Claiming to have a clearer vision, President Yoweri Museveni has hinted his next government could take up a more active role in development especially in critical areas where the private sector has not performed as expected.

Once hailed by western powers as a true capitalist for his adoption of nearly unfettered liberalism,

the president now says the government should engage in vital areas such as power generation, transportation, and mineral exploration.

The president made the remarks while officiating at the launch last Friday of Uganda's Economic Reforms. Insider Accounts, a book that chronicles and celebrates NRM's historic economic reforms that started in early 1990s.

While the president acknowledged his government is not about to embark on policy reversals, the statement is a fundamental shift from the free market liberal principles in which the private sector runs business and government only intervenes through regulation.

While this liberal stance has brought Uganda enormous credit from the international community and prosperity by spurring rapid economic growth, it has been criticised for surrendering the country to the vagaries of profiteering and for failing to protect the country's strategic economic interests.

Written by 21 economists, most of whom were the very architects of the celebrated economic reforms, the book highlights the liberalisation of trade in goods and services and the elimination of parastatals as one of the major factors that spurred Uganda onto a new ladder of rapid economic growth.

However, president Museveni while perhaps acknowledging the excesses of liberalisation, declared: "There were some oversights. You take ten years haggling over building a dam," president Museveni said in apparent reference to the delayed completion of the Bujagali hydro power station whose private concessionaires had failed to secure funding from the World Bank and other major financiers over environmental and design concerns.

"Now I am very clear in my head," Museveni added: "You could have indicative parastatals, where government moves in and builds a factory."

The president hailed the Chinese model of a mixed economy in which the government actively participates in economic activity such as running banks, building and managing transport systems.

Museveni noted that private investors go where they see the most profits, and neglects the sectors that are not profitable but are crucial for the country's economic development.

He attributed the phenomenal growth in telecommunications, education, housing sectors to high profit margins enjoyed by investors.

In similar fashion, he castigated the absence of profit for the lack of investors in crucial areas such as phosphate and iron ore exploration in Tororo and Muko in Kabale respectively.

The government seems to have embarked on implementing the president's vision, when it established the Uganda Energy Fund that has already lent US$ 70 million to the Aga Khan-owned IPS constructors of Bujagali.

"We are trying to modernise agriculture, but how do you modernise it without fertilisers?" Museveni lamented.

He added: "Now we have US $350m in the energy fund and we are going to build Karuma ourselves."

Strategic Stimuli

By building roads, power stations and fertiliser factories, the president argues, that the government will have created a strategic stimuli that will encourage more investments in those and other areas to spur growth.

He lamented that had he got that vision during the years of reform, Uganda's GDP would have multiplied ten fold than it is today.

Because of what appears to be his unshakable resolve about an active government role over the next few years, Museveni suggests the government will move to explore iron ore and build factories to add value to agricultural produce.

"Let's get moving on steel. We must quickly promote factories to process value addition on fruits, bacon and food."

The president's idea also seems to have underlined the government's move to support savings and credit organisations as a way of channeling badly needed credit to farmers, alongside the private credit lines whose high lending rates have limited the impact of commercial banks in poverty alleviation.

While it might sound revolutionary now, especially when such policy hints come from a revolutionary leader, the advocacy to allow for a more active participation of the government, as opposed to the hands off approach that was championed by the World Bank and the IMF, have been in the international policy fora for some time.

Leading economists such as Joseph Stiglitz have advocated for careful rethinking of liberalisation especially in areas such as foreign exchange policy, and for more policy space in which they argue that governments need to take charge of a country's affairs instead of leaving it in the hands of private sector.