Two weeks ago South African born billionaire Elon Musk’s wealth jumped $36b after car renting company, Hertz announced it would order 100,000 cars from Musk’s company, Tesla.
The gain in his wealth was as a result of the market reacting to the news and sending Tesla shares past $1,000 each. In the process Musk’s interest in the company top $300b.
These are just figures until you think that in
"Mr Musk’s gain last week is more than the total GDP of Uganda. And if that is not enough to make you seat up and take note, the World Food Program (WFP) boss, David Beasley said a sixth of Musk’s new gains would be able to save 42 million people around the world battling hunger...
Beyond trying to wrap our minds around these mind boggling numbers should be the question how can we have our own Elon Musk’s in Uganda.
Why should we care about having comparable wealthy men and women? Because such people create jobs, foster innovation and can very well change the way our country is run, for the better.
Musk is first an innovator in how to mass produce electric cars, that will go some way in saving the planet with the use of clean energy – the subject the recent climate change conference, COP 26 grappled with. We need people who can take our innovations, for which they are many, scale up their production, distribution and create wide acceptance.
How did the US create Musk --- or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or Mark Zuckerberg and at least another 400 billionaires?
"Infrastructure is key to the growth of these fortunes, but even more critical is the development of human resource and then creating the environment for them to able to actualize their inherent value...
Musk left the constrictions of apartheid South Africa as a boy to study in Canada and the US. While there he inserted himself into the technology ecosystem. PayPal, Tesla and Space X are the result.
This environment in which Musk found himself had, and has, thousands if not hundreds of thousands of innovators and scientists working in collaboration to solve the world’s challenges. But before they were experts they went through an education, especially at university, where they were encouraged to explore and invent. Even better, their innovations were not for the sake but were snapped up the private sector, people Musk, who scaled up and commercialized them.
It is a model we can copy, never mind on a smaller scale. It starts with recognizing that human resource of all the factors of production -- capital and land are the others, is where emphasis should be placed. The other two are really enablers of our human resource.
This is particularly important since for starters, we have a huge agricultural endowment that we are not taking full advantage of, or squandering all together for lack of human capital to exploit it.
The argument can be made of course, that there is a lot of research going begging in all our major institutions, and if only we could reach for the files and dust them off, it could make a world of difference.
A decade or so ago Nile Breweries wanted to brew a beer from local inputs. They found the solution in a breed of sorghum, Epurpur, which was derived from our natural environment and enhanced in our labs years before. It took a business to have a need and to look around.
It means
our universities need to learn how to market themselves and their innovations deliberately, and not rely on luck to find them...Interestingly our very same universities teach marketing.
In the US, Silicon Valley, where many of the innovations that run our increasingly connected world come from, has learnt not only how to market their new findings but gone a step further and discovered funders for these same projects.
While our financial system is still very shallow, dealing only with going concerns and not start ups, government would need to come in and hand hold these budding enterprises.
"Inevitably government will not do a good job of it, but it will at least open a new market that the private sector can then get into....
It has happened before. Government kicked off the fish export business when they set up a fish factory at Masese in Jinja, which flopped but was the foundation on which our current fish export industry is built.
Or even better, cleverer and cheaper, government can seek out these kind of financiers and work with them to create a whole new layer in the financial industry, government helping with some seed capital and enabling regulatory environment.
But whatever we do it will always come back to the people, the people who know how to do this and have some experience in doing it. Preferably if they were Ugandans, experienced in these particular sectors or building such value chains.
The legacy of post-independence Uganda is the number of Ugandans who have been flung around the world like the biblical Jews.
How about we start with an inventory of all Ugandans abroad, especially our specialists, we PhDs in everything from artificial intelligence to agriculture to waste management.
Former Nigerian president Olusegun Obassanjo took it a step further. He contacted all these experts and invited them back to Nigeria for a few days to give a paper on their fields and how Nigeria can employ their expertise or exploit the field. With this information a strategy was drawn up and things are happening.
Musk, by the way is worth more than $300b.
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