By JOACHIM BUWEMBO

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Those people who take note of the peculiar dates on the calendar are it again. This time it is not a single day; it is a whole year, in fact two years.

In case you hadn’t noticed — and chances are that you had no reason to notice — the year 2021 is exactly similar to the year 1971.

In Uganda since the year started, they have been drawing our attention to this fact and specifically pointing out January 25.

Monday, January 25! The day Uganda’s history and future changed dramatically when the military came out of the barracks and took over the Executive and legislative functions of the state before proceeding to beat the Judiciary to pulp. The day was celebrated annually for eight years and then cursed for several years and thereafter mention of it carefully avoided.

It is the golden jubilee this week, Monday January 25, and we continue avoiding it carefully because well, we are no longer sure whether the military should or shouldn’t be in politics. On January 26 we loudly celebrate the anniversary — the thirty fifth — of Yoweri Museveni’s ascendancy to power in 1986 at the head of the National Resistance Army — NRA that had been waging a guerrilla war for five years since the elections of December 1980 were disputed as rigged.

Some people claim that the NRA actually took the capital city of Kampala on January 25, 1986, but added a day to avoid sharing a political birthday with Field Marshal Idi Amin who had also used military force to take over state power. You see, Amin’s was a military coup while Museveni’s was a “protracted people’s struggle”.

Semantics aside, some African scholars are no longer sure that Amin’s ascendancy was such a bad thing. Fifty years since it happened and 42 years after he lost the power, a statistical analysis of Amin’s most memorable act (besides the occasioning many losses of life) of forcefully ‘Africanising’ the economy is coming up in a new book by Historical Researcher, Professor Samwiri Lwanga Lunyiigo titled Uganda: An Indian Colony 1897 - 1972.

Using statistical data, Lunyiigo persuasively shows that the expulsion of non-citizen entrepreneurs was a necessary step, the economic destruction it caused notwithstanding. This is a view Ugandans, possibly 90 percent of whom were not yet born when it occurred in 1972, will possibly easily buy as their judgement is not affected by memories of the eight-year military rule and the tears it caused.

Now as Ugandans ignore Amin’s golden jubilee on Monday this week and go on public holiday on Tuesday to mark Museveni’s 35th anniversary, it is a good time to reflect on the country’s economic past while focusing on its future, coming especially as Museveni has just got a new five-year tenure that starts mid-May.

Speaking just a few hours after being declared winner of the 2021 elections last Saturday, Museveni pledged to deliver free medical care to all and to make the now 24-year old free universal education “completely” free: supplementary charges like meals, books and uniform have been hindering some children from accessing the free tuition in public schools, while universal health care has just been getting annual mention in one sentence during budget time that there were no funds to make it possible.

On the economy proper, Museveni said the different economic programmes — especially agriculture based — would deliver the nation to middle income status but the long-awaited extraction of oil would make it even easier.

While Ugandans are focusing a lot on oil for “making easier” the acceleration of economic growth, recent satellite assisted geological surveys have established the existence of a wide array of minerals that now make possible a new industrialisation take off at a bigger scale than what collapsed in 1972 following Amin’s “revolutionary” expulsion of non-citizen Indians five decades ago.

The minerals are many and believed to be relatively plenty, making Uganda a ‘small Congo’ of sorts. Being free of the amorphous state of the State of Congo, Kampala, with a much more effective government than Kinshasa, can enforce more pro-people mining policies to make the economic growth even easier that oil extraction alone would occasion. And even more important is the amount of youth employment that would be created by mining especially in the downstream processing and manufacturing activity that it would trigger.

Understandably, there has been too much state involvement in the oil extraction planning — actually 100 percent as far as the local aspect is concerned — and thus the resultant delay.

But for “other minerals” the state doesn’t have to be the implementer. It can and should leave the action and the risk to the private investors as it sticks to its regulatory role.

Joachim Buwembo is a Kampala-based journalist. E-mail: [email protected]

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This article was first published in The EastAfrican newspaper on January 23, 2021.