In the middle of September the United Nations released its
annual Human Development Indicator (HDI).
This index serves as an indicator of the quality of life of
a country’s people by measuring the health, education, inequality, poverty and
security standards. Aside from the statistical measures of development like GDP
growth, this is obviously a better measure of how people are actually doing.
In this year’s HDI report Uganda was ranked 162 out of 189
countries with a HDI score of 0.516. The index goes from zero to one, the
nearer you are to one the better. Our score puts us in the low human
development category.
But as bad as that sounds we have been worse.
In 1990, the earliest year that these figures were compiled
our score was 0.311 even the UN recognises that we have improved 66 percent in
the last three decades.
According to the UN figures life expectancy has risen to
60.2 years from 45.5 in 1990; expected
years of schooling has doubled to 11.6 from 5.7, as have the average years of
school which are up to 6.1 years from 2.8 years.
We have come a long way but to paraphrase Nelson Mandela, no
sooner have you climbed one hill than you realise there are many more to climb.
Currently we are committing increasingly more of our budget
to infrastructure development --- roads and power generation. Which makes
sense.
As it is now Uganda has about 16 km per 1000 square km of
land area, while an average middle income county has about five times that figure
at about 80 km per 1000 square square kilometres. On power, using consumption
as an indicator, according to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA)latest
figures Uganda’s consumed less than 111 kwh per capita compared to neighbouring Kenya 167 kwh per
capita and the island state of Mauritius punching above its weight at 2,183 kwh
per capita.
The importance of adequate infrastructure cannot be
overemphasised. A robust infrastructure network improves the ease of doing
business by increasing efficiency in production, distribution and consumption
of goods and services. Increased economic activity should lead to higher
revenue collections which will pay for investments in social services and
creating new infrastructure stock.
The deficiencies everywhere you turn, be it in
infrastructure or human development means that hard decisions have to be made
in prioritisation and sequencing.
We are between a rock and the proverbial hard place. We can
either prioritise, funnel more and more funds into select sectors and let the
rest make do with the left overs, or
spread our resources so thin that it is impossible to be effective.
But in addition, to help this cause we need to widen our tax
base, so that more and more people carry the burden of supporting this country’s
development ambitions. As it is now we are collecting about 14 percent of GDP,
a figure that has inched up from 12 percent a decade or so ago. The sub Saharan
Average is average is 16 percent.
This is important because without increasing our revenue collections
it will be impossible to bridge the deficits ourselves or borrow abroad to
salvage the situation.
As it stands now barely a million workers are paying income
tax out of a workforce of 11 million. Government is trying to use a series of
indirect taxes – fuel duties, mobile tax and OTT to try and make this happen.
The logic is simple we can have all the beautiful statistics
about economic growth, but if this growth is not spread more evenly through the
elevation of of the lifestyles of more and more people there will always be
grumbling.
(SEPTEMBER 2018)
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