In our may edition, I wrote an article titled “Busoga Rural roads and why I accuse the peasant”.
In the article I accused the peasants of reneging on their civic duty of holding themselves and those that lead them accountable for anything. I accused the peasants of selfishly working against the future and actively participating in the breakdown of the rural social services for short term gain.
Early in November, I got a chance to be part of a group of ten Busoga progressives selected to travel to China to be part of the inaugural Young Rural Entrepreneurs Initiative. The program is supposed to make us use our entrepreneur innovativeness to transform communities through agribusiness and related interventions.
I was selected partly because of my entrepreneurship around founding this newspaper, but largely because of the community transformation work I do through my leadership of the Gabula Royal Foundation, the organization of the Kyabazinga of Busoga through which he seeks to transform rural communities.
We visited many places in our ten-day travel around China. However, two village made the difference for me. Mangajian village in Jinghong city and Hebian village in Yunna province, in Xishuangbanna.
Both villages were one of the most poverty-stricken villages less than two decades ago but are not the poster boys for transformation and frequently visited by scholars and tourists who, in addition to experiencing their authentic cuisines and warm people, want to learn how they were able to do it.
They are both agricultural villages, like Budondo in my neighbourhood of Jinja North.
Mangajian focuses on climate- resilient crops. It has developed an agricultural system resilient to climate change, reducing vulnerabilities in farming and the villagers have improved soil health, conserved water and boosted crop yields through sustainable agricultural practices.
Meanwhile, farmers in Buyala, Namizi, Bwase, Kyabirwa, Budhagali, in Jinja North, all villages just on shores of the ever-flowing River Nile cry over lack of rains during the dry season and are not able to produce vegetables around the year. How can there has never been an effort to harvest part of the Nile River for irrigation to ensure around the year production of vegetables?
In Hebian Village, villagers were mainly relied on traditional agriculture and livestock for their livelihood, and faced challenging living conditions and sleeping in squalid conditions until an intervention dubbed the Hebian Experiment was started. It guided the villagers to diversify their crops to not only plant vegetables but also plant rice and corn and other crops that suited their tropical climate.
As the experiment progressed, infrastructure improved significantly with new roads and villagers living conditions improved as wooden squalid houses were replaced with more eco- friendly, comfortable homes. The Hebian experiment not only improved income levels but also enhanced villagers’ quality of life, making the village a model of harmonious ecological and economic development.
My tour around the two villages further justified my accusation for the peasant back in my rural Busoga for their laissez-faire approach to transformation.
In my rural Namulesa and the wider Jinja North, most group efforts by locals are towards preparing how to attend each other’s funerals better. How to pool money to buy tents and plastic seats in case one village member gets a problem or has a party and would want to use them.
Most women saving groups are about borrowing and lending to each other with no care about whether the borrower is growing financially in any way. In the end, they run an indebtedness ring around themselves and stay in there all their lives living a hand to mouth life of squalor.
Individualism, selfishness is what the villagers of the two villages we visited first ejected from their lives. The villages have one goal- Success for the village which means success of each one in the village.
“The people were hungry for change and growth,” Deng Linguo, the village chairperson of Hebian told us when we asked how they managed to mobilize the people towards development.
My people in rural people in Busoga think competition with one another and being better than the other is a win. But where is the win in being the only one eyed among the blind?
Ask any village in Busoga what they are known for in terms of production and there will be silence.
I asked elders in Budondo in Jinja North, how come with the decades of vegetable farming, we have never seen a value added product produced and packaged for the market as a Budondo unique identifier. There was silence. I told them it was because of selfishness of the farmers.
You find bicycles of vegetables lining the road on the way to Jinja City Market. Individuals will half acre plots neighbouring each other approaching the market individually and
competitively. How about they unit into one big farming unit and control their approach to market and farming?
To fight the dark spirit of debt, Hebian and Mangajian village people set up Airbnb business to complement their farming. The business is managed through their cooperative unions.
They understood that for small holder farmers debt is a destructor of development, so they avoid it.
They also do not worry about how they will be buried when they die. All their interventions focus on how to improve their quality of life when they can still breath and leave the burying to the living. In any case, like Arundhati Roy asked in God of Small Things, where do old birds go to die?
A group of young men approached me few weeks ago. Supporters of a popular English Premier League team, they even formed an umbrella association to bring them together. They wanted me to go attend their launch.
When I asked what the association does exactly, they told me they save money to be able to take care of their members incase they died or got such problems. They also hope to saveup and start lending to each other. Each script their parents used three decades ago, same script their children are carrying forward. The cross and intergenerational transmission of poverty.
How can able bodied 20-yearolds be thinking of how to bury themselves instead of how to increase their productivity? It confirmed to me the need for community organizers or change agents to mobilize the communities for development. It is the one thing the two Chinese villages had and used well.
They trusted believed in their community organizers and were intentional about they yarned to achieve. Instead of parasitic leadership, they opted for development-oriented leadership in their community organizers.
If any lessons are to be taken from my visit to China and in particular my visit to Mangajian and Hebian Villages, for Namulesa, Budondo and other equally rural areas of Jinja North and Busoga at large to develop, there is need to have a frank uncomfortable discussion with the people. Uncomfortable to the extent that it questions their routine and make them understand why for all the years they have followed the emotional script of burials and saving for parties, they have never seen stead transformation in themselves and their villages.
Governments help the organized. Theres no way PDM will help communities if villagers approach it randomly without organized intention. Chinese government help of an irrigation system found an organized and intentional group of farmers.
The challenge I throw to you Busoga reader, is can you mobilize your village to join production and have a product associated to it in the next five years using the one village one product approach of the Chinese?
