That year we were the brightest of the brightest. The instructors set us a quiz to determine our knowledge of country.
The one question I will never forget was “What are Uganda’s
cash crops?” Chicken feed for the 1,000 of us seated on the floor of the grass
thatched classroom. Coffee, tea, cotton. What about maize, they asked. And
cassava? And beans? Aren’t they cash crops?
Credit to us, we all fell silent as we let these new “facts”
register, rather than protest and make bigger fools of ourselves.
All our school lives, 13 years up to that point, we had
parroted in exam after exam, coffee, tea and cotton as Uganda’s cash crops.
Fast forward to 1997. I found myself on the commodities trading
floor of HSBC bank In London, where they told me $150b in transactions passed
through that room daily, Uganda’s GDP at the time was $6b, and I happened upon
a research note that said coffee we would fall below 50 percent of the country’s
total exports by the turn of the century.
That was a mind bending proposition, because in that year
coffee exports accounted for six in every $10 of our exports, down from 90
percent in 1986.
"In today’s Uganda where coffee exports not only account for 30 percent of export value, but the sale of the aromatic bean has been overtaken by gold exports, that’s not news. It was at the time.
A quarter century later and the brightest of the brightest
of our youth are probably due for another mind bending moment.
In April, the Kenyan media reported that their imports of
power had hit an all-time high in the first quarter of the year. They imported
408.78 gigawatthours (GWh) up 42 percent from the same period last year. The
source of their imports? Uganda and Ethiopia.
Uganda Electricity Transmission Company Ltd (UETCL) reports
exports of electricity were back to pre-covid levels at $44m (sh170b) last year,
small when seen against total receipts of $5b but significant none the less. Going
by the growth trajectory of the last four years this number is set to double by
2028.
We have always exported power to Kenya but with new generation
capacity we are exporting more and more, especially now we are a member of the
East Africa Power Pool (EAPP), which is connecting power generators to the
region so power can be transmitted wherever it is needed in the region.
Trade in electricity within the EAPP has grown six fold to
3400 GWh annually since 2005 when it was begun.
So it makes sense to increase our generation capacity – one
study showed we have at least 4000 MW of hydroelectric power potential, but
also invest more in the high voltage transmission lines required to evacuate
the power.
Currently lines from Gulu-Nebbi-Arua, Kabale-Mirama and
Masaka-Mbarara are in the works. As long as our electricity sector is
efficient, so as to ensure demand for our power abroad, the enormous power
needs locally and regionally would make such investments no brainers.
It will not help that projects, which should ordinarily take six years to develop take more than a decade
-- see Karuma dam, as these delays are an additional cost that would price us out of the market. We are not big players, seeing by the total trade in power in the region of 3400Gwh versus our exports last year of 485 GWh. Also because the region has surplus of power generation capacity – 90,000 MW versus peak demand of 54,000 MW, it is a buyers’ market, meaning no one will take our power if it is not competitively priced.
Producing for export means we are subjecting ourselves to more
exacting standards than we tolerate at home. Our trading partners do not expect
frequent power outages, brown outs and power surges. They will probably sue us
for such infringements unlike our pliant locals.
Exporting power should
be an exciting thing, if only because it could serve as the new trick question
for our pre-university youth, something like “Which of our exports does not go
out by road, rail or air?”
