The PANAFRICAN Review
Unintended Consequences of Policy Decisions
Frederick Golooba-Mutebi
There is a word one hears being thrown about quite a lot among the educated elite in Africa . Perhaps it is thrown about quite a lot elsewhere too , but I don ’ t know that . We usually talk of ‘ good ’ or ‘ bad ’ policies and criticize or applaud our leaders for championing them , and governments for implementing them . In some instances , we talk of governments which are good at formulating or making policies but hopeless at implementing them . In others we talk of governments which are very good at policy implementation . Sometimes we go as far as claiming that these ones ‘ steal ’ policies made by others and implement them fast , while those that made them are sleeping on the job .
The one thing we do not do enough of , however , is to reflect on the challenges of policy implementation , even where the policies in question are very good , at least on paper . I have been studying ‘ development ’ for almost 30 years now .
My journey with development started in my early years at graduate school at the London School of Economics and Political Science . The school motto is : “ to Know the Cause of Things ”. It was founded “ for the betterment of society ”. It was there that I was first introduced to a subject which was entirely new to me : Development Studies . In my native Uganda it was not yet being taught during the early 1990s .
One of the joys of being on the course was being spoilt for choice when it came to deciding what one might want to study in-depth . One could choose from as many as 30 options from across a very wide range of disciplines . Development Studies was the quintessential multi-disciplinary course . There was no limit to what one could discover about the world around . With a first degree in political science , I became keenly interested in ‘ politics of development ’.
Two decades since I left LSE , packed my bags and returned to Africa , the politics of development remains a key pre-occupation to this day , kicking up puzzle after puzzle the more I try to understand the cause of this or that phenomenon . And the one thing I have puzzled over for years is why policies that on the surface seem to be good , tend to produce perverse outcomes . There are many examples of this from across Africa , in agriculture , public health , micro-finance , education , name it .
The story of agriculture can best be looked at from the vantage point of reforms that once sought to stimulate more private sector participation while curtailing state intervention . State intervention in markets had messed things up quite a bit by the 1980s when the push for market-driven agriculture began . A key effect of private sector entry was the destruction or collapse of cooperatives , and with them , support systems which had provided subsidized inputs and scientific advice to multitudes of small farmers .
If agriculture in Africa continues to contribute far less than it ought to in terms of GDP , it is because of the failure by the profit-drive private sector to fill the gap left by cooperatives and the infrastructure they had used to support farmers . Today if agricultural extension services in most African countries are weak , it is because the market was supposed to provide them . Someone forgot that the private sector won ’ t provide services where there is no money to be made .
Serving small-scale farmers who previously depended on cooperatives linked to the state does not make money . And so privatization which was supposed to inject much dynamism into efforts to develop agriculture , make it less of a subsistence activity and more of an income-generating one , has to a significant degree created new challenges for which many governments do not have immediate solutions .
The story of reforms in health is long and detailed . The most instructive bit is about the results that enthusiasm for strengthen-
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