{UAH} Baby you can drive my car, but don't buy her too many drinks
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http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/Uganda-fuels-cars-with-ethanol/-/434750/2474944/-/ve2v6iz/-/index.html
Baby you can drive my car, but don't buy her too many drinks
Posted Saturday, October 4 2014 at 10:40
This is surely going to be Uganda's decade of the car. Of course, it has been more used than trains, planes and boats for decades now because it gets closest to where people live and work, as there aren't that many airports, seaports or railway stations around.
But this decade, Ugandans are discovering the car afresh; how it can be used and powered. A court has just sentenced a rich city woman to 20 years in prison for killing her husband by running him down with a car.
Meanwhile, Ugandans are seriously moving towards powering cars with ethanol rather than fossil fuel, competing with their vehicles for consuming booze.
Kyambogo University students this year successfully modified a Toyota Ipsum from petrol to ethanol use. And a major sugar manufacturer this year unveiled plans for large-scale ethanol production for powering vehicles, reducing the sugar cane available for making sugar. We may start calling the sweet plant fuel cane instead of sugar cane.
And a project for making electric and hybrid cars has just been commissioned by Kiira Motors Corporation, which recently grew out of Makerere University's School of Engineering.
Kiira is the local name for the River Nile, the principle source of Uganda's electricity. The government is injecting some $60 million in the project and a hundred acres was secured for the Kiira vehicle manufacturing plant in Jinja.
But back to using cars for killing, at least getting a licence to own a car is not as difficult as getting one for a firearm. On the day the wealthy widow was convicted for using a car to kill her husband, another woman in Wakiso, immediately to the west of Kampala, was being arrested on charges of knocking her co-wife dead with a car.
Their husband had thought he would have peace between the two wives by setting up separate businesses for them; one a hardware shop and the other a beauty parlour. The hardware lady is now being accused of using her vehicular hardware to kill her younger marital rival.
We Ugandans are this decades seeing cars from different angles. Cars even have special significance in politics. Didn't we recently give each Member of Parliament $40,000 to secure a new set of wheels!
And when the prime minister was recently retired in a "lone reshuffle," he appeared in a new set of wheels with private numbers that suddenly became the talk of the town.
As the chatter about his being sacked was losing momentum, the car, apparently even better than the official limo, reignited interest in the man.
By coincidence, the military soon after the unveiling of the car staged a highly publicised operation to change the guards at the ex-premier's residence. We don't remember the withdrawal of guards from any of the previous premiers being such a spectacular military operation, preceded by a "voice" calling newsrooms around town to go and witness it.
We are not yet halfway through the decade. At this rate, we could witness the merging of our car numbers with our phone numbers and the national ID by the end of 2020.
Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International Fellow for development journalism. E-mail: buwembo@gmail.com
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