As Ugandans geared up to celebrate Easter, a news report tucked away in the Sunday Vision, the Sunday edition of the government daily, The New Vision, ought to have given many good reason for feeling cheerful.

According to the report, “The government will distribute dairy cows to over one million families across the country.”

Apparently, the scheme, the money for which the Ministry of Agriculture has already requested in the budget framework paper for the 2014/15 financial year, is part of the government’s plan to improve the socio-economic welfare of Ugandans.

The scheme, to be implemented over the next three years, seeks to target very specific households, those with more than four acres of land.

It is clear that the decision not to prioritise the land-poor was not simply plucked out of the air. Rather, it stems from considerations of the breed of cow the government aims to gift to those who have been smart enough to accumulate land and who, common sense suggests, are neither poor nor ought to be.

The cows will be of the highly productive Friesian breed, said to yield up to 20 litres of milk per day during peak periods and to eat lots of grass as a result.

As I read the story, the deeper I went into it the more it seemed familiar. For one thing, it reminded me of Rwanda’s one-cow-per-poor-family (gir’inka munyarwanda) programme, which has seen the government, working with a whole range of good Samaritans, give out nearly half a million cows for free over nearly a decade.

But of course Rwandans do not have land in such abundance as to countenance putting aside four acres of it for a cow, however productive.

There, the cows go to land- and cash-poor families to enable them to lift themselves into some kind of prosperity, courtesy of milk sales, and to use dung and urine for fertilising their small gardens in pursuit of increased productivity.

I don’t know for sure, but gir’inka munyarwanda may have something to do with one million Rwandans having exited the ranks of the poor between 2005 and 2010.

Eventually the proverbial penny dropped. I remembered that towards the end of 2011, only months after the General Election in which the National Resistance Movement had pulled off a more convincing victory than pundits had dared predict, the government announced a scheme to hand out six Friesian cows per family, for free.

The stated objectives have remained the same: To boost household incomes and increase overall milk production and consumption.

In 2011, however, nothing was said about how much land those who wanted to receive cows should have before they became eligible to receive the animals.

President Yoweri Museveni, who announced the initiative while commissioning a fruit-juice processing plant, said he had already issued orders to the Ministry of Agriculture to start implementing it.

If since that time Ugandans have heard nothing of the scheme, it is not because they have been spending more time on Mars than at home.

It is because either for some reason it has been implemented quietly and the results not made public, or it simply never took off for reasons only the government can tell whoever wants to know.

Did they realise after announcing the initiative that six free Friesians per family was a non-starter not least because of the huge cost the scheme would impose on the exchequer?

If they did and went back to the drawing board and decided on the now modest offer of a single animal for each recipient, it would still leave them vulnerable to accusations of being reckless with taxpayers’ money.

The reason for that is simple: Even with its revised offer of a single cow, questions remain about whether the assumptions behind the initiative have been rigorously tested for validity.

Already, experts are warning about the dangers of handing disease-prone exotic animals to people who have never looked after cattle and who, therefore, have no idea how to go about it. Also, while the idea of extending the initiative to all parts of the country is bound to excite those who stand to gain from it, it is fraught with risks.

There are, for example, areas where cattle diseases are so rampant that the idea of successfully introducing Friesian cattle there does not begin to make sense.

For one thing, veterinary extension services have for the most part collapsed. Where there were such things as communal dips to combat pests, those have disappeared.

Today, farmers who can afford to pay private service providers fend for themselves while those who cannot, watch helplessly as their animals succumb to diseases, some of which are easily preventable.

Anyone with a livestock farm or who knows some poor farmer trying to make a success of a livestock-rearing venture will find this story rather familiar.

Which raises the question: Are those promoting the initiative aware of these issues and have a plan to deal with them, or are they assuming all the recipients can find their own solutions?

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