Motokas, cows and wives

Having only recently finished Twelfth Night, I had promised myself that I would take a 12-month break from matters theatrical..... But, as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and I find myself in another play starting next week at Uganda's National Theatre in Kampala. We will be doing four performances of the comedy The Cow Needs A Wife, written by Angie Emurwon and a prize winner in last year's BBC World Service African playwriting competition.

Without giving away too much of the story, the plot of this hilarious play revolves around the efforts of a poor young man (Mamboleo) to pay the bride price for his chosen woman, assisted by his over-bearing uncle (Motoka) and the cunning jack-of-all-trades (Kuyiya). I will be playing the role of Motoka, so named as the first owner of a motor car (motoka in Luganda) in his village.

The central themes of the play are bride price and fund-raising, both of which have considerable significance in Ugandan life. The logic of bride price is simple: it represents compensation paid to a family for the loss of a daughter. In an environment lacking an external welfare state, the extended family is the only approximation to a social safety net for the disadvantaged. But in recent years, some non-governmental organisations in Uganda have campaigned against bride price, on the grounds that it encourages society to regard women as chattels that can be bought and sold. It is hard to know to what extent this campaign has attracted popular support, either among women or men, in a society where the Kwanjula (betrothal ceremony) is deeply rooted in traditional culture. My own theory is that, as Uganda becomes wealthier and more urbanised, the Kwanjula - where the bride price is paid in the form of gifts of livestock and other commodities - will become increasingly celebratory and ceremonial, and that the transactional element will wither away.

One consequence of bride price is the need for would-be grooms to fund-raise among their families and friends in order to raise the necessary cash to meet the huge costs of betrothal and marriage. Next week, when we stage The Cow Needs A Wife, I know that in the tranquil lawns surrounding the theatre, there will be at least three or four tables each evening where meetings of wedding committees will be held, to organise functions and raise money to finance the event. Complicated budgets are drawn up and pledges from friends and family carefully recorded. Very few men in Uganda can afford to meet the costs from their own resources, especially in a country where extended families are large and where it is not unusual for weddings to have more than 500 guests.

And this is the cultural backdrop to this excellent comedy. If you are able to come and see it next week, don't miss it!

Nazareth

I went to Nazareth last week. Not the Nazareth in the Holy Land where Jesus served his apprenticeship as a carpenter, but the Nazareth that lies about 100 km south of Addis Ababa in the Oromia region of Ethiopia, its name a reminder of Christianity's long history in highland Ethiopia. (Or so I thought, until my host pointed out that the city's Oromo name is Adama, and that it had only been renamed by the last Emperor Haile Selassie some years ago.)

It was four years since I had last visited Addis. As with so many African cities, the pace of economic growth (at least if construction work is any sort of proxy) is rapid: yet the country remains in visible poverty. My journey took me south, to the Southern Nations and People's region. Shortly after the town of Butajira, we branched off the main road and continued along an excellent all-weather road en route to a farm in the Hlaba district. There were hardly any motorised vehicles on the way: most people travel on foot or, for a lucky few, on donkey carts. I saw very few shops on the way: the exchange of goods appeared to be reliant on weekly open-air markets in village centres. The rains had recently started and farmers were busy using ox-ploughs to prepare their fields for planting. In such a region, households are dependent on wood and farming waste for their energy source, yet there were almost no trees visible standing more than about head-high.

After reading Jared Diamond's book Collapse last year, this visit was a timely reminder to me of the vulnerability of rural communities like this to any adverse shock - for example, failure in rainfall. No rainfall, no crops. No crops, no food. No safety net, and no incentive to traders to transport food into the district, because there would be no money to pay for it. The same could be said of the long term impact of annual farming on soil fertility: diminishing farm yields feeding an ever-increasing population. It is a sobering thought.

On the way back into Addis, I saw a sign for Bobmarley Square (sic), a reminder of the strong connection between the Rastafarian movement and its spiritual home in Ethiopia. Tafari was, in fact, Emperor Haile Selassie's real name: according to Rastafarian beliefs, the embodiment of God on earth and the opponent of western Babylon. It is almost exactly 30 years to the day since Bob Marley's untimely death from cancer, and 36 years since Haile Selassie was executed by Mengistu's Derg, but the Rastafarian movement lives on.

Panacea

For all the hype that surrounds microfinance, one can be excused for believing that it will save the world. There is an initiative by the Ugandan government called "Bonna bagaggawale" which, loosely translated from Luganda means "Prosperity for all". Few appear to take it as a serious policy statement, but as a long term vision it is laudable. Bonna Bagaggawale could, however, be the manifesto for the microfinance movement, the latest cure-all in a long sequence for the world's woes.

I've recently finished reading the provocatively titled book "Why Microfinance doesn't work" by Milford Bateman, which should be compulsory, if uncomfortable, reading for microfinance believers everywhere. Bateman poses the question of why countries that have achieved microfinance saturation over the last decade (for example Peru, Bosnia and Cambodia) do not demonstrate obvious and substantive poverty reduction and "bottom-up" development gains. While the book deals less with African countries (where the microfinance movement is younger and, presumably, reliable statistics are harder to come by), Bateman supports his arguments with impressive statistics and qualititative observations. His conclusion is simple: that most independent evaluations are unable to show concrete evidence that microfinance has had a significant impact on poverty alleviation.

Indeed, Bateman goes further. He asserts that, contrary to the major premise of the microfinance movement: that it promotes poverty reduction by enabling the poor to borrow and invest in income-generating activities (and create a kind of virtuous spiral of wealth creation by micro-entrepreneurs), that in fact the vast majority of microfinance loans are taken out for short term expenses like school fees, health care, funeral expenses or other consumption requirements. So, far from creating wealth, microfinance adds a new item to many household monthly budgets: repayments to the microfinance institution (MFI).

No doubt microfinance supporters can (and will) produce powerful statistics of their own in support of the developmental thesis rubbished by Bateman. So far, at least in my experience, their rebuttals have been feeble. Recently, on quoting from Bateman's book, a MFI Chief Executive responded to me that "poor people also have a right to credit". Well, I can't remember seeing that particular right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

A few years ago, at the onset of the credit crunch, my brother remarked to me, after having lived for a year or so in Nairobi, that while there wasn't a great deal of money around, at least personal indebtedness was very low. After the consequences of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, this seemed to him to be an entirely positive aspect of African economic life. What he didn't appreciate was the colossal demand for short term debt to meet essential consumption requirements. Now, better by far to have this demand met by properly regulated MFIs than by the Tallyman with extortionate interest rates and brutal enforcement methods (hence the classic movie poster above), but to represent this as poverty alleviation? To me, that's a bit like saying that credit cards and other unsecured lending are the solution to the world's economic problems. I don't think so.

The trouble with walking to work......

.....is, of course, that you have to walk home again.



Or at least, under normal circumstances, it is difficult to think of any other possible objection against this carbon-friendly and healthy alternative to Kampala morning traffic jams. But in Uganda, the "walk to work" campaign has taken on a whole new significance. Led by a loose alliance among the leaders of opposition parties, this apparently innocuous campaign, ostensibly against high food and fuel prices, has provoked a powerful, many say disproportionate, reaction by the Ugandan government. Here's a little piece of visual evidence from the Monitor newspaper. It's certainly a deterrent to leaving the car keys at home.

But leaving aside the muscular response, what's driving the underlying problem of increasing food prices? Global commodity prices, especially oil, are one factor. Increasing regional demand, in particular from South Sudan, is also cited. But the fundamental law of supply and demand is the real driver. Quite simply, there is a supply-side problem, fanned by the increasing demand of a growing population. There's not enough production and, in Uganda at least, there certainly isn't enough storage capacity. I've written before about the remarkable informality of Uganda's food distribution systems and the reliance on fresh products for food - and the lack of buffer stocks of maize and rice in particular - mean that there are no smoothing mechanisms in times of plenty or scarcity

And prices are rocketing upwards, across the board. Matooke, potatoes, maize and beans have all seen increases of between 20-40% in recent months. Not surprisingly, increases in staple foods are also driving up the cost of dairy products, poultry and pork. Fish prices have doubled in the last two years or so, as a result of the depletion resulting from over-fishing in Lake Victoria and Uganda's other major lakes. It's at the bottom of the pyramid, where food costs make up the major part of the household budget, where the impact of inflation is felt the most. When the Ugandan President said, a few weeks ago, that increasing food prices were good for the farmer, he was right, up to a point. Commercial farmers may well make some hay while the sun shines, but the truth is that most small-scale farmers are net consumers, not suppliers, of agricultural products.





"It's the economy, stupid" was Bill Clinton's slogan in his successful campaign against George Bush in the 1992 presidential elections. It's a phrase that could apply to a number of the popular uprisings that have sent shivers down the spines of many longtime autocratic leaders across Africa and the Middle East.

The best response for the nation to the "walk to work" campaign is investment in the agriculture sector. Big fists will only make things worse.

A green and yellow melancholy

It's always a wrench, coming to the end of a play. This will be my last post about Twelfth Night, by some distance my most successful production so far. And while I couldn't have asked for a better cast, the real star was the English language, in Shakespeare's incomparable hands. Here are just a few of my favourites quotes from the play:-

This fellow is wise enough to play the fool.

You are now sailed into the north of my lady's opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard.

You are all idle, shallow things. I am not of your element.

Let us draw the curtain and show you the picture.

Madam, I will.

A very dishonest paltry boy.

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenge.

Get him to say his prayers Sir Toby, get him to pray.

She sat like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief.

Virtue is beauty, but the beauteous evil ... are empty trunks o'erflourish'd by the Devil

And it is with a green and yellow melancholy that I say goodbye to the characters and the words. Plays are labours of love: maybe one day I'll be brave enough to choose the wonderfully-named Love's Labour's Lost.

Or what you will

To be performed at The National Theatre in Kampala in early April. "'Twill be admirable".

Banana Republic

Uganda is a true "banana republic", not in the disparaging meaning of the expression, first coined to describe the United Fruit empire in central America in the 1950s and 1960s, but in the significance of bananas as the preferred staple crop. Most Ugandans consume huge quantities every year - some estimates put daily consumption about 1 kg per day - mostly of matooke (cooking bananas) but also of the delicious sweet "apple" bananas pictured, and many other varieties.

Quite apart from their taste, bananas have been a great crop for Ugandan farmers, because they are incredibly easy to grow. Plant a sucker and, provided it rains, the sucker will grow rapidly and produce a truss - perhaps weighing 15 kg or more - within a year of planting. It needs little or no inputs and maintenance: nature does all the work. And indeed, once the banana plant is established, it will throw out further suckers which, left alone, will in turn grow and produce within a year. As with the potato in pre-blight Ireland, it is the easiest option for the farmer.

But, just as potato blight ravaged the Irish potato crop in the mid-19th century, causing a disastrous famine, so Uganda is falling victim to banana bacterial wilt disease. Bacterial wilt kills the banana plant and infects the soil. It spreads rapidly, mainly because transplanted suckers are the normal method of propagation. Experts estimate that crop losses may be in the region of $500 million per annum. This in itself is very significant, of course, but the slight reduction in supply of matooke to urban markets also results in substantial food price inflation.

Ugandan researchers have, with local and international support, been working on solutions to banana bacterial wilt. Indeed, my colleagues at the Kilimo Trust provided a grant to Uganda's National Banana Research Programme for this very purpose. And progress is being made: disease-free tissue-culture banana plantlets are available in Uganda; improved farming practices can restrict the spread of bacterial wilt. But perhaps the most promising solution is the most controversial: the incorporation of a sweet pepper gene into the banana to inhibit the transmission and spread of bacterial wilt.

There is a great deal of international hostility to GMOs - most of which, in my opinion, is based on emotion rather than fact - and this hostility presents itself among many in the donor community who finance national agricultural research and development bodies in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa. But they tend to overlook one very important fact of life in low-income countries; namely, that opposition to GMOs is driven by the wealthy, by people who have choices in the food that they eat. For the poor, the simple availability and affordability of food is infinitely more important than the manner in which it is produced.