When the IMF and World Bank visited my father

In memory of his father, who passed away earlier in October, Yusuf Serunkuma offers a heartfelt political reflection on his father’s unfulfilled dreams since Uganda’s independence in 1962.  Recounting the story of his father’s dismissal from a textile factory in the early 1990s, he illustrates the devastating impact of the neoliberal austerity policies imposed by the World Bank and the IMF on the lives of ordinary Ugandans. These imperialist interventions dismantled the material progress and aspirations of the generation that won independence, and continue to suppress the hopes of both present and future generations.

Yusuf Serunkuma

When I wrote about my father about two years ago – in the Ugandan newspaper, The Observer – I sought to comment on several items, but specifically, the deferred dreams of independence – the promise of modernity – and ruinous staggerings of the National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) which took power in the 1986 and has stayed on ever since. Using my father as synecdoche, I noted that my father’s story – of retrenchment from Nyanza Textile Industry (Nytil) in the early 1990s – echoes many others across Buganda, Busoga and most parts of Central and Eastern Uganda – and many across sub-Saharan Africa. Titled “When the World Bank Visited My Father”, I stressed that for all those Ugandans who had left tilling the land for their sustenance, but instead labour in factories and the service industry – ca. 1950-1995 – concentrated mainly in Jinja town on the shores of Lake Victoria as it intersects with River Nile, and some other industries in parts of Kampala City – their story was one of disappointment and ruin when World Bank and the IMF insisted on privatising our (then and now) peasant-led economies.

We are the children of these men and women. By their dreams being suddenly and permanently shattered, their children were direct victims. We carry their deferred dreams in our souls, and their pains and frustrations continue to shape our daily realities. Sadly, with the IMF and World Bank – and their native co-conspirators – still around, alive and well, insisting on the same policies, we’ll pass these frustrations to our children, the grandchildren of our parents. With key sectors of Uganda’s economy – energy, telecommunication, banking, mining, coffee export, etc. – officially signed off to foreign, white monopolies from Euro-America and South Africa, there is almost no hope for native entrepreneurship and innovation. Consider, for example, that banking interest rates range between 15-35% (sometimes, 40%) and Ugandans, with a monopoly foreign power distributor – UMEME – complaints are endlessly lodged about fraudulent metering. Also, the telecom industry is dominated by foreign companies – MTN and Airtel – and charges the waves the way they feel. High charges are true across Africa making telecommunication – both calling and data – three times more expensive of the global average.  Ironically, all of these are happening under the auspices of the World Bank and IMF after the privatisation of public agencies which offered these services as public goods.

Sadly, the Ugandan president, Gen. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni – perhaps the best example of a ‘colonial caretaker’ under the new depoliticised, technocratic, colonial machine – tends to insult Ugandans as lazy to explain the bone-biting levels of poverty across the country.  The irony is entirely lost on him that he has been president of this country for the last 38 years. But I will say one more time: Ugandans are neither lazy nor unlucky. Not at all. It is not true that they lack business acumen or entrepreneurial skills, as so-called “developmentalists” tend to caricature us while hawking “saving culture” lessons. But privatisation/ structural adjustment – whose ruins we are yet to fully appreciate – visited Uganda riding on the insecurities and inferiority complex of the NRA/M. This has turned natives into paupers and beggars, who are now running en masse to the Middle East into absolute slave relations.

Notice that wherever IMF and World Bank found insecure, non-ideologically grounded folks in government – like what happened in Uganda – they ran riot. Remember, many countries, especially in North Africa, Ethiopia under Meles Zenawi, and almost all of Asia refused to implement IMF’s selfish policies. Confident leaders in other parts of Africa – such as Tanzania under Julius Nyerere – calmly braved IMF-WB harassment and threats, and found ways of remodelling these selfish policies ensuring to create room, however small, for their native businessfolk and industries. For Uganda, as their friend, Prof. Mahmood Mamdani has noted, these former NRA/M rebels only recently arrived from the bush, simply saw a chance to eat and enrich themselves and thus wantonly auctioned the country – and have continued to this day.

The pains of the retrenched

In telling my father’s story, I noted that my old man fell on bad times after the privatisation of Nyanza Textiles. He was among the “retrenched,” as they euphemised sacking labourers en masse. Like all other retrenched, these bad times hurt his immediate and extended family – and have continued down the years. Comrade Hassan Byekwaso Tibamanya so was my father’s name, before leaving the ruins of Jinja town for the countryside after retrenchment, tried sketching an existence as seller of cut and peeled sugar cane, and sometimes, boiled maize. But this was a man who after 22 years – between 1973-1994 – had grown to the rank of a senior weaver for Nyanza Textiles. Earlier, after a five-year stint with Printpack, he had been trained in industrial paper-manufacture. Both companies had been privatised, which often meant, closure and ruin. Now he had to learn hustling the street at 50 years of age. It was a difficult feat.

Having left the countryside around Lake Kyoga in 1964 – two years after independence – after almost 30 years in urbanised and industrialised Jinja, neither tilling the land nor fishing was attractive anymore. Amidst the confusion, he determined to soldier on with life in the city. But his dreams had been dealt a fierce blow.

As Jinja was losing its glow, my father, who had acquired a great deal of sophistication and taste – he was very dandy and chic – also started losing all his flair. From an evening hanging out with co-workers with whom they had worked for the last two decades, he was now spending it alone after a long working day around Jinja town.  It was tough. We started moving houses ending up in the slummy wetlands of Mafubira, a small suburb along Jinja-Kamuli Road. I’ll never forget the image of this man returning from his vending routines, hungry and tired, and as soon as he slumped his tired bones on a chair, and leaned backwards, he would be snoring just a few moments later.

There was more pain coming: a year after retrenchment, the Indian-built, then fairly posh Main Street Primary School where three of his children studied, including myself, became unaffordable. If he managed the school fees, buying or repairing our uniforms was difficult. I still recall the day, at a class assembly when a teacher called me up and pointed to a small hole that was growing at the back side of my pair of shorts. A part of my butt was visible through this hole.  The teacher then calmly advised that I tell my parents to stitch it up.  The times had hit my father really hard.  Indeed, four years after retrenchment, in 1996, he moved from this now dying industrial town to the villages of Mukono closer to Kampala.  About that time, he had turned to frying pancakes and vending them on a bike. Then, I had developed some wits, and watched him lose his smile and elegancy, but soldiered on.

My father’s story is true of many retrenched factory workers, folks in the service industry, early urbanites and other cosmopolitans. They could not return to the land – if there was any land to return to – but also didn’t know what to do with land after decades of a different lifestyle and different ethic in the city. So, they passed this lethargy, trauma, and frustration to their offspring. We are the children of these men and women and are trying to refashion our futures amidst the ruins.

Seeing through Nytil

About two years ago, my father learned about a case his former co-workers at Nyanza Textile had won over their denied terminal benefits in the 1990s retrenchment scam. After over 25 years of negotiating with the new ‘colonial caretakers’ in the NRA/M, the High Court in Jinja ordered government to pay them Ush6.2b (about $1.7m). My father had not been among the 3426 claimants when the case was being initiated. So, he asked me to escort him to Jinja City from Kampala to see if his name could be added onto the list of beneficiaries. I was reluctant. I explained that the cost of trying to get his name onto the list – both emotional investment and financial cost – would be much more than any compensation packages that might ever come to his pocket.

I explained that Ush6.2b if evenly distributed to 3426 people, each will get a small unsatisfying cut: about Ush1.8m each (about $482).  This is before the lawyers who argued this case carved off some Ush2billion (about $500K) to themselves. Or even more. Hoping there were no handlers and other fixers in between to claim a percentage for themselves, too! I told my old man that the world they had inhabited as young adults had massively changed under Museveni neoliberal order – everyone had become a thief.  But the old man’s spirits were still high.

I finally agreed to make the journey to Jinja for the emotional satisfaction of my old man. But this journey turned out to be a journey back in history. We spoke and argued a lot. My mind could not get off these 3500 men and women whose careers and beautifully settled lives as factory workers – just like my father – had been ruined by foreign agencies claiming newly-found benevolence towards Africans. This was just 30 years after independence. Had we not kicked out these pillaging foreigners for selfishly killing and stealing our resources? How quickly had they become our benevolent friends?

I could not stop thinking about all the workers in the other parastatals – in a parastatal and cooperatives-led economy. Over 140 parastatals, public companies, and cooperatives were targeted for liquidation for “interfering” with the market forces of demand and supply, supposedly bad management, and unprofitability. It was a lie. Consider for example Uganda Electricity Board (UEB); Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB), Uganda Transport Company; Uganda Bus Company (UBC); Uganda Coffee Marketing Board (UCMB), Nytil Textiles; Dunlop Tyres, Uganda Breweries, Uganda Distillers Ltd, Uganda Dairy Cooperation (UDC); Uganda Fisheries Ltd; Uganda Hotels (UH); East Mengo Growers’ Cooperative Union; Busoga Cooperative Union; Uganda Airlines Corporation; Uganda General Merchandise, Lake Victoria Bottling Company – just to mention some of them. Hundreds of thousands of Ugandans were employed in these enterprises. If you took an average of 2000 employees in each of these units, this would be 280,000 knocked out people out of work. Remember, this was a country estimated at slightly above 10 million persons. Since these “retrenched” represented the core functioning of the country – the promise of modernity – coordinating the other units, and auxiliary sectors, with the dismantling of these companies and corporations and cooperatives, you have an entire country successfully returned to the stone age.

A world of tears

In 2020, when the High Court judgment finally came, most of the Nyanza Textiles’ retrenched workers had died. Those still living were too old to fully and personally use their money – if it ever came. But how had they lived throughout these years especially that most of them had been retrenched in their late 40s and early 50s? Consider also that these people had families and extended kindred relations depending on them. Consider an average of five dependants each (280,000 x 5), these are 1.4m people. How did they manage to sustain their families?

The stories are painful: a friend of mine whose father worked in Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB) recalled how his father failed to find his bearing again. Retrenched at 47, he passed away three years later distraught and frustrated. With these times of mass retrenchment coinciding with HIV/AIDs pandemic on the continent, these distraught folks were wasted. No wonder, HIV/AIDS ravaged entire communities – sadly, as Prof. Peter Mugyenyi has told us, European and American pharmaceuticals, hungry for humongous profits, denied Africans life-saving medicines. In the labour units, I learned from a son of the retrenched, Andrew Lubega, who is 52 years old now, that there was sheer pandemonium and confusion. Almost all government agencies had housing estates for their labourers. In Kyambogo Estates, Nsambya Estates and Naguru Estates and several other places. All of a sudden, a father of five found himself without a job, and could not continue living in the labour unit which had been attached to the job. And without compensation.

The hustler sleeps

Old enough, analytical and more reflective, returning from Jinja to Kampala, I told my father about how his tastes, and his dreams had become mine, and how nowadays I was able to locate him in a troubled national/ continental context. I told him about how he and his contemporaries had so transformed themselves in comparison with their compatriots left in the countryside – and how his life had been transformed by the promise of a colonial modernity and the WB-IMF violence of the 1990s.  He was all ears, this stuff made so much sense to him. Like several early urbanites, this Junior II graduate cherished reading, and indeed, read with me every night. There would be no dinner before a certain number of pages had been completed.  However, once World Bank and IMF arrived, this rhythm died down. My old man had become somewhat angrier, and quieter. But he trudged on. As we drove on, I asked him about the lives of his co-workers in Nytil with whom he had kept in touch. He looked outside of the window, speechless. He then he said, sombrely, pensively, “ffena tugenda kufa!” (We are all going to die). He choked up. I guffawed to distract him.  But he remained pensive. I then asked him about how he had met my mother, and who his other lovers were. On this one, he lit up, and it was my turn to answer some questions of his – about almost the same topics.

Dear reader, this man, my father, passed away on the 4 October 2024. He was 80 years old – and the joke he often told was that he was as old as the Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, but did not want to live too long and become a burden to peoples’ lives. It is difficult to say with certainty what my old man died from. I have decided to chasten myself with the thought that “old age.” He too, would agree with me. But a short history of his health locates the beginning of his troubles in the COVID-19 pandemic. Not the flu, but the vaccine. Yes, I’m vaccinated myself.  Comrade Hassan Byekwaso was very athletically built and spent most of his last 15 years on his bike vending vegetables in a radius of 10km – every day, to the time of his death.  (Even in the month of Ramadhan, which he insisted on never missing despite clear-cut exemptions owing to his age).

I had never seen this man in hospital except for dental and hearing complications. But months after fully recovering from the COVID-19 flu, following intense publicity, the man went for the vaccine. But at 77 then, he instead became sicker than had been during the flu. His coughs became intense and chronic. There was no tuberculosis. More complications then emerged relating to his heart – it had become “musical” as one doctor put it. A couple of weeks before his passing, he suffered a stroke, which put him in a wheelchair for some days. He then suddenly passed in his bed. Indeed, at 80, many things are possible – and our Creator knows best. And as we say in the Islamic tradition, Inna Lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un. (Indeed, we belong to Allah, and indeed, to Him, we return).

Dear reader, I tell my father’s story partly to celebrate his life, but also to mourn him. (I’m actively hiding in writing about him to not feel the depth of the void – writing being one of his dreams for his children, which has lived on). Part of my intention is to remind ourselves about the frustrations and pains our parents, and our generation have had to contend with, and subsequent generations will have to contend with. My father did not stopped talking about never being compensated for this wrongful retrenchment.  And while my old man, his former colleagues, and other victims of the so-called “retrenchment” might be dead or aged, their killers (IMF and World Bank) are still here – sticking to the same old policies, quietly, technically killing dreams, and violently wrecking lives apart – for the benefit of western corporations.

This article is a longer version of two pieces first published in the Ugandan newspaper Observer on 9 October 2024.

 Yusuf Serunkuma is a columnist in the Ugandan newspapers, The Observer, and a scholar based at KU Leuven and Makerere University.  He is the author of The Snake Farmers a play, which is read as a set-book in Rwanda and Ugandan High schools.  Yusuf teaches decolonial studies/new colonialism and writes regularly for ROAPE, and the Pan-African Review in Rwanda.  His forthcoming, *Surrounded: Democracy, Free Markets and Other Entrapments of New Colonialism* is being published in December 2024 by Editor House Facility in Kampala.

For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers path-breaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive. Please consider subscribing or donating today.