By JOACHIM BUWEMBO

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Seeing African athletes doing well in the Paris 2024 Olympics and other Olympiads before, one wonders what they do right that Africans in other fields don’t. Why do determined individuals in sports who take on the world, win, and some like Joshua Cheptegei consistently, but African economists with Phds for example keep failing their countries miserably?

It isn’t like the athletes are favoured. You have probably seen some interviewers concentrating on a bronze winner from another continent and ignoring the African gold medalist. African athletes, especially those based at home, face many odds against them, unlike the economists who usually study on lucrative scholarships after their first degree.

And yes, usually these economists were good in school, mostly getting first class first degrees, so their consistent failure in central banks and treasury departments is not about them. It has to be something else, that makes brilliant people render shabby performance. After all, they don’t appoint themselves to the jobs and would be dropped if their appointing authority was dissatisfied with their performance. Otherwise why do some government contracting loans they are not ready to use but pay commitment fees and interest?

Why do countries like the US and China, that pursue directly opposite ideologies, register success at collective and individual level, while individual Africans only excel in sports, business and professions practised outside government while their countries register unflattering performance? Why do African athletes bring gold home while the economists bring debt and botched up projects?

In fairness, science-based government initiatives have registered success. In Uganda, for instance, medical researchers turn in stunning successes.

Agricultural scientists keep improving crop varieties for higher yields, disease and drought resistance and faster growth. Also, Uganda’s automotive engineers have scored stunning successes with the first vehicles they put on our (not-so-good) roads for commercial purposes in 2019 already clocking over 100,000 kilometres without registering the slightest technical hitch.

Read: BUWEMBO: Power might belong to the Ugandan people, after all

What beats Africa’s economic managers? Athletes in training know they have to hit the qualifying mark if they are to be entered into the race.

If they don’t make the mark, they can’t grumble for not being allowed to compete. When will African economists figure out ways of financing projects instead of digging new debt holes to fail to fill older holes they dug to finance failed projects? Are they not allowed to think or is it a case of engaging the right people to do the wrong job?

Two prominent Ugandan commentators recently offered two different explanations for what goes wrong with African economies. The first blames the education which he calls “miseducation”, arguing that our mindset was poisoned by colonialists a century ago and no detoxing has been done even after independence.

He argues that from the day a child goes to school, s/he is trained to sit, spending all day sitting most days, and after school looks for a sitting job.

Hence, according to him, the common stating of one’s address as “he sits” or “I sit” in that office, building or street! Of course you don’t learn or produce much by sitting.

The second blames the external financial institutions. He says the big men and women in African central banks and treasury departments just carry out orders of external lenders. He even quotes several meetings he attended where government economists defied the president, not out of reason but stubbornly, because they are defending the position of the foreign lenders. He is supported by a national legislator who also quotes several meetings he attended where the president desperately pleaded with ‘his’ economists to spare the indigenous financial institutions.

Two prominent personalities, each quoting several different cases where the central bankers and treasury officials dishonour the president’s pleas, even as he is the chief manager of the national economy who delegates his Finance minister, means that any African head of state suffers many such agonising meetings.

There is circumstantial evidence to bear out the latter two commentators, the recent report “How Africa’s ticket to ‘prosperity’ fueled a debt bomb” in The EastAfrican being a good example. At times the actions of Africa’s economists cited in the report border on comedy, like when they blame the credit rating agencies of bias, without explaining why they further indulge in the borrowing binge.

If our athletes had the same mindset as our economists, there is no chance that they would even win any wooden or even charcoal medals.

Buwembo is a Kampala-based journalist. E-mail:[email protected]