After a long spell of bad news, including disease outbreaks, killer landslides, collapsing infrastructure and the multiple army helicopter crashes, Ugandans interested in policy matters woke up to a potentially heart-warming story early last week.

On Tuesday, September 4, the Daily Monitor announced that the Museveni government was in the process of producing a formula for the country’s transformation into an economic powerhouse.

The broad outlines of the formula being produced by the National Planning Authority, are to be found in what commentators have baptised “Vision 2040,” the year when the country is supposed to have made poverty history.

According to the NPA’s chairperson, Dr Wilberforce Kisamba-Mugerwa, the Vision is about transforming the country from “a predominantly peasant and low-income country into a competitive upper middle income country”.

Specifically, by 2040 per capita income is supposed to have risen from today’s $506 to $9,500. Life expectancy is supposed to soar to 85 from today’s brief 51.5 years.

The percentage of the population living below the official poverty line is supposed to plummet from 24.5 per cent today, to a miniscule five per cent.

The infant mortality rate now standing at 63 per 100,000 live births is supposed to collapse to four per 100,000 live births.

Driving these far-reaching changes will be a whopping 8.2 per cent GDP growth rate propelled by the budding oil and gas sector, reforms in the agricultural and tourism sectors, and the harnessing of millions of currently unemployed youth.

In this exercise, the government is inspired by a number of role models. They include Malaysia, South Korea, Chile, Mauritius and other countries that have, within the space of a generation, demonstrated that the fight against poverty is winnable.

As a country, Uganda is full of smart people: Hard-nosed policy types, and a good spread of casual armchair analysts, some elected Members of Parliament, who never let things of this kind float by without scrutiny.

So far, many concur that the government is over-reaching itself and have dismissed its ambitions as pie in the sky.

The more charitable, yours truly included, would rather the folks at the NPA were given ample time to refine their ideas ahead of Uganda’s 50th Independence anniversary, which is when they are supposed to officially unveil this roadmap to prosperity.

Nonetheless, early critics are not simply being blood-minded. Yes, the Museveni government is to be applauded for a whole raft of poverty reduction schemes it has hatched over the past 26 years, including the 1990s action plan that won it international accolades.

However, it is also known for not following through with these strategies.

Critics cite the 1999 formulation of Vision 2025 after wide national-level consultations.

The Vision with the optimistic theme “prosperous people, harmonious nation and beautiful country,” was never implemented, apparently because it lacked a defined implementation framework.

Why no one pushed for its definition and why Vision 2025 is now treated as if it never existed is yet to be explained.

And then there is the rather muted complaint that since the National Planning Authority was established after the planning function was taken out of what used to be the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Planning, it has remained something of a poor cousin, starved of cash and attention.

Just as serious, is the government’s aspiration to emulate countries that have banished poverty within relatively short periods of time without necessarily learning the right lessons from their experience.

Research suggests that the East Asian countries at least, initially rose on the basis of injecting large amounts of financial resources into smallholder agriculture, some going as far as dedicating up to 20 per cent of their national budgets to the sector.

While up to 80 per cent of Ugandans earn their living in agriculture, most of it of the peasant smallholder variety, the sector remains one of the least funded, way below the African Union mandated 10 per cent of the national budget.

Responding to early criticism, Junior Minister Matia Kasaija insisted, “The political leadership is committed to achieving this vision.”

Over and above the questions this raises about which leadership he was talking about, given that he and his generation will not be here and in power for the better part of the next 28 years given their advanced ages, it poses another one: What will be the source of this commitment and why has it been so lacking in the past?

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]