Mutebile and Museveni

The verbal skirmish between the governor of the central bank on the one hand and the presidential spokesman and the gentleman from the NRM communication bureau on the other has caused quite a stir in the media and in private conversations across the country.

The facts are familiar, earlier this year the government made a decision to purchase fighter jets, to that end it drew 400 million dollars from the foreign reserves to pay for this purchase. It then sought retrospective authorization from parliament, dominated by the ruling party which it was granted as part of a supplementary budget. That there was no real debate in parliament on the necessity or the timing of this purchase or the fact that the supplementary budget was far in excess of what is allowed by the constitution seems to have been relegated to the sidelines as unnecessary or unduly pedantic.

How are decisions made in this country? My understanding would be that the Uganda Peoples Defense Forces through the Ministry Of  Defense would make a case for the purchase of these jets, the strategic imperative if you will. This imperative would be interrogated and if the reasons put forward were sound a decision to fund the purchase would be made. Of course this decision would have to be considered alongside other pressing concerns like health care or education.  Does such a process exist?

Every thing I have read about these jets leads me to believe that they are first rate in terms of their technical performance but at the back of my mind I am worried. Why? Because many of the purchases we have made have been great technically, it is just that what we pay for and what we get tend to be worlds apart and no commission of inquiry has been able to reveal why this is so.

Furthermore, there are other issues that come to mind will the amount of money we have paid include consumables like bombs, bullets and missiles? Does it include a technical support package in terms of training and spare parts? If it does not then we are in for more surprises and not the pleasant kind.

In reading about all this I came across an interesting term ‘aircraft reimbursement rates’ a very big word for the cost of maintaining a fighter jet in the air. Comparable fighter bombers such as the Tornado or the F-15 can cost as much as 30,000 dollars an hour in fuel costs to maintain in the air. That does not include the costs of consumables bombs and missiles which can cost as much as 100,000 dollars for a single item.

 Lets think about this in perspective, with anywhere between one third and one half of our population living on  less than a dollar a day, with a per capita income of  600 dollars annually it begs the question is our economy geared towards supporting a war in which this equipment is used? The short answer is no.

Maybe just maybe this is what has Mutebile all worked up, the fear that these planes are nothing more than a glorified white elephant, a securocrats fantasy and rational economist’s nightmare.