Renowned financial expert, Dr. Ezra Suruma has made a thorough and expert explanation on the controversial and hot debate on whether to or not to merge the supreme coffee regulating body of Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) with the mother Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries (MAAIF) to allegedly decrease on costs of running the authority as an autonomous body.
Watering down proponents’ argument, Dr. Suruma imagines a situation where Mulago Hospital is merged with the Ministry of Health, or Makerere University with the Ministry of Education and Sports, all in the name of cutting costs, and suggests that the logical thing to do for improvement of poor service delivery in many government departments is improvement and not creation of additional work.
According to Dr. Suruma, throwing away institutions like paper towels is not understandable and is truly a conundrum.
Giving the genesis of UCDA and its operation, Suruma says that on proposition of UCDA in 1990, a revenue source for it was provided meaning that it would not need money from the government. The recommendation was that a ‘cess’ – a small service charge of 1 percent on coffee exports to cater for UCDA’s administrative costs – be set up.
Problems may have arisen when cess rose to 2 per cent which led to an increase in money to UCDA, and thus attracting government attention. This came at a time when coffee production was shooting up and so pushing up the cess.
MAAIF decided to take the cess and UCDA became another agency needing money from the government. UCDA’s fatal mistake was raising the cess instead of lowering it now that exports were increasing. Now the government has taken over the revenues and decided to make UCDA another department of MAAIF.
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Explaining further, Dr. Suruma says that in 1987, foreign supporters advised us to dissolve or sell government banks, saying they were unprofitable or bankrupt.
“I fought hard to restore Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB) profitability to its levels as from 1965 when it was established. When we made it profitable again, the neo-colonialists said it would now get a better price, and it now dawned on me that their reason for dissolution of our banks was misleading”, Suruma explains.
Similarly, with UCDA, the problem is not high costs because with the huge exports, even a cess of 0.25% of exports would cover its requirements for supervision of export quality, promotion of research, and increased production.
To back his argument of maintaining UCDA’s independence from MAAIF, he said, “We visited countries including Costa Rica, Columbia and Madagascar to benchmark on coffee handling best practices, and found that they all had autonomous coffee export institutions”.
Further on, Dr. Suruma explains how those engaged in coffee export suffer looking everywhere for absentee bureaucrats often scattered in a department in MAAIF.
“Look at how people suffered trying to get photo sanitary certificates from MAAIF”. Ideally, he suggests, the matter could be put to a referendum for the population to decide.