{UAH} Pojim/WBK: East Africa has changed: Give Museveni coffee so he can wake up to - Charles Onyango Obbo
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East Africa has changed: Give Museveni coffee so he can wake up to
With all our attention focused on crazy things President Yoweri Museveni's camp is doing to run former premier Amama Mbabazi and his presidential ambitions to ground, and the pummelling that the Uganda Shilling is getting in the money market, many of us missed something big.
Yes, whether Museveni, Mbabazi, or Kizza Besigye becomes the next president will determine the shape of Uganda's future, of course, but it will not be a game changer. What will, and offers citizens the opportunity to exercise their sovereignty and industry, is what happens next in the East African Community (EAC).
In that regard, a milestone came on July 1, 2015 that wasn't marked with any fanfare in Kampala, Kigali, Bujumbura, Dar es Salaam, or Nairobi.
For on July 1, the EAC Common Market entered into effect. In Uganda, we were too preoccupied with the Museveni-Mbabazi battles. Kenya was too busy pimping up for the visit of US president Barack Obama. Tanzania was in the throes of the ruling CCM nomination, and what appears like a resurgence of the opposition ahead of the October election. Burundi was convulsed by president Pierre Nkurunziza's third term grab, and Rwanda too was peering at the board, looking to engineer a third term.
If the letter and spirit of the EAC Common Market was to be observed, a Ugandan should be able to travel and trade with and in Kenya without any hindrance, and a Kenyan to do the same in Uganda.
And it's here that we shall make a future for ourselves. An economist who knows these things tells me that in common markets, 80 per cent of trade is usually intra-company trade.
Thus Uganda sugar has been available in Kenya for over two years now. Now with the common market, expect more of it in Kenya. Countries don't trade. It's companies and individuals that do. Uganda and Kenya are mostly addresses for them.
For companies like Nakumatt, now functioning in a common market, it makes even greater money sense to have a regional supply chain. Thus if Uganda sugar is the cheapest, it will stock all its stores in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda with Ugandan sugar. If the best and cheapest packed juice is from Kenya, it will stock its stores in Uganda and Rwanda with juice from Kenya.
So today for a Ugandan producer, the goal should not be "to export to Kenya", but to sell to Nakumatt, Tuskys, and Uchumi in Uganda, and let them do the export for you if your product is superior.
Now, like sugar, the Kenyan maize is lucrative, but a hot political potato. But that is if you are exporting dried maize in sisal bags.
The dynamics change if you are exporting maize flour. Uganda grows maize more cheaply than Kenya, so there is a killing to be made here.
The way to do it though is not to set up a maize milling and packing plant in Kampala. Take it to Busia, Tororo, or Mbale.
Again, this requires an understanding of the changes underway in the region – something that the chaps at Tororo Cement understood years before anyone else did.
If you drive in western Kenya and the Rift Valley, nearly every one of five giant lorries that you meet is a Tororo Cement truck.
Now Buganda has been pushing for "federo". With the 2010 constitution, Kenya is the country in the EAC that is closest to being a federal state.
This means Uganda has a near-federal state to its north, South Sudan, Kenya to its east, and possibly soon Tanzania to its west.
For reasons of geography, politics, and culture, these federalist shifts, added to the common market, are altering forever the economies of East Africa.
Thus the Uganda economy will informally be broken into new zones: Eastern Uganda will be part a fast evolving sub-economy with western Kenya and the Rift Valley. Northeast will mesh with northeast Kenya into a cattle keeper swathe.
The north will now have to babysit South Sudan even more, and with the DR Congo finally showing signs of getting its economic act together, we shall have a northern sub-economy spanning the three countries.
The most advantageously placed location is Mbarara. It can be a confluence between an "Equatorial belt" sub-economy taking in three sub-zones - chunks of eastern Tanzania anchored in Bukoba; eastern DRC, and western Rwanda.
So you see why you should mill and pack unga in Mbale or Tororo? Because if you are not selling it to Nakumatt, your next bet is to sell it to the western Kenya-eastern Uganda economic zone. Call it the "Elgon Belt".
But a president cannot think big for this world, if he's preoccupied with the parochial business of setting the dogs on his election rivals. Someone give Museveni strong coffee, please.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian AFRICA (mgafrica.com). Twitter:@cobbo3
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