Photo:

Seated L – R: Omukama Tito Winyi II (Bunyoro), Sir Andrew Cohen (Governor), Omukama George Rukidi III (Tooro)

Standing: L – R – Kabaka Edward Muteesa II (Buganda), Omugabe Charles Godfrey Gasyonga II (Ankole)

©Licence from Alamy

The importance of firm infrastructure as a foundation for development has been recognized for centuries. It was central to the growth of the British colonial state in Uganda, as Sir Andrew Cohen, the British Governor, made clear in an address to a joint meeting of the Royal African Society and the Royal Empire Society in London on February 7, 1957.

Newly retired from his Uganda mission, Sir Andrew highlighted the four key areas of the Protectorate government’s economic policy: improving the productivity of peasant farming; developing secondary industries; providing basic economic services, with large investments in electric power, roads, railways, and rural and urban water supplies; and helping Africans to play a larger part in trade and commerce.

As we celebrate another Independence Day this October 9, Sir Andrew Cohen remains the best leader Uganda has had. That is an uncomfortable thing to say of a colonial governor in a country that has been independent for 64 years. I say it because the record demands it, and because we can no longer afford to avoid the comparison with what followed him.

Andrew Benjamin Cohen was born in Berkhamsted, England, in 1909 and took a double first in classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. He joined the British civil service in 1932, moved to the Colonial Office the following year, and by 1947 was head of its Africa division. There he became the chief architect of a new policy: that Britain’s African territories should be prepared for self-government. He was a practical, forward-thinking reformer, impatient with ceremony, who believed the purpose of colonial rule was to make itself unnecessary.

In January 1952, aged 42, he was sent to Uganda to practice what he had preached, and he governed the protectorate until January 1957. He later represented Britain on the United Nations Trusteeship Council and served as the first permanent secretary of the Ministry of Overseas Development until his sudden death from a heart attack in 1968.

Cohen spoke with confidence because the colonialists had delivered more than they had taken out of Uganda. Consider what was built. The Owen Falls hydroelectric project at Jinja was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth II in 1954. The Uganda Development Corporation, founded in 1952, drove industrialization by anchoring Tororo Cement, the Jinja textile industries, and the Kilembe copper and cobalt mines. To carry that copper to the coast, the western railway extension reached Kasese in 1956.

Add to this urban water and sewerage systems, an expansive road network, marine ports, excellent schools, and well-equipped hospitals. Entebbe International Airport, opened in 1951 under his predecessor, was extended into a premier regional hub. He laid the foundation stone of the Parliament Building on December 18, 1956, and his administration prepared the ground for the New Mulago Hospital, commissioned in 1962. Cohen built on his predecessors’ work, but the pace was his. In a remarkably short time, Uganda became the envy of Britain’s African colonies.

His political legacy was greater still. He declared that Uganda’s future was as a primarily African state, and he acted on it. Recognizing that a unified country required representative central institutions, he reorganized the Legislative Council. In August 1953, he expanded African representation to 20 of its 56 seats and eventually restructured it so that Africans held half the seats on its representative side.

In August 1955, he introduced a ministerial system that brought Africans into the central government as ministers for the first time. A new generation of political parties, including the Uganda National Congress and the Democratic Party, found room to organize. He opened the senior civil service to Ugandans, expanded secondary education, and backed the co-operative movement so that African growers could finally gin their own cotton and process their own coffee. Makerere grew in standing during his term. The men who took Uganda to independence in 1962 learned their trade in institutions Cohen created.

His tenure had one inexcusable dark spot. In 1953, he deported Kabaka Edward Mutesa II in a dispute over Buganda’s place in a united Uganda. It was his gravest error. He misjudged Buganda, and the deportation united the kingdom against him and cost him much of the goodwill he had earned. Yet he redeemed himself by conceding the error. He negotiated the Kabaka’s return in 1955, under an agreement that made him a constitutional monarch, and welcomed back to his throne the man he had banished. It is hard to imagine any of his African successors allowing an exiled opponent to return to his office.

Governor Cohen and his predecessors succeeded because they were committed to the prudent and accountable management of the country’s finances. What money came in was spent on building the country, not on buying political support and arming a militarized state. They did not spend obscene amounts of public money on the luxurious lifestyles of a ruling class, or on celebrations and conferences whose chief value would be a psychological boost to the regime and a tiny section of the population.

Then what happened? Why did Uganda and Singapore, for example, take such different paths? At independence, both inherited the same British institutional frameworks. Yet Singapore embraced a fanatical devotion to meritocracy, strict rule of law, and zero tolerance for corruption, and transformed itself from a third-world port into a first-world economic titan.

Things fell apart in Uganda because of failed governance. The same is true elsewhere. Zimbabwe’s infrastructure at independence in 1980, after nearly two decades of war and economic sanctions, was remarkably sophisticated and self-sufficient. Today, 46 years later, the country is hollowed out by hyperinflation and state decay. Ditto Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, and a host of other African countries on the same journey.

Is there something more fundamental upon which a sustainable infrastructure must be built? There is. It is good governance: democracy, justice, the rule of law, the pursuit of peace, accountability, sacrifice, prudence, meritocracy, investment in human capital without regard for politics, and the resolute prevention and punishment of corruption. Rulers who ignore this build on sand.

I sound nostalgic because I am. Uganda has a 70-year-old blueprint for prudent government and focused leadership. What Uganda needs is regime change, not just of the rulers but of the entire national culture. The spendthrifts are not only in government offices. Ours is a national ailment, marked by a poor tradition of saving and long-term investment.

We must abandon the politics that create wars and destruction and stop deliberately impoverishing political opponents. We must stop spending money we do not have. We must fight corruption through personal example, publicly accessible audits, the equal application of the law, severe punishment, and the recovery of stolen public funds.

Then shift the billions saved to the service of the entire population, through a functioning, networked, integrated, and well-maintained infrastructure. The miracle of Singapore was not a miracle at all. And Andrew Cohen was a normal person. He simply cared about Uganda, put the protectorate first, and his own interests last. 

© Muniini K. Mulera