President Museveni cuts a cake after delivering the State of the Nation Address at Parliament yesterday. Photo by Geoffrey Sseruyange 


A few minutes after President Museveni arrived at the Serena Conference Centre to deliver his State of the Nation address yesterday, the skies suddenly opened and doused the city in a brief but intense thunderstorm.
Half an hour earlier and it would have rained on the parade, literally, laid out as a Guard of Honour outside the conference centre, but it did not dampen the President’s mood.
“The sky is the limit,” he proclaimed, highlighting the country’s agricultural, manufacturing and natural resource potential.

“Those who were predicting doom last year are embarrassed. Shame on them.”
Mr Museveni struck a bullish tone yesterday, highlighting the impending commissioning of Bujagali Hydropower Dam and the reliable power it is expected to provide, as one of many positives for the economy.
Yet compared to a year ago when Mr Museveni, buoyed by a 68 per cent electoral result, applauded the “phenomenal growth” of the economy, yesterday’s speech revealed the precarious nature of an economy scarred by a year of battling inflation and falling growth.
In a break with tradition where he throws up the impressive numbers of growth President Museveni yesterday went straight for the jugular, outlining the areas he intended to cover; delays in prioritisation of expenditure, political sabotage of government programmes, as well as corruption and selfishness. 
He could not be denied the ever-present reference to 1986 (when he took power) and how things have improved since but President Museveni was more realistic yesterday about current challenges and future threats, especially the lack of employment.
Hair salons, Mr Museveni said, had grown by 9.7 per cent in the previous year while agriculture, which employs seven out of every 10 Ugandans, had only grown 1.4 per cent.
Growth, the President said, was not creating employment, and was instead spawning a consumer culture built on imported products. But while the President was spot-on in his diagnosis of jobless growth, his policy prescriptions were neither clear nor comprehensive.
Factories can create jobs – and the President gave an example of the three sugar factories at Lugazi, Kakira and Kinyara – which directly employ 19,000 people but he suggested few ways by which we can build more factories.
Increased electricity is one important ingredient in creating a manufacturing base and the government has, with Bujagali due for full commissioning later this year and Karuma, also due for ground breaking within a year, finally put the blame game aside to increase generation capacity.
Yet while the President wistfully reminded us that we would need 11,554MW to catch up with Malaysia, it is not clear how we plan the required quantum leap after we exhaust our hydropower potential.
The biggest letdown from the speech on jobs, however, will have to go down to agriculture. The President rightly pointed out the unexploited potential of the country’s 40 million acres of arable land and the potential to become the region’s food basket.
Yet it is potential that has been highlighted in several policy statements in the past but which consecutive programmes, from the Plan for Modernisation of Agriculture to the ubiquitous National Agricultural Advisory Services, have failed to implement.
The President had spoken at length about agriculture last year, highlighting promises on irrigation, agricultural finance, value-addition and marketing of agro-produce.
Apart from a passing, wistful reference to what could happen “when we start using fertilisers” the speech was devoid of a clear way out of the structural crisis that the agricultural sector finds itself in; employing many people who are producing less every year.