Here is how four-acre model can work in Busoga
What we have right now in Uganda and specifically for Busoga is that the four-acre model is promoted as a program parallel to PDM, and PDM has so far only been known for its money.
Isaac Imaka.
_____________
OPINION
By Isaac Imaka
I pride myself on being the last journalist to have an extensive conversation with the late Matyansi [Mathias] Ngobi, former minister for cooperatives and the father of cooperative unions and Busoga’s post-independence economic transformation, before he lost his coherence and eventually died.
“It was a selfless mission to organise our people and create opportunities where they would benefit from their toil,” he said of Busoga Growers Cooperative and how it introduced the rural people to the money economy.
Therefore, when Hon Daudi Migereko, former energy and lands minister, rang me to discuss the article I had written in the New Vision: How Busoga can maximise cabinet slots, the 30-minute call provoked me into thinking how best a region of nearly five million people can turn its fortunes around using government’s rural transformation programs like the four-acre model.
The President has, on separate occasions, cried that Busoga has refused to take up the four-acre model. In fact, at a dinner organised to honour His Majesty the Kyabazinga’s marriage, he reiterated his disappointment and hoped that the queen would use her ‘economics’ background to make the Basoga understand the kibalo (calculation).
Busoga land is highly fragmented. However, most people have at least an acre they can use for production, and the four-acre kibalo can apply to the one-acre farmers.
If a group of four farmers came together and each got the one million Parish Development Model cash boost, they would have four acres and four million shillings as initial investment. To help the president, the region’s leaders—political, cultural and religious—should cure the region’s kange mentality—the selfish believe that what one owns as an individual, no matter how little, is much better than what he would own as a team— that has been etched in people’s heads so much so that neighbors see each other as competitors instead of as strategic partners in production and development.
The President would then focus his energy on the technical aspects of what is failing with PDM and the four-acre model in the region.
For example, when the government of Kenya copied (and I use the word with great camaraderie) our Parish Development Model and the Four Acre Model and launched the Kenyan Rural Development Program, they focused on ensuring that all the key factors of successful agricultural production are easily available to the poor the program is intended for.
Good seeds, good fertiliser, irrigation solutions, land as a factor of production and as a route to capital and money as a liquid form of capital, among other things, are easily accessible to the Kenyan rural farmer through a single source.
What we have right now in Uganda and specifically for Busoga is that the four-acre model is promoted as a program parallel to PDM, and PDM has so far only been known for its money.
Even worse, those farmers, despite having one acre each, cannot use the land as collateral for bank loans to complement the PDM money because their land is not registered due to prohibitive costs.
There are different programs running in different directions, trying to achieve rural transformation. Pillar No 1 of PDM— production, storage, processing, and marketing, which would take off better under the four-acre model— cannot be operationalised without organising the small landowners into production groups. Individualism amidst scarcity kills production scaling.
The President should create an office for the four-acre model. It cannot continue running as an experiment. This office would then ensure that all key ingredients for the four-acre production, beginning with land registration, PDM access, good seeds, and fertilisers, are coordinated under one roof.
If one thousand one-acre farmers are mobilised, they would make 250 four-acre model clusters. What would they produce? What would they need to produce it? For which market, and how would they reach that market? Such and other questions would be asked by the one-acre model office, and answers provided to the cluster farmers—organised, intentional agricultural production.
Lastly, and because their current representative might be a little preoccupied with boycotting engagements with the NRM government due to political disagreements, the one-acre farmers of Budondo Sub County along the riverbank in Jinja North are keen on producing vegetables all year round. Just like coffee farmers have secured an irrigation system loan, they too want to have an irrigation system to pump water from the River Nile into their gardens to increase production. Do I need to mention that Budondo used to be the vegetable basket for Jinja and Kampala?
The write is a journalist and former MP contestant for Jinja North Constituency
imackisa@gmail.com