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A new dawn has arrived. A lot of change is taking place in the countryside. The middle and upper class are going back to the villages and buying large chucks of land for commercial farming.
The move is commendable, except that the peasants are not being compensated for their land. The move, although in line with Vision 2040, is not being properly implemented. Peasants are being bought off, given a little money, and not helped to resettle.
The end result is squatters and the emergence of first-class beggars.
Those shrewd enough are moving to nearby towns. Welcome to the town peasants—the uneducated lot rushing to towns without any idea of survival in the town.
The trend is leading to sudden pressure on the existing town facilities and the resultant problems of unplanned population growth in town centers. Many towns, for example, lack facilities to meet the needs of their burgeoning populations. The quality of the majority of the population in terms of their level of education is poor. You have two extremes of people: the educated class running the best businesses in town and accounting for over 80% of the economic activities, and the low-end class (majority) surviving by luck on the streets.
As more peasants are bought out of their ancestral lands by middle-class commercial agriculture investors, they are immigrating to the towns.
It is an ongoing trend as more professionals get into commercial agriculture and many others invest their retirement resources in the sector. The peasants want town life. They think it’s affordable. They are not being told the truth. Once they get some little money from the sale of their bibanja, they move to towns and enjoy a short-lived good lifestyle until it lasts.
Once the little money is finished, stark reality surfaces: you must be earning to survive. With no job and nowhere to go, they become a nuisance. These ‘town peasants’ are a time bomb waiting to go off. When the old people die, their daughters and sons divide the land, which creates small plots of land. The majority of the youth sell them to buy boda bodas (motorcycles).
Available information shows that over 400,000 motorcycles are bought every month in Uganda. Many of the ‘town peasants’ are motorcycle riders, which is another problem. The problem here is that these people lack formal education and have no village to run to. Covid-19 lockdown proved this.
This unsettling of people will be good for a very, very long time to come. However, in the near future, disaster is anticipated. People being unsettled are an uneducated lot, experiencing a mid-life crisis. The responsible ministry must step in as soon as possible to arrest this situation. A clear policy for anyone who buys off the land of a peasant farmer must be documented, providing for, among others, payments over a period of time to avoid mismanagement, education of the peasant’s children, and providing basic skills to the farmers in financial management, as well as resettling them properly to avoid a sudden crisis to their livelihood.
Commercial farms need workers. Anyone who buys a peasant out of his land should build them a small house and keep them around as workers.
What is Uganda’s fort?
The latest World Bank report names Uganda as one of the few countries with fertile, uncultivated land. This land has the capacity to reduce poverty, boost economic growth, create jobs, and unleash shared prosperity in the country and region at large. However, a short distance out of Kampala, stark imbalances in living standards between the rich and poor become evident.
Andrew Rugasira, CEO, Good African Coffee, once observed: “Between Amuru, Nwoya, Lamwo, Bunyoro, and Busoga districts alone, Uganda could feed east and central Africa, transform our people, and have surplus. Why we don’t learn from other success stories is, I think, a testimony to a strategic subversion of what we know can empower our people and emancipate them from poverty and ignorance. Maybe I am being too cynical. Perhaps that’s why there isn’t too much shouting.’’
The reality on the ground is bad.
Move to any supermarket; most foods are imported. Rice is from Pakistan, garlic is from China, mangoes, tomatoes are from Kenya, and oranges and apples are from South Africa. What plans do we have as a country for the 70 percent of our people engaged in agriculture? How can the country continue importing the things we have the competitive advantage to produce very well? It is a known fact that Uganda’s climate is one of the best for commercial farming, as it is suitable for most kinds of crops. We want to focus on industrialization, yet we lack the skills and knowledge to do so.
Why not empower people with better farming methods, improve household revenues so that they may take their children to school, introduce value addition, and then think of industrialization?
It is so puzzling. About 80 percent of the labor force is rural-based, yet 90 percent of the production takes place in urban areas. This presents a mismatch between the centers of economic activity and the location of labor. It is on this basis that experts say the rich should be allowed to take over land for commercial farming.
The future of Uganda is in agriculture.
Whereas it may not be cost-effective for Uganda to sell manufactured products to Kenya, it has a ready market at competitive rates for agricultural produce. There are lots of opportunities in South Sudan, eastern DRC, northern Kenya, Rwanda, and northern Tanzania, as they have unmet markets for food. Uganda’s main export partners are Sudan (15 percent) and Kenya (10 percent), with small quantities going to the DRC, Netherlands, Germany, South Africa, and UAE.
According to the International Development Association (IDA), in countries where the share of agriculture in overall employment is large, broad-based growth in agricultural incomes stimulates growth in the overall economy, including the non-farm sectors selling to rural people.
Research has shown that every dollar of growth from agricultural products sold outside the local area in African countries leads to a second dollar of local rural growth from additional spending on services, local manufacturing, construction materials, and prepared foods. The best strategy to employ all Ugandans is to modernize agriculture. Are we doing enough? It’s not too late.
About the author: The writer is a marketing and distribution expert. He sees business in everything. He loves writing business news, reviews, and analyses. Reach him on or Twitter: @mkaketo LinkedIn:
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