Had this not been so, more than half the world today would have remained dependent and unfree.

As in most countries classified as “unfree” by human-rightsorganizations, enforcement of the law can be arbitrary.

According to the US-based Heritage Foundation’s widelycited Index of Economic Freedom, China and India are relegated tothe group described as “mostly unfree.”

The vocabulary preferred by economists, consisting of “access to education”, buttressed by unfree and/or “free” education, or the use of “equity” instead of equality, recalls the words of John Maynard Keynes about the powerful influence that economists have even when they are wrong, as well as those of Paul Samuelson about the irrelevance of constitutional guarantees when these conflict with the recipes in economics textbooks.

If a tactic like this had been used in a national election in any country in the world, if a Government had announced that the election would be held on a certain day and then told voters who showed up on the appointed day that the election had actually been held at midnight the night before, the world would rightly regard that election as unfree and unfair.

The President of the Uganda Private Sector Foundation stated that: “Public institutions such as UIA, the Uganda Revenue Authority and the Uganda Electricity Board have improved their services to the private sector and it is now up to the private sector to take advantage of this opportunity.” The improvement is also recorded in the 2004 Index of Economic Freedom, where Uganda ranks 48, within the category “mostly free”, up from a position of 81 (2001), within the category “mostly unfree”.