The government has absconded from its responsibilities and is hiding behind liberalisation that can ruin a country
Iread some of your articles with interest and they can be very informative. However I have come to the realisation that many of your claims are based more on theory than on the practicalities that would lead to the development of a country like Uganda. I agree for example with all you are saying in the article but are your solutions practical or would they only apply to an economics class at the university.
First of all do you actually know why these subsidies exist? The subsidies sky rocketed because of the thermal mix that was introduced into the energy sector to counterbalance the loss of energy from the hydropower plants.
Of course the initial mistake was not to plan for extra plants and only came to the realisation that the water levels had reduced to unacceptable levels. I have also listened to you claim that you should never have fought the AES Bujagali dam and wonder whether you are being serious or just argumentative.
If the procurements were riddled with bribes and the PPAs were faulty what do you expect people to do? Look on as people rob the country dry and who says that even though the project had gone ahead we would not be in the same crisis? The power sector is not isolated and no one should argue like it is. What is happening in the energy sector is what is happening in the roads sector, the health sector, education sector, etc. The government has absconded from their responsibilities hiding behind this liberalisation crap and forgetting that liberalisation and market economics that you have become a campaigner for can ruin a country. Liberalisation has to be heavily regulated especially for developing economies where institutions have not yet developed to regulate strong companies. However in Uganda the government understood liberalisation to mean its pulling out of everything and the parasites jumped in and are robbing the country dry with the help of NGO policies that everyone can see will never work.
Back to the electricity sector, the subsidy initially was supposed to lessen the impact on the common man. Forget about the era of thermal plants this was supposed to be a temporary solution but due to government incompetence the whole thing snowballed. UETCL used to be a profitable company before the thermal plants.
In this country of ours we need to go back to basics. The government needs to lead development not leave it to foreign companies that are interested in profits and repatriating them to their countries. The argument is that MTN used Uganda as a launch pad to enter the more lucrative Nigerian market. It made a killing in Uganda and they are no longer interested that is why their services are rubbish and UCC has no backbone to tell them off. Note that MTN is not the only company giving us rubbish services and not caring about it. The government needs to know where it is going before it starts adopting these policies which are leading us nowhere.
Uganda is trying to behave like a developed country by introducing all these liberalisation policies forgetting that these developed countries intervene to protect their own while here it is not heard of unless it is political. You argue against subsidies forgetting that the US refused to remove subsidies for its farmers while arguing against other countries doing the same.
Uganda has to get serious and know what its future holds not to lurch from one crisis to another. The first mistake in the electricity sector was to privatise distribution and Kenya refused to make the same mistake. Anyway let us agree that the mistake was made and the agreements signed. So how is the distribution sector being regulated? Is UMEME measuring up compared to other distribution companies? If you are not industrialising how do you expect UMEME to become profitable? Like you said in your article, the domestic consumers consume the least amount of power. How then does UMEME make a profit if the economy is not growing? The only way to do this is to increase the number of households and introducing a connection subsidy is a first step but a tariff subsidy is also necessary to sustain these people on the network.
Subsidies are necessary in developing countries like it or not because development is needed. That is why investors are given tax holidays, etc how many common Ugandans benefit from these? You are always arguing that you will not condemn these projects however corrupt because in the long run they will benefit Uganda. I pray that this happens but you forget that you are not living in the states or UK. These projects like the Naguru Estates were low cost housing. Now the new ones will be about Shs 100million for a one bedroom apartment. How will the common man benefit? How was the common man to benefit from the Temangalo project that you praise on all radios? The same argument against the electricity tariff is the same argument in all the projects you praise.
I think that ever since you became a business man you lost the journalistic distance from the source of money. Not that I claim that you are being bribed but you look at things from both a journalistic point of view and a business man point of view. To be able to fight for a country you have to be able to sacrifice. If you cannot do that you should concentrate on other things.
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