AN INSTRUCTIONAL MANUAL ON LIFE

 BOOK REVIEW: BLACK LIKE ME?

AUTHOR: DENNIS SEMPEBWA

PP:320 PAGES

Book launch for 17^th August after which will be available in all major bookshops

Dennis Sempebwa was one of the members of the gospel group Limit X, which in the early 1990s and 2000s entertained around the world with their unique brand of gospel music, a fusion of everything from pop to R&B and hip hop. They were wildly popular among the youth with their contemporary dress, hairstyles and dance moves.

While initially frowned upon by the Christian traditionalists, they could not be ignored. They drew crowds everywhere they went, not only in Uganda but in Europe and the US as well. Dennis was a founder member of the band, which also included Paul Mutebi, Isaac Ruci and Ken Serunkenya, who left them early on to pursue his studies.

"Unlike other memoirs this book is not just a chest thumping, ego trip. This is more than a story about a boy who fled Uganda in search of greener pastures and made good...

Dennis had less than an idyllic childhood growing up in the Uganda of the 1970s. His family suffered hunger, displacement and poverty. His father an alcoholic and womanizer, like his father before him left most of the heavy lifting to his mother, before his premature death. From an early age it is clear, Dennis was determined to break the generational curse. His quest for significance flows strongly through the book.

From his humble beginnings, a family tragedy due to HIV/AIDS, accepting Jesus as his personal saviour, making his way to and finding his feet in the UK, Dennis is clearly a searcher after the truth. This is particularly evident in his musings about why the black race in the west seems to be down trodden.

While not ignoring centuries of systemic discrimination he thinks blacks really should stop playing the victim card and take their fate into their own hands, organize and uplift themselves.

He can be criticized for being a bit shallow in his analysis, discounting the centuries of slavery and discrimination that has rewired the African American man’s psyche to one of self-loathing and hopelessness from their previous pride and selfawareness. But the sincerity in his search for answers is unmistakable and in some respects you can see his growth in understanding of the subject as the book goes along.

For anyone who saw Limit X at its height the story of its rise and demise provides good value. Their beginning as a secular music group, their struggle to find and establish their niche in gospel music before disbanding on differences of conscience and principle.

"It is a very introspective book, as it should be. The various struggles that Dennis has with his conscience are vivid and moving, providing good fodder for younger readers working through their own youthful struggles...

The overall theme of the book of hope and redemption are not adversely affected by some of the literary license the author indulges in. I noted two instances in which I thought he had gone overboard. in one instance he claims that half the girls in his primary school had been raped by soldiers, an incredible claim for which thankfully he did not name the school. One can speculate what the author wanted to achieve with this piece of hyperbole. Paint a picture of the universal terror of Idi Amin’s Uganda? Or was he writing for a western audience for which the stereotype of the continent as war torn, diseased and poverty stricken is familiar?

Also, in the book he alludes to certain tribes in Uganda that have century long animosities. Beside mentioning the hatred between his tribe, the Baganda and the Luo, which unlike in Kenya are not a homogenous tribe, he is vague and leaves the claim there unsupported.

Maybe Dennis maybe forgiven, since most if not all his adult life, has been abroad where some local urban legends were far away from the scrutiny of an adult mind.

The book is written in a very accessible style. It is a narration of his life. Beyond the events he goes in some depth into his thoughts and feelings on the events. The effect is a three-dimensional account, making it difficult to put down the book once one has started reading.

It is a good read. Firstly, for people who experienced Limit X and have nostalgia for a time when hip hop and other western music genres were gaining traction in Uganda with the entrance of FM radio. But more importantly this is a book that should be read by the youth trying to navigate the dilemmas of their age – faith, relationships and going to work abroad.

 

SAYING BYE TO WORLD BANK BILLIONS, FOR NOW

The World Bank last week announced it would not be contracting any new assistance to Uganda, their response to our enacting of the Anti-Homosexuality law earlier this year.

This was not an announcement to thumb your nose at.

"The World Bank has been front and center of jumpstarting Uganda’s economy over the last four decades. Currently they have more than $5b (sh18.5trillion) in projects in areas as diverse urban redevelopment, agriculture, environment protection, energy, education, health and digital development among others....

These current projects reaching back to 2013 are riding on the back of and in support of fundamental economic reforms that saw this country liberalise the economy. The liberalisation of the economy not only unlocked local initiative, but has led to huge foreign direct investment into the economy.

The reform process has been more successful in Uganda than in other places because Kampala has embraced the logic of the reforms.

It was basic economics, to resuscitate the economy we needed to increase production, to increase production we need to improve infrastructure and remove inefficiencies like government parastatals. People who are hankering for a return to parastatals either have forgotten this context or have ulterior motives.

This mutually beneficial partnership has clearly come to a cross roads. The World Bank says the anti-homosexuality law undermines efforts to have inclusive development for everybody regardless of race, gender or sexuality.

Uganda on the other hand enacted the law through parliament, the representatives of the people, a democratic process.

"It would not be a stretch to interpret the World Bank’s action as saying, “if you want our billions, you have to drop the law.” It takes your breath away, when you narrow it down to its bare essentials.

It should serve as a wakeup call to us.

Our wellbeing and that of generations of Ugandans to come is really up to us. Everybody else can only be an enabler or hinderance to our developmental ambitions.

In this journey others will have their own values and priorities with which they will choose to help or not. They have choices, we don’t. Development has to happen with or without the helpers.

That being said our dependence on donor support is long past its sale by date. We have the means to mobilise our own resources.

We have a budget of sh50trillion, which has to be adjusted not to reflect this new reality, as more than half of it is going to be underwritten by the donors. WE all know that we are not collecting as much revenue as we should, the excuse has always been we area largely informal economy.

As an indicator of how much money we are leaving on the table, last year more than sh170trillion flowed through mobile money platforms. This is more than thrice the size of the budget and the size of the entire economy at $47b. As an indicator of economic activity few indicators beat this.

"The problem is not that the economy is largely informal but that we are not exercising creativity and innovation to collect what is due from all citizens...

I have always argued that we need to tax all land in Uganda. Not only will it increase our revenue collections but even better it will increase the productivity of those lands. If I have my acres of idle land and you slap a sh100,000 tax on every acre I will either have to put it to work, that it pays for itself or sale or lease it to someone who can put it to good use.

But also we need to stop thinking of tax according to the text book. I was a supporter of the tax on mobile money transactions and even on data because these are all economic activities or proxies for economic activities that need to be taxed. I know the arguments about financial inclusion and access to the internet, but anything to make these more productive, which tax does, is welcome.

When the colonialists came to Uganda and wanted us to grow coffee they instituted a poll tax, a tax on every grown man, that forced us to sell something – our labour or goods to pay the tax. Coffee was useful and hence our huge small holder coffee farmer population, which feeds into us now being the biggest exporter of coffee on the continent.

"The seduction of aid is that it is easier to access than taxes. To introduce or raise taxes governments have to negotiate with their people, show some quid pro quo. You pay taxes and we will deliver public goods. Governments don’t like such pressure. It is easier to hop on a plane to Washington DC and over cocktails and canapes, sign aid contracts – per diems all around. The lender will not care as much as the local whether the money is employed for its intended use, more than if he gets paid.

This will undoubtedly have a ripple effect through the donor community.

Locally we may very well have to change the way we think about democracy. For example how do we cut public expenditure for example, in the size of our current parliament? Do we think MPS would ever vote to cede their seats in the house? If push comes to shove how do you do it using the current processes in place?

The move by the World Bank is unprecedented since they pulled out of Uganda during the Idi Amin era, this might just be the push we needed to become more self-reliant.

 

TAKE LESSONS FROM MILK INDUSTRY TO PRODUCE FOR EXPORTS

It was reported recently that milk production had reached record levels at 3.2 billion liters in 2022. Prior to the covid lockdown the Dairy Development Authority (DDA) announced the country had passed South Africa as the leading exporter of dairy products on the continent.

When history is written the exponential leap in milk production – it was 460 million liters in 1990, will have pride of place and may very well serve as template for the increased production of other commodities.

"Apart from coffee, which like milk’s success is due largely to small holder farmers, there is no other commodity, that has seen a leap in its fortunes like milk....

This was not by mistake and is all the more surprising given the decimation of the herds in eastern Uganda due to insurgency and cattle rustling in the 1980s and 1990s.

So, it was left to Western Uganda to carry the load. A long period of peace helped to boost milk production, but also an adoption of higher yielding exotic breeds, a program to dot the region with milk collection centers, at once created a market for milk that was previously poured down the village paths for lack of market and set the foundation for milk processing industry.

From a solitary processor, Dairy Corporation, which was itself privatized in 2006, there at are more than 135 processors to day with an installed daily capacity of above 2.89 million liters. Dairy Corporation had the capacity to process only 60,000 liters a day when it was a monopoly.

The formula can be used on any other commodity – Increase production, have collection sectors to lower logistical costs, set up processing units to suck up the increased production and open new markets for our processed output

As it is now barely a third of what we produce is consumed locally.

There two thirds of the produce is what is giving president Yoweri Museveni sleepless nights, criss crossing the globe in search of markets.

Maybe for the first time in a long while the president has something to hawk that has export-size production. Coffee is top of eth list but also sugar. The latter though has been canibalised by questionable policies that threaten our national sugar surpluses.

The trade ministry licensed other operators in the Busoga region who are poaching sugar cane from the Kakira and Sugar corporation of Uganda ltd (SCOUL) making previous investments in farmer subsidies, research and development increasingly unviable.

"Unlike coffee and milk whose back bones are the small holder farmer, if the math doesn’t add up for our biggest sugar producers, sugar shortages will not be far behind....

However, the dairy industry is far from ironing out all its glitches.

Dairy farmers in Kikuube district western Uganda were lamenting the slide in milk farmgate prices. They complained the fall from sh900 a liter to the current sh600 by their cooperative was making the enterprise unfeasible. They said with the cost of drugs and pesticides, margins are now paper thin or non-existent at all.  They inevitably called on government to put a floor under the falling prices.

This is a good indicator that despite the explosion in dairy processing capacity there are still demand-supply imbalances that need to be addressed. Hopefully by the private sector and not the government.

Thankfully we can not export raw milk. So unlike coffee we need to turn into long life milk or milk powder or its constituent proteins like Casein to export it. In theory it’s the one industry we can capture most of the value addition for ourselves.

People in the know say that for successful animal husbandry tow things are key feeding and genetics. The gains our dairy farmers have made may be down largely to feeding.

In more developed markets the genealogy of the animal, genetics, are value in themselves. Tracking an animals ancestry as far back as possible is good for several reasons but two jump to mind. That it can be certified that there has been no inbreeding, that would affect the health and quality of the animal and relatedly, that the animal has been bred for its best qualities.

Some of our best farmers are now importing semen from as far a field as the Netherlands to improve the quality of their herds, because they do not trust the local breeds. An investment in genetics and its management can ensure we get to the next level of the sector’s development and open all sorts of new markets for us....

While the sugar industry is mostly large plantation farming and our coffee bushes are rather hardy in surviving years of neglect, the delicate nature of dairy production may hold some useful lessons for us in how to increase production in other commodities and develop industry and export markets around them.

 

HACKING THE AGRICULTURE CODE

We met to talk about something else. When that was done, I found out about his farm.

I tend to roll my eyes at stories of urban elite running farms. Often, they are vanity projects, subsidized by their paychecks, that can not stand on their own without the subsidy.

My friend, I will call him Jack, made me seat up and listen when he said he had opted for crop farming over cattle farming, though he is from Kashari, long horn Ankole cow country.

I asked him why, he said he wanted to make money and the mathematics of cows did not add up for him...

So, he went off hundreds of kilometers away and got himself land in Masindi, a large expanse of which he now has 230 acres under maize.

I asked whether he went so far for fear of being laughed out of Kashari, he just laughed.

He tried soya bean, it failed. He tried coffee, the environment was too harsh, before eventually settling on maize. He has a few cows of course, wondering around, more for the aesthetics than anything, I think. They are already costing him, they have been responsible for breaking though his fence to get at the maize. Ten acres he has lost to his cows this last season.

Jack, a lawyer, who spent most of his career working abroad, counsels that it would be suicidal to go into an enterprise his size first time.

“I have been studying this for at least 20 years. I worked in Zambia for 18 years and learnt from my friends the ins and out of commercial agriculture there,” he said. And even on his current land he tried out on a small scale, things he thought would work, before jumping in with both feet.

There is a visible gleam in his eyes when he talks about how his experiment has turned out. He has so far done three years and he is keen to build up to 500 acres. Renting land in the area is about sh150,000 an acre per season. There are two maize seasons March to July/August and again from August to December.

“I think another 70 acres for maize will be good, the rest I will leave for the cows, coffee and I want to get back into soya bean,” he says in between sips of his tea.

Jack is looking forward to next season, which planting season will soon be under way, because he discovered and tested a ferterliser that will significantly increase his yields in the next season.

“I am doing about one ton an acre now, with good rain about 1.2 tons with this new ferterliser I am seeing up to two tons an acre,” he says gleefully.

But back to why he cannot be bothered with cows.

“There is no grading as a determination of quality in this country. So the beef from scrawny cows sells at the same price of that cow’s meat which has good genetics and has been looked after well. As long as that continues, a real beef market is hard to see here,” he said.

He points to South Africa where President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Anklole cattle are selling for hundreds of millions of shillings each.

With milk, the wild price fluctuations mean one probably has to set up an processing plant, that means building a large enough herd to do that, a huge capital outlay, which again is a discouragement. It can be done but crop farming is the low hanging fruit.

“Here I have two seasons a year, my friends in southern Africa had only one. It is a nobrainer.”

However, he does not live on the farm. He visits it once every two months, leaving the day-to-day running to his manager.

“I got a young man who was willing to work, had him trained at a agiculture school and sent him off. During the week we talked a lot about integrity and long-term thinking. He has turned out very well,” he said.

In addition to his salary, he is paid a commission on every crop and Jack has helped him get land in his home area and build a house.

In addition, he has an app which monitors his tractor, the biggest asset in his farm. He showed me where it was in real time. The app also monitors fuel consumption, mileage, whether the tractor is due for service and any number of metrics.

"Other than expansion of his farm he is now building storage facilities, mainly to be in control of the price he gets for his crop. Crop prices fluctuate according to seasonal patterns. Prices fall during the harvest and jump when the harvest crop is exhausted....

During his journey Jack was also surprised to find a lot of help for agriculture available.

“I borrowed using the ACF (Agriculture Credit Facility) to buy my tractor and also insured my first failed crop and got reimbursed what I put in. I think these facilities are just not marketed well,” he said.

With the ACF his bank dragged their feet for two months before a chance meeting at the golf course, after which a few calls were made and he had his tractor within the week.

He acknowledges that it is still early days and that he continues to learn, but he is convinced the future is bright.

“I think the urban elite should seriously consider taking up crop farming. Whichever way you look at it, it works,” he said