THIS SEASON’S OPPRESSIVE HEAT has been drying up my plants for weeks now, but I was ready for it. For years, I have always been prepared to fight off plant dehydration because I adopted appropriate technology a very long time ago.

By the time President Museveni laid out those drip bottles at Kawuku farm I had seen my mother do that in her gardens, and she is still at it. So I’ve spent weeks gathering up bottles and keep filling them up with water for the plants.

It works, as most of my garden at home will tell you – even under this severe onslaught of hot weather.

I have a modern irrigation system piped into my compound fourteen years ago, for the grass; the bottle drip irrigation system is for the potted house plants.

Those piped irrigation systems don’t cost a lot of money, including the monthly cost of water used, compared to other things we spend money on.

The drip bottles cost even less, and make the most sense for the potted plants.

When President Museveni told our general populace about that solution, the usual talkers took up fingers onto their keyboards. The cynics out there who laugh off these small techniques will never stop doing so.

Ours is to ignore them and keep taking small steps where need be, and big ones where we can.

Please do not get confused. The point is that the majority of our population is at a stage where they need to adopt appropriate, low-cost solutions before getting to the complex ones.

We are not wrong when we aspire to commercialise agriculture in Africa.

The only problem with our approach is that it is often times not realistic. It has been this way for decades now but is embedded into our education.

Because of that education, the most clever Ugandans out there will scoff at bottle drip irrigation and make it seem ‘backward’ even if they can’t offer any better.

The inappropriateness of most of our education leapt out at me from the pages of the book ‘Bunyoro, Tropical Paradox’ by Walter Bazley (Pub. 1993 about his years in Uganda as a government administrator in the 1940-50s).

One of the administrators was a Ugandan, a Munyoro called Henry Berunga, who was in charge of agriculture.

Read what Bazley wrote, from 1950 or thereabouts:

“Henry Berunga told a story that showed that even the experts in London were vague in their minds about African farming. With a group of junior officers from Uganda he had been sent to the Canadian Prairies to see examples of extensive agriculture; huge tractors ploughing miles of flat, featureless land. They were treated to long dissertations about fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides that were applied to the land by aerial spraying.
After that the storage and transportation problems of crops were discussed. To round it off a meteorologist gave them details of the harsh prairie winters.”

Those lessons being given to the officers back in the early 1950s were still in the schoolbooks in the late 1980s when I attended secondary school classes. My peers and I, and those who came after us, were also taught about the Canadian prairies (that phrase always pronounced unintentionally entertainingly by the teachers).

From Bazley’s account, even back in the 1950s, Henry Berunga already knew better, as the story continues:

“On the return flight the group landed in Lisbon and managed to get a couple of days in the Portuguese countryside, which is where they should have been in the first place. They saw small farms, sometimes only three or four acres, many of them on hillsides.

Each was well integrated with horse, cow, sheep, goats, a pig or two, chickens and a great variety of food crops. Their cash crops, corresponding with Uganda’s cotton, were an acre or two of grape vines or olive trees, and their self-sufficiency was exactly what was being striven for in Uganda…
‘…If they can do it in Portugal, we can do it here,’ was Henry’s comment. He had summed it up perfectly…”

See?

It would have been more appropriate for the clever people back then (the Colonial or Protectorate Government) to take learnings from the European countries that were more like Uganda in their agricultural set up.

Instead, we were told about the gentle rolling plains of the prairies, and if we crammed the information well enough we scored well in our exams and got singled out as highly intelligent.

Where has that high level of intelligence gotten us to today?

Raise your hand if you have a high school classmate who is doing commercial agriculture right now along the lines of what we were told about the prairies…

We discussed this with KFM’s Patrick Kamara this week, linking it to the new approach to education Uganda has taken and how we now need to Be Serious about it.

We mused about how a student from West Nile, for instance, would leave his family tobacco farm that he knew intimately, spend hours being told about Canadian prairies, and then fail exams about the damn prairies only to go back home to successfully grow more tobacco…

…for value addition elsewhere, and export to places where it would be converted into high value products making profits on stock exchanges in New York and London.

It’s ridiculous. But real. Therefore it’s really ridiculous.

We need to fix it, one drip and one bottle at a time, till we get a whole piped irrigation system spraying good sense and wise decisions across the intellectual and actual garden of Africa.