This week weight lifter Julius Ssekitoleko was released by police on bond. Last week he was deported from Japan where he had tried to stay on as an illegal immigrant. Sskeitoleko who has struggled to find employment because of the shut down of Kampala’s night life – he is a bouncer, listed this and the fact that his partner is pregnant, as reason for his ill fated move.
It is difficult not to sympathise and most people do.
Recently it was reported that hundreds of young people are being shipped out monthly to the middle east, to find work as menial workers. Again apart from the allure of earning in dollars, these often unskilled workers are struggling to make ends meet here.
It is safe to say that anybody whol leaves this country to work abroad, even the well paid ones, would rather be working at home, close to their friends and family.
Working abroad is not all its cracked out to be, they soon discover that with the high cost of living their incomes are not as juicy as they first seemed.
"While these émigré workers – illegal or otherwise, are sending more than a billion dollars back home annually, that is a fraction of their usefullness to this economy if they were gainfully employed here than abroad....
We are a wasteful country on many levels and that is the reason we can not keep our children at home. Each one of these young people beyond being Ugandans are units of economic output that we are donating to other countries.
Of course, the worst thing we can do is prevent them from living to better themselves, that is so 20th century.
We should start by committing to ensure every Ugandan can find gainful employment in Uganda. That’s where it starts, clearly we have not made that commitment yet.
At the basic level we need to create an environment for business to thrive, so that jobs can be created. There is a lot of work to be done in building infrastructure, producing skilled workers and to ensure property rights are secured. But even more important, if government wants to be really useful, it has to work at creating market access for our goods, locally and abroad...
Creating demand locally is a chicken and egg situation. To create local demand there has to be an increase in incomes across the board, but that only comes when people are gainfully employed. A crude, but unsustainable way to do it, is for government to give relief funds to the most vulnerable in the society. Another crude method that has been used with some success elsewhere is for government to take up local products especially from agriculture.
In the early 1980s Kenya launched a school milk program. Under the program all primary school children would receive 250 mls of milk at least twice a week. With this single stroke Kenyan milk production jumped and Kenya Cooperative Creameries (KCC) became a huge player, graduating to exporting UHT and powdered milk. The initiative was brilliant because aside for the nutritional benefits to the kids it created a huge market for processed dairy products that persists to this day.
Without doubt such or similar initiatives would need a massive outlay of resources from the treasury, but the long term benefit in terms of healthier kids, the building of the productive capacity for us to launch into the export market and the thousands of jobs that would be created up and down the value chain, would far outweigh the cost.
But the real jump in job creation would be for government to facilitate access to foreign markets. It was heartening to see new agriculture minister Frank Tumwebaze pushing for Kenya to open its market to our products. Interestingly this was happening as Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta was in the UK suing for greater access to that market for his country’s horticultural produce.
To give a sense of how this can be transformative, a friend went down to South Africa to try and get his coffee on the shelfs of a major supermarket chain. After hearing him out they suggested he start by trying to supply their 14 branches in the Cape Town region. But he soon gave up when faced with the demands. The supermarket chain wanted them to supply 45 tons of their branded coffee every two weeks, but in addition have a constant 45 tons in their warehouses on standby. As if that was not enough payment would be due within 60 days of delivery. He worked out that to meet the demand, he would have to scale up his operations almost four fold – including workers, and that was only for the Cape Town market, forgetting his current clientele.
Access to markets also means helping our own businessmen to scale up to meet the new demand in quantity and quality. But this can also go to include services especially ICT, financial, education and health services, where we can develop a real competitive advantage if we committed to it and did so systematically.
There are probably hundreds of ways this can happen. We will not be reinventing the wheel.
But probably more importantly, committing to having everyone be gainfully employed at home will avert scenes like we saw in South Africa two weeks or so ago. There people took advantage of protests against the arrest of former President Jacob Zuma to loot businesses. Over the last two decades or so South Africa has done a dismal of spreading the wealth around more equitably, instead the powerful and connected have forgotten their commitment to the majority blacks, engaged in corruption on an industrial scale increasing the hopelessness of the everyday man.
If South Africa with the security industrial complex it has can fail to keep the calm, what of us?
