INDPENDENCE DAY AND THE DUBAI EXPO

Tomorrow we commemorate 59 years of independence. This year’s celebration comes hot on the heels of an outcry about our underrepresentation, misrepresentation or representation at the Dubai 2020 Expo.

The long awaited Dubai Expo opened its doors to the world last week and for the next six months will be the one place to go to explore countries from around the world, what they are about and what they have to offer.

Uganda has a stall at the Expo and thanks to the magic of technology, Ugandans at home got near real time pictures and video on what we were up to. The criticism came fast and thick after pictures of a few tins of milk, boxes of tea leaves, handwoven baskets and pictures of gorillas came through.

"The critics were scathing in their condemnation --- a lot of it knee jerk reaction and the default mode of the chattering masses online....

The net reaction is that again we had embarrassed ourselves with a sub-standard display, we did not get value for money and of course the top heavy delegation came in for particular flack.

I had to look again.

As I said the critics were either being unfair, disingenuous or downright nasty. I couldn’t think of many other things other than the ones I saw on display that Uganda can be globally competitive in.

The now permanent secretary at the finance ministry, Dr Ramathan Goobi pointed out a while back (when he was s till a mere mortal) that the incoming lane on the Jinja-Kampala highway was lower than the outgoing lane, an indication that the loads coming in are much heavier than the loads going out. A useful proxy to indicate that we import more than we export.

According to the last Uganda Bureaus of Statistics (UBOS) figures in 2019 we imported $7.7b worth of goods while shipping out goods worth $4.4b.

Going by these stats alone it should come as no surprise that Uganda’s shelves at the Expo are a bit bare.

But we don’t have to travel all the way to Dubai for this truth to be evident. Our supermarket shelves are dominated by foreign imports. Granted, its less now than a few years ago but the bias is there.

So the Expo emphasizes a greater challenge, one that dogs us almost 60 years as an independent nation, that we produce little that is internationally competitive – our raw coffee beans, tea leave and fish are about it, low value commodities when we should have got around, a long time ago, to exporting these processed. We would have managed to have a foot in the door of those insanely competitive markets and by now be exporting meaningful quantities.

It can be argued that we have been up to our eyeballs in the business of digging ourselves out of the hole of the 1970s and 1980s, but that line can only go so far.

"The truth is to export we need to ramp up production to multiples of what we consume locally. So currently the only things we produce that could possibly sustain a local industry, let alone meet export demands are coffee, fish, tea, milk and grain...

To show how inadequate our production is, I learnt recently that we produce about 14,000 tons of tomatoes a year, all of which we consume. A cursory look online for plants to process tomato paste, I happened on one which could manage to process 2000 tons daily or would sort our national output in a week and be redundant for the remaining 51 weeks of the year. Ok even if we got a smaller plant that would process 100 tons daily it would have taken 20 weeks to sort out the nation’s harvest.

To have a tomato paste industry in Uganda we would have to increase production by multiples of its current number. And this goes for any other crop we produce.

Taking an industry from zero to exports has been done in our life time and the lessons are there to learn. We did it with sugar, milk and gold.

It takes the execution of a national strategy that includes increasing production, enabling market access, supporting research & development, availability of affordable financing and good management.

So the Expo has reminded us that despite our middle class speaking English and wheezing around in second hand cars, we really don’t amount to much...

One last point and which speaks to our inability to lift ourselves off the floor. The lineup of government officials who were in Dubai for the first week inspired little confidence in our chances of turning our current plight around.

While Uganda Investment Authority (UIA) was present we must know by now businessmen pay little heed to government officials in deciding to invest in one country or another. They prefer to talk to one of their own a fellow business person who has skin in the game.

If there were no serious business people to make the trip with the president at least Uganda Development Bank (UDB), Ugandan Development Corporation (UDC) would have pride of place ahead of politicians, bureaucrats and glad handers.