Leave the sugar politics aside, Uganda remains our most precious trade partner
What you need to know:
- Uganda, smaller in every way than we are, happens to be very important for our prosperity.
I was in Uganda last weekend for a family function and heard first-hand the spillover there of the poisoned sugar politics which is all the rage here. At the ceremony I went to attend, a minister with the Buganda kingdom pointedly thanked Kenya for not being stampeded to block sugar imports from Uganda.
Our problem is always the failure to see the larger picture. You may not know it from the rantings on social media, but Kenya is the big beast of East Africa.
And not just for being the largest economy in the region (actually we are the biggest non-mineral economy in sub-Saharan Africa). Nairobi is the city other Africans love to come to shop and be seen. Our neighbours may not think highly about our untidy politics, but here is the place they take instruction from on matters as diverse as micro-finance enterprises to running farming cooperative movements.
FOREVER LOCKED
Uganda, smaller in every way than we are, happens to be very, very important for our prosperity. Official figures may show Tanzania has overtaken our eastern neighbour in trade figures but, overall, Uganda is far more precious.
First of all, the figures don’t account for the hefty black market with Uganda, which they and us prefer to remain blind to. But, more critically, our neighbour will remain forever locked with Kenya because of its landlocked geography.
Whereas we can greatly mess up Uganda if we – improbably – closed its access to the sea, she has the capacity too to block our ambitions to access the Rwandan and eastern Congo markets we covet.
Kenya’s most vibrant diaspora in Africa happens to be in Uganda. They are in business and everywhere. Kampala International University (KIU) is so flooded with Kenyan students that they call it Kenyans In Uganda.
A close business friend told me how some in their group were irked when they could not access the hall in Kampala where President Kenyatta met the Kenyan diaspora during his recent visit there.
Yoweri Museveni has been good for Kenya. Unlike a certain neighbour who always has a big chip on their shoulder where Kenya is concerned, the Ugandan leader has no qualms in tapping Kenyan enterprise to help his country and, along the way, to cement the East African federation he envisions.
I have been to Uganda severally before, of course. Kenya’s economic influence is deeply felt there. Kampala supermarkets are loaded with Kenyan fare, not just the Brookside stuff we are frothing in the mouth about. Our currency is accepted everywhere there, which does not happen with their own here. Uganda’s is quite simply the most important bilateral relationship Kenya has in the world.
NEED TO DIVERSIFY
Travelling by road from Kampala through Jinja, you cross miles and miles of the sugar cane estates of Lugazi and Kakira, which are owned respectively by the Mehta and Madhvani families.
The cane there looks healthy, well-tended, robust. I imagine the management of their factories is very professional. Crossing the border to western Kenya, the outgrowers’ cane you see is unhealthy, weak, and looks more like napier grass. You can tell that no fertiliser has been used, and the piglets and zebu cows prowling the fields indicate the farmers have other priorities. And you expect these wretched farmers to compete with the Madhvanis?
Once upon a time, my mother used to have a lush crop of coffee bushes. But when the government put its interfering fingers into that cash crop’s business, she uprooted the crop and planted other things. So did her neighbours. They were eventually happy with their efforts. The sugar business is in a worse state because of wrong types running the mills. Actually the government owns just a minority of the factories.
Farmers, as usual, expect the government to nanny them all even when the economics of cane farming is all wrong. They need to diversify.
