Uganda elites and Museveni's drip irrigation - A snake in the pot

So, I have been following His excellency Yoweri Kaguta Museveni's demonstration-farming efforts in Luweero. The president has been encouraging Ugandan farmers (most of them are peasants by the way), to adopt the method of irrigation where used plastic water bottles are filled with water and a hole is drilled in the bottom to drip-irrigate each plant, i.e A water bottle per plant.

I am lucky that I grew up in a rural village and at the same time had access to an elitist education (afforded of course by our boarding school culture and the fact that my parents had the means). When we had holidays from boarding school, many of my friends from the elitist school i attended, went to Kampala for holidays. A good number of them spent their holidays taking extra lessons ( we used to call it coaching) from places like Makerere University (anybody remember the famous professor Lugujo?). While my friends were busy at this, my father would send us to his plantations to plant/weed/harverst maize, sugarcane (for "kaloddo" production), beans, matooke among so many crops that we used to plant. That is how I topped up my pocket money for school because our farms were partly commercial.

I carried food from the garden way into my university years and I still did quite some digging to help my mother in her subsistence garden. Now, we were the lucky ones, because we my father's children did not "dig to survive". Around us there were many kids, for whom farming was a must in their daily life. While I was working for pocket money, they were working so that their parents would have money to send them to school. Even during school days, they went to the garden first before trekking the long distance to school. I used to play football in the evenings with these boys. Some of them have long since died but the majority actually never made it beyond secondary school partly because the yields from their parents' gardens were not sufficient.

In those days the farming approach was very simple; wait for the rains, plant and pray that all will be fine. Many times the harvests were not good enough because of poor rains among a plethora of other problems including pests. I recall my mother (RIP) lamenting on many occasions how her maize had "died!" and how the seasons seems to have "changed". That was around 1990 - 1996 before we started talking much about climate change.

I have been studying the phenomenon of climate change at a very high academic level. I have analysed troves of data and unlike climate change sceptics, I can bold say with science as my witness that the climate is changing. The rainfall amounts in Uganda on average are expected to increase in the wet seasons but the dry seasons are expected to get even drier. In Uganda we have a bi-modal rainfall seasonal pattern , meaning we have two major rain seasons in the year i.e March - May and September to November(sometimes to December). Even our dry seasons have historically had precipitation meaning it was easier to be a breadbasket for the region given that many places didn't actually dry up even in the dry seasons.That is changing. To add insult to injury, our demographics have changed a lot. They say our population was close to 6 million at Independence in 1962 but now we are steadily rushing towards 40 million. Meanwhile the toll on the environment is so obvious with deforestation, building in wetlands, etc. So even the climate change sceptic has to agree that we cant do Agriculture to feed the growing population with business as usual or as in the past. We have to irrigate where we never did before.

Then comes mr. Museveni with this idea that is meant for farmers (peasants) who are committed to their farms. Yes, there are many brilliant technologies that we could employ, but they often come at a price tag and would be very difficult to spread out to all the peasant farmers who have the most need. The menace of plastic bottles has been growing in the country, so to me it looks like a good recycling strategy (You can call it disposal delaying strategy) if these bottles can be reused. Its almost a ZERO conventional-energy recycling strategy.

So how have my elitist friends reacted to this irrigation idea? Well, I have to first give some credit to my elitist friends. In the past few years, many of them have "discovered" the magic in Agriculture. Never mind that all through school from primary level, we were told that Agriculture is the backbone of the nation. Possibly they took these school lessons as "just facts" for passing exams. We cant blame my friends for this. Their parents and the education system didn't probably expose them to the reality of agriculture being important. Their city lives full of coaching and cramming facts couldn't have helped either. So I applaud them on their farming exploits whatever the motivation. However for most of them, farming is a part time job and they cant appreciate some of the things that are being proposed.

One of my friends, criticising the president wrote, " What time do those bottles need before they need to be refilled? I am thinking about the amount of labour that is required. I think by the time you are done water bottling the 40 acres you have to go back and refill the first bottle you filled when u were starting". Another one responded, "You would need to camp in the garden forever". So I asked, "Don't we all camp at our jobs "forever" when we want to succeed or have a tight deadline?". The response I got showed me that my elite friends haven't yet realised that Agriculture is supposed to be a full time job and that as farmers its their duty to do these calculations and adjust their daily schedule (Most of them studied some optimising at school i guess). These discussions by the way were on Facebook (where else would I meet my elitist friends?). One gentleman wrote in reply to me that, " We have other jobs and cant be on a farm all the time". So i told him that "In all countries where farming is successful, farmers work their farms 100 % and not as a hobby". Like I said earlier, this is true for any job. For farming, in some critical seasons, one has to increase the hours so that their crops dont die. I told my friends that "as long as they see farming as a side job" or as something "cool" to do because everybody (the cool kids?) is doing it, they should just forget it!!

What happened next was interesting!! The gentleman edited all his previous responses and wrote, "We may need to camp in our farms doing several other things other than carrying water, this is the reason we need to set up Auto water systems that are not too complex"!!

I wanted to say, "Well before we can afford those not complex automatic (which to me sounds complex ) water systems, do we starve and die?", but i realised that the Facebook comment flow was broken" (Damn Facebook's editing tool).

My elitist friends want ready-made solutions, akin to the solutions from the cramming and coaching they went through in school. They will not try an idea and develop or adjust it as they go. They want an imported ready made system ( like the many used cars , phones TVs etc they use), designed by a foreigner for another country probably with another type of problem in mind. They haven't computed the cost of local labour vis a vis the imported machine and what it means for the price of their end product. And when that machine fails, they will probably ask government "etuyaambe" to buy another.

Whats wrong with going simple and improve what "we can already reach with our hands" (Omumpi waakoma wakwaata) and in the process build capacity?

I of-course have issues with many proposals of our government regarding many different sectors. I cant say I am even 60 % happy with the current political dispensation and that I trust all policy proposals but this is not about politics. The system may be broken in some ways but even a dead clock can be correct at least twice a day. So let us try the idea and at minimum if it is so bad, we can document its failure and propose how we can improve it. As long as we haven't tried something or an alternative, we dont have the data to oppose it. Yes, there are valid concerns about the effect on the environment of the bottles that eventually get retired especially regarding where they may end up (polluting the soil). Instead of saying this will be a problem, how about we think and propose how such a problem can be solved. To me rejecting this is like the famous "snake in the pot scenario" that I learnt from my father. If you dont beat the snake , you wont eat, If you beat it, you may break the pot and still wont eat. But if you somehow beat it without destroying the pot or in the process keeping a part of the pot then that is success.