02/04/2026
When the history of Uganda is rewritten, We will have afew pages about your outstanding work
Dr Buregyeya Dear President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni,
Greetings.
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1. The narrative that we are not a prosperous country because we export low value primary commodities is not excellent.
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2. That, as a primary policy, we should establish large-scale industries here in Uganda if we want to see economic transformation may sound politically plausible but it is an ineffective strategy.
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THE VALUE ADDITION CONUNDRUM
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Australia has iron ore as its top export product. In fact, it earns over 80 Billion USD every year from export of this primary material. Australia is on the list of top ten developed nations in the world.
So, where is the flaw in the value addition narrative?
Value is created by demand. Demand is a markets dynamic.
Markets determine value and markets is what prosperous nations focus on to build, protect and expand. Markets are racist, nationalistic, imperialistic, and all “-ists” politics can create. And, markets are a political problem, your problem, not a private sector led value addition problem. I’ve previously used an example of a white woman who earns more money from horns of Ankole cattle — a part of the nyankore cow we recently considered as waste — than we currently earn from its meat sales (https://www.ankole.co.uk/collections/horns). The white woman does very little in grazing the cow and growing its long beautiful horns, but she has access to high-end markets that are closed to the Ugandan cattle owner. So, the primary policy for your government should be that of building, protecting and expanding markets, not value addition. As citizens, we are not poor at thinking. We easily figure out how to add value to primary commodities. We are just intelligent. We avoid failure. I’ll explain more just below.
Kindly allow me use an extreme example to enable the weak in faith among us to easily understand why our government shouldn’t be worrying about value addition. I need consensus as I write to you, Mr. President. Ugandans are familiar with banana plantations. The majority of us own banana plantations as part of our homesteads, and we sell them fresh from our gardens without any value addition. One example of adding value to our harvest of bananas is to cook it, at source - our village home. I mean, cooked bananas return a better profit than raw ones. I know many are thinking that the shelf life of cooked bananas is very short. But, this is only a problem if one doesn’t have a ready market. It’s markets, again 😎. In fact, most cooked bananas served at weddings and other mass gatherings are always cooked kilometers away from the assembly venues.
If we all understand this story of cooked bananas, then we understand the importance of markets as drivers of value addition. You can cook your fresh bananas but it won’t make sense if you don’t have secure demand for cooked bananas. Coffee value addition is another common example. We have all coffee roasting technologies and excellent barristers in Uganda. We just don’t have enough coffee drinkers. So we remain dependent on German coffee traders who can only neglect us when we talk about adding value to coffee here in Uganda for markets in Europe that they control. They’re about profit, not charity. The same story applies to all primary commodities that we have in the country and in the region.
Therefore, the assumption that further processing of our primary commodities will attract more money for us is not that deep. It won’t work. We need patriotic policies to protect local markets for local industry development first, and to establish foreign markets. We need our soldiers to be moving with our industrialists when they go to pacify Somalia, Sudan, CAR etc. It has to start with what we already have, our local market.
Mr. President, the British showed us a good approach when they built Tororo cement factory to supply cement for the construction of Owen falls dam. I shared on the pre independence infrastructure development in Uganda in my book, “The Big We”. I hope your copy reached you. More copies are at Aristoc, Uganda bookshop, and at Entebbe airport bookshop. So, Tororo cement factory has been the most consistent supplier of cement in Uganda since 1954. We have not much to show for local industry development out of Karuma dam construction project. I’ll find time in the near future and write to you about how Chinese engineering firms are killing opportunities for local skills development and general economic development of Uganda, and how this is happening at our cost. You remember, how your technocrats and politicians promoted Escom claiming that Ugandans are incompetent and can’t run electricity infrastructure? How comes that Uganda Electricity Generation Company (UEGCL) that is now run by Ugandans is functioning exceptionally better than when it was in the hands of Escom? Especially that Escom is currently underperforming at their home in South Africa. I have another story of how your technocrats, those bandits at UNRA, are giving Karuma bridge to Chinese to repair at about 8 billion shillings when we have local capacity that can fix the same bridge better at about 3 billion shillings, moreover with more benefits of local capacity development that is important for sustainable infrastructure management, national security and economic prosperity. Anyway, I have so many pain points, it’s easy to digress. Let me get back to markets. Markets is what your technocrats should be establishing. And capturing markets is a warfare skill that you are the most excellent in. You can demand of the same excellence from your technocrats. In fact, you can instruct them to do the ground work as you work on calling your Tanzanian counterpart, Mheshimiwa Rais Samia Suluhu Hassan, and securing supply of steel components on the phased railway infrastructure development project across Tanzania that is now being implemented. Over 3,000 kilometers of a railway network is being developed and that means close to 7,000 kilometers of rails and rail anchors in steel which is a good market for our iron ore. It’s now in the fangs of Chinese dragons. The railway tracks will need steel in quantities over 135 million metric tons for the 3,000 kilometers of the railway infrastructure in Tanzania alone. Just give me an LPO for supply of quarter of that quantity of steel and I’ll give you a steel factory in Rubanda, Western Uganda, in just 6 months. I won’t need money from government.
So, when there is a secure market for a high value product, Ugandans will build appropriate industries and supply it. Kindly have faith in us. Get us secure markets just.
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ON LARGE SCALE INDUSTRIES.
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Kampala cement Ltd is a good example of a large factory in Uganda that has not produced a single bag of cement in the past 2 years. The markets bleached their operating capacity (Kindly forgive my cajh writing style. It’s the essence of social media). Certainly, we don’t have enough infrastructure. So, it should make good political sense to establish a large cement factory in the region to take advantage of the obtaining infrastructure gaps? And, in a free market like the one your leadership has established in Uganda, the most complex piece of any large scale business puzzle is capital development. Kampala Cement Ltd raised good capital and run a cement factory for a good number of years until it closed. Let’s pose here and consider another example, a bryophyte, Tembo steel.
Tembo steel projects as the biggest steel manufacturer in Uganda, processing our high value raw material (iron ore) to its final product, steel. It’s an excellent story of value addition, one that takes advantage of your good will and dream of transforming our national economy. But I’ve never found and later bought a single Tembo steel bar in hardware shops in Uganda. I’ve been very active on Uganda’s construction scene for the last 20 years, and I have a portfolio of a good number of storied buildings as a main contractor in Kampala and other major cities in the country. I can’t have missed a steel bar from Tembo steel in the last 20 years. It has always been steel bars from Steel & Tube, Roofings, and, very few times, Pramukh and a host of Chinese and other imported steel bars. Hopefully, I’ll meet Tembo steel bars soon, if the markets will miraculously allow them to survive beyond your generous goodwill. Otherwise, to me, they’re currently like bryophytes, non-vascular plants that bloom with no roots and no stems.
The list of fails is long and URA should help process this information for your better planning.
I heard you admired BM Steel Ltd, a plant located in Mbarara City that used to recycle steel scrap. It belongs to Ugandans. Ugandans are truly smart business people. They know how to add value to their primary communities.
But science (knowing how to process and convert materials) is inferior to intelligence (adapting to circumstances).
Ugandans are intelligent, too. They won’t see things in China and try to reproduce them here. They thrive in original thinking. They won’t start industries when their government is not rationally patriotic in action about growing and protecting markets.
And, with alien investors, most exit their profits at developing/establishment stage. Our true allies are ordinary Ugandans. The BIG WE 🤷🏿♂️
I serve at your pleasure, Mr. President.
