AS THE UKRAINE and Middle East wars and crises move to the middle pages of the news, Africa needs to organise a continent-wide face palm because, as usual, we have not yet started growing any wheat.

Instead, we are riding around on our boda-bodas discussing foreign aid being cut and organising more wars of our own while continuing to import wheat from a country we believe to be at war and “in a crisis.”

Personally? I have not planted an ear of wheat, but I have also not bought a new Range Rover or built an arcade building or apartment block with my earnings. Neither have I put my money into any manufacturing or value addition venture, so I am firmly part of the ignorami here.

Surprised? I am not.

Just this week we had a headline in our leading daily about investors needing to prioritise manufacturing in 2025.

We have been talking about it for decades in spite of how bleeding obvious the concept is and also taking hundreds of thousands of students through lessons explaining this in detail by way of subjects like ‘General Paper’, ‘Economics’, and more.

This week’s report came from a “stakeholder engagement” at Kampala’s top hotel, at which everyone agreed that we were being daft by investing so many million dollars into shopping malls.

“Manufacturing picks a lot of graduates from the streets and more expertise than the malls, which only pick maybe one or two people to supervise rent collection,” said businessman Ben Kavuya at the event.

Present to listen to his wise views were Finance Minister Matia Kasaija and Permanent Secretary Ramathan Ggoobi, together with various bankers.

These are the right stakeholders for that discussion—a combination of businesspeople, policymakers in finance and economics, and the people who hold and lend money.

Will the result of that discussion be tax policies implemented in the coming 2025/26 budget to make investment into value addition and manufacturing easier and more lucrative for more Ugandans with money at all levels?

We shouldn’t wait and see—we need to enter the conversation as all Ugandans—and East Africans—who hope to see development and wealth spread out through our families, villages, neighborhoods, and nation. We need to be serious and engage the policymakers now about this.

Amongst my close friends and acquaintances, I know very few who have sunk money into value addition and manufacturing. A couple of them are well heeled but still have taken a major risk in venturing into the big league—and face frustrations every day that simply amaze the rational mind.

One pal is still reeling from the day I sent him an update about a foreign investor who had reportedly been given a chunk of ‘incentives’ that positioned them to compete in my friend’s industry and export medium-level materials for final manufacturing elsewhere, cutting my man off at the knees.

My friend did not attend that stakeholder engagement session and has not spent much (if any) time going into government offices for favors and incentives because…why should he?

He is one of those, like me, who believes that business should exist in an environment where fair competition will ensure the economy gets the best out of the ventures put on the ground. We both agree that an environment where investors spend most of their time meeting the President, Cabinet members, and bureaucrats in European suits simply fuels inefficiency and…corruption.

Which, we laughed together after the story about the stakeholder engagement was published, pushes more and more people into a cycle of ventures like boda-boda businesses, retail duukas, and eventually shopping malls.

In fact, Minister Kasaija reportedly stated at that event that of the one million boda boda riders, half are university graduates riding for a living. It’s worse than that, if that figure is to be believed—we have highly educated people employed in fairly respectable offices who are “investing” in boda-bodas as their wealth-creation plan.

A forty-something year old holding a Masters degree in complicated things and working as a senior finance manager in a company whose parent is listed on a stock exchange in a foreign capital “invests” in boda-bodas.

Of course, the investment pays back the money on a daily basis to help cover daily consumption costs and, perhaps, accumulate additional return funds for additional investment in… one-roomed mizigo, then two-roomed ones… like that, like that.

But why one-roomed mizigo? Because there are those one million boda riders who need housing.

It’s an economic cycle we have been creating since the early 2000s, when we decided that boda-bodas were a viable source of living for our people.

It’s an economic cycle we can break to create a much bigger one if we get off these boda-bodas after understanding what opportunities we really have and channel our efforts into them by planting wheat when the Ukraine is busy, changing our policies to make it easier to invest in manufacturing, and getting people with money—you and me together—to put it in the right places for real wealth creation.

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Simon Kaheru

www.skaheru.com
@skaheru