IT WAS A BUSINESSPERSON who came up with the phrase, “Pay peanuts, you get monkeys,” and he was basically referring to the low quality of person one would attract if you did not invest value in them.

Peanuts are generally being treated badly in that little ditty because they are quite valuable to some of us in many ways, besides being very tasty.

Very annoyingly today, though, there are people out here who should be attaching the highest amount of value to peanuts—we call them groundnuts in Uganda—because of how much they supposedly extract from them, but are exhibiting traits of being paid in the damn nuts as a currency.

It is bad enough that we needed the President of the Republic of Uganda to make a pronouncement about groundnuts and our handling of them.

Kweli, in this US$63 billion economy of 46 million people, we needed the President of the country to tell us about groundnuts?

First of all, he has been telling even scientists about this for over ten years now. On the front page of a simple internet search, I found a report from an African Union meeting where the boss was challenging our scientists and government officials.

“The President challenged senior government officials from African Member States, particularly Uganda health practitioners, to go out of their way and inform the public on the challenges and dangers of the virus…”

The phrase ‘go out of their way’ was certainly tongue in cheek, and was lost on them all. Hence today’s situation and the most annoying story of the week, titled: ‘Traders plead with President over proposed ban on shelled groundnuts’.

As far as I know, these traders have been quietly shelling their groundnuts and said no word about this as they operate under a regulation that goes back to 1959 – that’s the year Uganda’s Food Act was passed.

“Traders dealing in groundnuts have appealed to President Yoweri Museveni to give them an opportunity to improve the quality of their products before implementing a proposed executive order banning their sale over health concerns.”

Imagine that they even (claim to) have an association called ‘the Groundnuts Traders Association Uganda—GTAU’, and got to make their pleas at a whole press conference at a hotel in Kampala.

On that note, Ugandans, please stop forming associations if they are not designed to create solutions to the problems and issues facing your select group of interests.

An association of Groundnut Traders should not need the President, whose main agricultural activity is not even crop-based, to tell them about aflatoxins and how to handle their product of interest.

What are these people doing if not sitting down together to work out the best way of producing and selling the product their livelihood is based on?

I’ll tell you what they are doing; their spokesperson, one Henry Kakooza, said at that same press conference: “We ask the President to first send his technical team to guide and train you on how we can improve the standards…”

Be serious, people!

You want the President to grow, shell, roast, and package your groundnuts for you?

Besides annoying, there is irritation around this from other corners as well, including the media, which is citing things like this one report that read: “According to statistics from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS), Uganda produced 219,000 tons of groundnuts during the 2005/2006 financial year…”.

In the very next paragraph, the story goes, “Groundnuts play a critical role in the economy, supporting farmers, traders, processors, and sellers across the country.” If it’s that critical, what are YOU, a media house, doing quoting statistics from ten years ago?

The rest of the internet provides statistics housed in other countries that are much more recent and relevant—and that the so-called Groundnut Traders Association Uganda clearly has no clue about.

It’s nuts, the way we do some of these things, and if we don’t stop being so intellectually lackadaisical about it, we are going to continue earning peanuts and not being much better than monkeys.–

@skaheru