President Yoweri Museveni during this week’s state of the
nation address exhorted Ugandans to buy local over imported products.
For starters he pledged that uniforms for the security forces
and health workers will be sourced locally, barring any quality issues.
The call could not have come too soon, in fact it should
have been a mantra for a country looking to ensure that the economic growth of
the last three decades is spread more equitably.
This directive it is expected will have the knock on effect
of increasing demand on our local textile industries, forcing them to invest
more and hire more labour.
The industries will develop capacity. Then the next
directive should be for a public service uniform to be supplied by our local
textile industry. Imagine if we had all our 300,000 public servants dressed in
kaunda suits or kanzus to work, how many jobs that would create.
By the time our local industries are supplying the army,
nurses and public servants they will have proven their capacity and their
ability to scale up that capacity to then make clothing for the general public.
"Some preferential treatment can then be given to locally produced textiles over imported ones – banning second hand clothing for one, preferential tarrifs are another....
We might have to get drastic.
There is a reason why the Indians wear the khadi – a long
sleeved collarless shirt and pants and saris and the Chinese have their Chinese
collar suits. The long and short of it is that in an effort to boost their
respective local textile industry, a simple uniform was designed that would not
over tax the nascient textile industries of that country. People were
encouraged or compelled to wear the uniform in order to create the demand for
local industry.
I can just hear the human rights activists jumping up and
down at this proposition.
In order to spark transformation sacrifices have to be made
--- in this case we might be forced to be a colourless, dour society, dressed in
earthy colours, as our textile industry develops the capacity to provide the
variety we are accustomed to.
Interestingly Chinese collar suits, the Indian Khadi and
Sari are considered fashionable around the world.
And that’s only in clothing.
In the Kenya in the 1980s the government started providing
milk free to all primary school going kids as a way to increase the protein in
their diets, spurring a dairy industry that is second to none in the region.
Our eastern neighbours produce at least 5 billion liters of milk a year and are
exporters of UHT milk, milk powder, butter and ice cream. And we haven’t even
started to talking about beef production.
We produce less than half the Kenyan output at about two
billion liters a year.
"The challenge of course is how to do this in an orderly fashion, which will not benefit just a few Ugandans but will benefit everybody up and down the value chains in whatever sectors we seek to promote...
Agriculture is the obvious starting point as at least seven
in every ten Ugandans derive their livelihood from the sector.
The knee jerk reaction when it was announced a ban on second
hand clothes was announced or when the president directed that the army’s
uniforms be done locally is that we don’t have capacity to meet our needs and
that we would be depriving hundreds of traders of a livelihood.
The answer to that is in the question, how do you develop
capacity if you have no demand? And secondly, won’t the hawkers of second hand
clothes find a place in selling locally made clothes?
But as they say every one want to go to heaven but no one
wants to die.
We yap a lot about building a self-sustaining economy
without wanting to pay the price. When we say our industrialisation is not
taking off we need to know it’s unrealistic to develop industry without
springing off robust local demand.
