Which tax payer? Who is their political class accountable to? Once again, I will tell people that the population of Uganda has no solid stake in the management of public affairs because it lives outside that domain: 85% peasants, dying at 45 years of age, living in a non-monetary sector, in the rural countryside, untaxable because they do not produce any surplus to be taxed, about 50% of them are illiterate, 50.2% 15 years and below, wearing nappies, the highest in the world….that is not the kind of population that takes its government to task. Never!
We need to start thinking less traditionally about our socio-political reality. The whole notion of ‘tax-payer’ is completely out of place in Uganda.
That aid is unearned income and you know what unearned income does. If government was depending on money deducted from 20 million Ugandans wage earners, it would think twice before squandering it. It would be someone’s sweat and they would demand for accountability. But who in Uganda identifies with ‘donor’ aid as his money? If we do not come to grips with the relationship between paying tax and governmental accountability, then we shall keep fooling ourselves for ever with democracy for ever.
That is why I always insist that we need to proletarianise the population-urgently-create wage earners, get rid of the passive peasant class. A population that is largely wage-earners or proletariat is a population that you do not fool around with. The impunity of our political class now is a logical consequence of the fact that the country is largely peasant. That is why some of them are interested in preserving that passive class that will vote for them just because of a piece of soap. A wage labourer will tell you not to insult him by bribing him with money he contributed as PAYE or income tax.
What tax do the peasants pay?
“They … removed UPC I government because they wanted to scuttle public spending”
The Common Mans Charter may have talked about increase in ‘public spending’, but for those that engineered the deposition of AM Obote, ‘public spending’ per se was not the primary problem. The real problem was the source of finances for such expenditure: expropriation/nationalisation of foreign owned enterprises. That was the primary contradiction.
We know that Uganda was broke right from the cradle: independence was on 9 oct 1962, 24 hours later, on 10 oct 1962 there was no money to finance the return of the colonial administrators to London. The first structural adjustment facility was arranged there and then (what ever structures there were to adjust on day one). If AM Obote had asked for grants to finance his ‘public spending’ (whatever that means) instead of expropriating foreign multinationals, he would probably have lived longer and may be succumbed to internal contradictions.
Remember also there was the contradiction between the two global powers. AM Obote played into that with the adventure to the left, to defend a non-existent proletariat, as though that was the country’s primary challenge….remember the Blue Belt and Red Corridor?
