NOW WE ARE GOING INTO CAR MANUFACTURE? #SMH

Last week the Kiira Motors Company (KMC) unveiled their 25 year old business plan.

The company which started as some engineering undergraduates tinkering around resulted in the development of the Kiira EV prototype, a car that runs on electric power in 2011. According to the business the planned car assembly plant will employ up to 10,000 people, is projected to be profitable by 2023 and at full capacity in 2039 will be rolling out 60,000 units.

The project will be developed by Makerere University and the government.

You will forgive me if I do not share the same enthusiasm for the project as its promoters.

When the Kiira EV was launched I struggled to put the development in its place in the wider context of Uganda. It was a great achievement for the students and their supervisors without a doubt. I wondered whether maybe they could license the process to someone else. Then disturbing noises started about how we are going to commercialise the concept and even build buses.

Disturbing because whereas the car may have passed muster technically, it did not mean the market will embrace it. It was hard to even get a price of how much a Kiira EV would cost on the road.

So when last week the promoters revealed that KMC’s cars would go at $20,000 (sh66m) I had to pinch myself.  I would have dismissed it as a bad dream were it not for the fanfare that surrounded the business plan’s launch.

Let us start from first principles.

Despite the congestion there are less than a million cars on Ugandan roads today. Easily nine in ten of these are second hand cars bought for less than $10,000. Most if all of them bought cash down.

For years the dealers of brand new cars have tried to bend government’s ear towards making new cars easy to buy. They suggested more taxes on second hand cars, relax conditions on asset financing, to name a few. Government made some concessions here and there but nothing to get the new car industry flying.

These concessions pale in comparison with what KMC will demand to be a viable enterprise. Already it was reported that the land and infrastructure required will cost $36m (sh120b).

Concessions are necessary to make the car affordable, a $20,000 car in Uganda would be dead on arrival, setting 2023 as a breakeven date would have to be taken with a tablespoon of salt.

And if you can’t sell the car locally do we believe we can compete abroad?

"Secondly, as a country we have neither the comparative advantage --  that we can make cars better than any other product, nor the competitive advantage --  that we can make cars better than other people, which is a red flag for the enterprise. Both conditions are not insurmountable but at great cost and without guarantee of success...

Essentially, we will have to deny much needed funds to social services and infrastructure development to indulge in this adventure and after we have poured in millions of dollars, only to find that after all, we cannot make a commercial success of it. Ask the Kenyans.

And finally and connected to the last point is, is the push into car assembly the best use of our hard earned cash? Wouldn’t we be better building more roads or dams, whose outcomes would have a more far reaching effect on the economy?

One can argue that the car assembly industry would be a technological leap for us and would throw off many more industries that would have wider applications like electronics, metallurgy and upholstery. But advances in technology and supply chain management suggest that to make the industry viable the plant will require fewer than the 10,000 workers suggested and most components will be sourced abroad.

Indian industrial conglomerate, Tata in 2008 started producing the Nano car, a small energy efficient, inexpensive car with a $2,500 price tag. They thought the 30 million middle class would lap it up. They are still waiting. Initial indicators were that the car was too expensive, being more costly than a motorcycle so they stayed away.

"I would love to be wrong on this but whichever way you look at it this project has no wheels, is a whacky distraction from more serious priorities and can only be justified as a vanity project – until it doesn’t work...

OF HOES AND THE CHATTERING MASSES

A few weeks ago President Yoweri Museveni set off the chattering masses with his announcement that he was going to see that government distributes 18 million hoes to villages across the country.

The response from the urban elite was unbridled derision, we the chattering masses were rolling in the aisles our sides threatening to crack with the absurdity of the campaign pledge.

Aren’t we supposed to be modernising agriculture? Shouldn’t we be distributing tractors? Credit to the chattering masses they dusted up their primary arithmetic skills and did a quick calculation.

That if a hoe is sh25,000 (that should have warned us to how out of touch the calculator was, a hoe goes for sh7,000 in Arua.  But never mind him) government would spend sh450b. The calculator then divided this by sh120m – his proposed cost of a tractor,  and came up with 3750 tractors he then divided this by 110 districts (actually there are 112) and came up with about 34 tractors per district.

Even I was amazed at the possibility.

But then when one thought of it, one wondered whether a lack of tractors more than hoes was the key issue in the agricultural sector?

For the chattering masses modernisation of agriculture is synonymous with mechanisation, which is not entirely wrong.

"A cursory look around Uganda’s agricultural sector shows that yes hoes are still very much in use, but also that they are in short supply...

Ever since the Chillington tool company based in JInja folded up its plant and left the country in the early part of the last decade we have not been making hoes locally. They folded because they couldn’t compete with the cheaper imports.

In 2011 then finance minister Maria Kiwanuka scrapped the 10 percent import duty on hoes as a way to lower their costs and eventually raise productivity. That intervention was missed by the chattering masses but signals a recognition that there are issues with our farmers getting this much needed implement.

The majority of farmers – 96 percent of the 3.95 million farming households, in Uganda are small holders with farms of less than three acres according to official statistics. A tractor is not their immediate need. 

Interestingly of all the farming households 3.4 million of them have hoes according to a 2011 statistical abstract from the agriculture ministry. So one wonders about the half a million households without a hoe, what do they use to cultivate their crops? And is one hoe per household enough?

The numbers also show that only about 30,000 households employ tractors.

But to see mechanisation as the only evidence of modernised agriculture is to keep a narrow view of the issue. Essentially mechanisation suggests increased productivity, defined as out per unit input be it land, labour or capital, but increased productivity can be managed in our context without mechanisation as we the chattering masses think.

In the areas around Mubende the Neumann foundation is working with coffee farmers to improve the productivity of their holdings. According to the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) the average yield of a coffee farm in Uganda is half a ton a hectare, but the farmers in the project double even triple, this out put on their own, with not a tractor in sight.

The key to their improved yields is the extension services made available to them by the Neumann Group, which means they benefit from information about better coffee farming and handling practices, setting up and running farm organisations, improved bargaining power and access to inputs on credit.

To make the argument that giving farmers hoes is backward thinking is fallacious.

"As the numbers show hoes are urgently needed. However beyond hoes it is clear that our farmers are getting little to no guidance, and therefore unable to improve productivity and therefore remaining in poverty...

The same Agriculture ministry figures showed that of the nearly four million farming households 0.68 million or about a sixth of all farmers benefit from extension services.

In an ideal world we should be clamouring for tractors instead of hoes, but in the current circumstances that will be like me pining for a private jet to go to work when I need a car or better public transport.

In my mind the joke is really on us the chattering masses.