As means of follow up from our article on the Ugandan wedding we bring you a transcript of a meeting between His Excellency Mr Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, President of Uganda and the Commonwealth Partnership for Technology Management in London. The CPTM  works primarily with emerging Commonwealth Countries  to enhanse national capabilities for the creation and participation in global wealth. At the begining of March President Museveni visited the CPTM hub in London to discuss a way forward for Uganda. Below is the introduction followed by a transcript of the meeting.

On behalf of the Smart Partnership Movement & CPTM Fellows, Chairman of the Joint Executive Group- Tan Sri Datuk Dr Omar Abdul Rahman, I would like to welcome Your Excellency and the Ugandan team to the CPTM Smart Partners' Hub.

We , Smart Partners, Fellows, JEG Members and Special Guests are gathered here today to launch the Global 2009 -Munyonyo Dialogue with Your Excellency as Host Patron & Adviser. The overall objective of the Smart Partnership Movement's Munyonyo Dialogue is to identify and promote Smart Partnership enablers for socio-economic transformation within the framework of regional integration and under the threat of the continuing Global financial crisis. We will be doing this through a first annual Think Tanking approach applied to the four inter-connected themes: i)Articulating and realising National Visions; through ii) Improved Market Access, Quality Infrastructure and EPAs; and through iii) Integration of Innovation in public strategy and business; and made more effective through iv) Regional Integration of effort; and in spite of v)The continuing and perhaps worsening Global Financial Crisis. Your Excellency's colleagues, the Council of Patrons & Advisers for Global 2009, together with Smart Partners' links from representing politicians, civil servants, business, labour, social issues, art/culture and media from the Commonwealth & beyond, will look forward to joining Your Excellency and Ugandan Smart Partners in Munyonyo for the second time at the end of July this year.

Today is also a special Commonwealth Day which celebrates 60 years of existence. To quote a leading UK politician: "The Commonwealth is a rich patchwork: each member is made from its own distinct material yet they are woven together by the threads of democracy, diversity, tolerance, understanding and collaboration. It is representative of nations and peoples of rich tradition, heritage and culture and it is able to bind them together with the shared values and aspirations that endure in us all in a remarkable way. It includes and gives democratic voice to 53 countries, large and small, of all the major faiths spanning five continents and three oceans". Smart Partners from the Caribbean, Southern, East and West Africa; West Asia/ Mediterranean; and Asia/ Pacific Webs undertake, together with CPTM, to make the Global 2009 Munyonyo Dialogue a most successful one as a contribution to the Commonwealth Anniversary.

On behalf of the Smart Partnership Movement, Dr Mihaela Y Smith KMN PJN Smart Partners' Hub, London Joint Dialogue Convener- Smart Partnership Movement

His Excellency

Regarding the financial crisis:

I studied economics 40 years ago. I'm not very well informed but when this started I set up a group to study this issue. With inputs from other people we can come out with a composite viewpoint.

Firstly I would like to put forward an idea on whether this problem is merely about fund management or whether there are more structural problems in the global economy today? I would like this issue to be looked into.

We know there were funds which were lent to people who could not pay. Had somebody scrutinised the borrowers carefully they would have known that these borrowers could not pay and therefore they would not have given those loans. This is what was explained to me in a simplistic way.

By the time somebody had began to invest in the marginal borrowers what had happened to the more viable borrowers? If I have a set of two borrowers there is a viable borrower, the one who can borrow and pay back, and then there is this other marginal one, the one that shouldn't have been lent money but was lent because of inefficient due diligence. The question then would have been, was there a better borrower in the system that was overlooked or did the money go to the bad borrower because there were no better borrowers in the economy? We need to answer that.

Which better borrowers were there in the system that were overlooked and did reckless leaders go for bad borrowers, or was it insufficiency of good borrowers? If it was the insufficiency of good borrowers what was the problem? It implies a much more structural problem then simply saying this manager made a bad decision. So it may not be just the manager but the whole system. This was one question I posed to the group. The group had been talking about toxic debt and so on. I stopped them and said that if I enter a room and I look around for a place to sit and there are not enough good chairs I will choose a rickety one. If after I choose this rickety chair, it then collapses then you can not simply blame me that I selected a bad chair. It was because there were not enough chairs in the room.

Our Munyonyo Themes and the Transformation Challenge which Transcends them

Behind the themes we have for Munyonyo: Market Access, National Visions, Innovation, Regional Integration and so on there is a new challenge to humanity; this is the challenge of managing Global, or Universal, socio-economic transformation. Until now we have had partial socio-economic transformation. If you look at Europe in the fourteen hundreds for instance, it was a three class society, you had the aristocrats, the artisans and the peasants. If you come to the UK today you don't find that structure. You have a middle or working class. The European society has been transformed over the past 500 years from a pre-industrial society to an industrial society. For a number of centuries this transformation was confined to Western Europe, North America and Japan but in the last 20 or 30 years this transformation has spread to India and China plus some other places and it is now progressing in Africa. So once the entire human race is transformed what further challenges will be imposed?

There is more demand on natural resources. If you remember this preceded this crisis; there was more demand for cement because the millions in China who used to stay in straw huts are now living in high rise buildings. We had more demand for concrete, for steel and fuel, because there was more demand prices went up. Then all of a sudden there was this crash. Some years ago we were going to build steel plants in Uganda but we were told not to because of a global glut. A few years ago there was a global shortage of steel and the price went up. Now we find the market has collapsed. So what is the interrelation between global socio-economic transformations with these cyclic upheavals? In any case, cycles or no cycles, how do we plan to manage a globally transformed society? How will we manage when India, China, Africa, Latin America are modern?

Making Transformation Durable: Uganda, Africa and the Global Crisis

How can we all live in affluence in a sustainable way?

In the past the question focussed on the minority of people from Western Europe, America and Japan. They called this the global economy although it was only a minority of countries and people. What we are heading towards now is the 'real' global economy.

We are all now arriving on the dining table of affluence. Now in the case of Uganda this global crisis has not gone deep yet and this tends to confound my point that there are some structural problems and not a simple fund management problem. In the case of Uganda the inflows of foreign exchange were reduced, the money sent from Ugandans living abroad to their families through remittance also reduced and because of tax imports tax collection has reduced. However, despite this, regional trade within Africa is booming. That is why our economy will continue to grow at approximately 6-7% despite the crisis. Normally it would have been at 9% or higher and this even though there are some problems with energy and so on.

Africa is still growing despite the crisis. It is because there are 900 million or so Africans that have been under consuming while in the Western Europe there has been over consumption. These under consumers in Africa are slowly becoming greater consumers and these are the ones who are really pushing our economy in spite of the global turmoil. Locally we are doing well but where we are not doing so well is where we are linked to the over consumers who have run into some difficulties.

How will we manage because we are not just a few hundred million aspiring to modern life but the entire global population? Innovation will play a part but it has its limits. There must also be the question of the ultimate limit of resources available for supporting a certain life style. What life style can be afforded by humanity?

How our Munyonyo Dialogue and our Experience-Sharing can Help us to Answer these Questions

I think the meeting in Munyonyo will be very useful. I have a question in mind, is there a need for rationalisation because you find also that there is a lot of wastage in the way resources are used? What is the sustainable formula for supporting global affluence when the whole human society wants a decent life? Those that are talking about protectionism are wasting their time. Market access is part of the stimulus for greater production. Protectionism means fragmenting the market and I don't think that will go far because if you remember, India had a protectionist structure until about fifteen years ago. Although their economy was stagnant they had 1.1 billion people. If 1.1 billion people could not run a good economy I don't know who can. China was also protectionist in the past, in the time of Mao, but everyone agrees that when this changed (under Deng Xiao Ping) China really expanded. So protectionism is just wasting time. The more buyers there are, for the things we produce, the better. The question is how we do it on a global scale and in a balanced way.

My Hopes for Munyonyo; Our Ideas on the Table; My Belief in Smart Partnership

So all this is very interesting which is why I am looking forward to Munyonyo and even the prior meetings where we shall prepare and together we shall bring something good together for the human race. Finally I want to add that I support very strongly CPTM and when I was supporting it and lobbying out commonwealth partners to do so: UK, Australia, Canada, India and others like South Africa were not convinced. They asked why support CPTM? I said I am supporting CPTM because according to my involvement in African politics and international affairs over 45 years I have not come across any other think tank which thinks beyond its own special interest. What you have normally are interest group think tanks and they only think within their own think tank plans: how to push their selfish interest and promote their self interests. CPTM is the only, so to speak, 'inter-interest' think tank I have come across which seeks win-win solutions transcending all individual interest groups.

To find out more about Smart Partnerships and the CPTM visit their website.