Opinion: The legacy of Nsibambi can still be salvaged, here’s how

The news – sad news really – of the passing on of Uganda’s first technocrat Prime Minister Apolo Nsibambi found me at a private residence of one of the global superpowers’ employees.

It was near darkening to hear he’d passed and despite no public announcement of it at the residence, each of us that found out in our own way was overcome with pity.

Nsibambi, it can be now said without fear, embodied a work ethic that is admirable of a public servant; timekeeping, dialogue, getting the job done, leaving the stage and intellectual pursuit of ideas. The fact of his time keeping has now been repeated so much that it no longer sounds like an attribute of his but a collective failure of us as a society to hold this basic rule. The bar is truly on the floor on this one.

Yet, in his glowing eulogies, a morning or two after, another headline gripped national news – Scrap PLE, World Bank Tells Gov’t.

The two reasons I choose to connect the two events is that;

First, 7 in 10 of the children who sit PLE exams are from a Universal Primary Education school, a key government program aimed at universalizing education and increasing national literacy.

Secondly, the man who’d passed on, Apolo Nsibambi was the second and longest-serving Prime Minister of the UPE policy.

If we ignore the other reasons for his picking for the Premiership like his belonging to Buganda and his religion, we can settle for the fact that he was handpicked for his academic brilliance at the ‘Hill’ which ought to have translated into practical political work to make the government absorb the political pressure of the time.

So the UPE policy, as a government policy fell squarely on his hands as key government business whilst on the floor of parliament.

At his time of appointment, UPE numbers had become disastrous to read. 5 in 10 pupils in urban schools could neither read nor write, 9 in 10 in the rural areas, for whom UPE truly mattered, were unable to do the same too. And yet, for his time in the lead of government business, he encountered an unimpressionable finance ministry that progressively reduced the percentage allocation of government revenues to the sector coming from as high as 24.9 down to 11% now. Nominally, they were increasing and yet, never were they matching the high enrollment numbers.

By the time Nsibambi departed the Office of Prime Minister, enrollment to the programme had gone down, teacher to pupil ratios had improved, more pupils attended and submitted work to teachers.

Now, 8 years later, UPE has produced successful enrolment numbers that can be used to source development aid but bitterly poor logical and problem-solving populations that have birthed unemployment, crime, inequality and poverty.

Government is now mooting policy after policy to address what are only effects of a poorly executed program.

I opine, for Nsibambi’s legacy to be kept, the Prime Minister today, must move a motion to soundly debate the Universal Primary Education and its place in National integration and progression.  The motion must focus on the boring and mundane work of tracking what it is that has failed and seek solutions. We can add some pepper to the spice and call it the Nsibambi Reform On Education.

But we must do it, else we forget ever having more Nsibambis’ in our time.