people of using State House to give chits. The other one was people who overstay in office, and the third one was rigging elections.
I do not know now whether we managed well these three effectively: to say that we are election-rigging free, we are free of overstaying in office and we are free of misuse of office at all levels!
And so these are some of the shortcomings. But also there have been a lot of achievements. However, when you achieve, you want to achieve more. You don’t want to lose even the little that you have achieved. As one old man told me, “You are not successful until you have a successful successor.”