As the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government commemorates 20 years of Universal Primary Education (UPE), President Museveni has likened the success of the programme to the Biblical mustard seed.
He quotes the book of Luke 13:19 which says: “It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and put in his garden; and it grew and became a large tree, and the birds of the air nested in its branches.”
The president said the principle in the referenced verse underscores the fact that the ministry of education had to priotize – carefully use what it got from the treasury and avoid spreading itself rather too thin.
Museveni said this in a preface he wrote for the report Universal Primary Education: Transforming Uganda, which launches on January 26, 2019 in Tororo. The 221-page report chronicles the successes and challenges of implementing UPE since 1997.
The same report contains the total enrolment in all primary schools; the percentage of enrolment of male and female pupils in primary schools (1997-2017), the incremental government expenditure on education in Uganda (1997-2017), the government expenditure on teachers’ salaries (1997-2017), the incremental number of classrooms since 1997 to 2017 and the average number of pupils per classroom in government-aided primary schools, among others.
The report further discloses that UPE gave a chance to many parents who had lost hope of ever educating their children. Many of the products have turned out to be useful professionals such as teachers, soldiers, doctors, engineers and lawyers, among others.
Admitting that NRM was not the first government to come up with UPE, the president attributed the failure of past governments and success of this programme to three reasons. Museveni said his government is not selfish and embodies the virtue of listening to people’s problems.
“As an imperative, the NRM deliberately takes time to listen to what ails the wananchi. We realized that the ordinary Ugandan was facing a multitude of challenges- a social services system that was on life support,” he said.
The president explained further that NRM was able to succeed in UPE because it mastered the skill of working within its resource constraints.
“In spite of the unrelenting temptation to revive everything at a go, we made a strategic choice of tackling the fundamentals first…”
His third reason is that NRM succeeded because, “we are a learning organization – we acknowledge our mistakes; take time to diagnose the cause of mistakes and forge a better way forward.”
“Any organization that does not learn from its mistakes will simply self-destruct; it is just a matter of time,” he added. UPE was implemented in 1997 amidst torrents of skepticism from donors and some experts from the education sectors.
Many experts spelt doom for the project, labelling it as a non-starter because of the apparent unpreparedness and thin financial and human resources. In the subsequent issues of The Observer, the newspaper will make a follow-up with surgical analysis of the report, accompanied by real-life stories of the products of UPE.