A revolution Museveni didn’t plot is happening in Uganda’s bushes

A friend, a successful businessman, has gone on “rampage” and is farming over 10 square kilometres...

Recently in Kenya there was a statistic that the local media ignored, and was only covered by the Chinese news agency Xinhua.

It said that Kenyans were, finally, again buying more new shoes than second-hand (mitumba) imported ones. The bigness of that news was in its smallness. The second-hand car, spare parts, etc., market is of course still going strong, but in a continent where until the crackdown of recent years, in some countries there were endless markets selling even mitumba socks, bras, and underwear (and they were outselling new ones), when new stuff outsells mitumba, then something significant has happened.

One, it could mean new Chinese products (including shoes) are now cheaper than mitumba, a remarkable phenomenon that only clever economists like Bank of Uganda Deputy Governor Dr Louis Kasekende can explain to us civilians.
Secondly, and more optimistically, that incomes have risen enough that previous buyers of mitumba shoes can now afford new ones.

Thirdly, that all other economic factors haven’t changed, and the only thing that has shifted is a resurgence of African pride and attitude. That we are simply refusing to buy third and second-hand shoes.
Whatever the reality, something dramatic is beginning to happen to our societies whose full nature will emerge more clearly in two or so years.

Indeed in Uganda a few days ago, I was struck by something regular travellers on the Kampala-Jinja Road wouldn’t think twice about. After enduring the sea of second-hand cars in the Banda area, after a short drive toward Jinja you begin to encounter your first new vehicle “showrooms” in Bweyogerere. They are not selling cars, but tractors and their accessories - ploughs, and sprinklers.

Later in a drive through the Industrial Area, I also saw several new tractors and ploughs on sale. I tried to make sense of these eye-pleasing sights. It is perhaps well to mention that a Ugandan of my age grew up at a time when every tractor that came into the country was brought on some – eventually disastrous – government backed “agriculture mechanisation/modernisation” scheme.

Ordinary business people did not invest in tractors, in part because Ugandans (excluding the tea and sugarcane plantations) didn’t farm on a scale that required many tractors. I have become aware that things have changed, and the market for new tractors is now “coming alive” hence the new ones on sale. Now tractors are one of those things where a new one is always cheaper, in terms of cost of ownership, than a mitumba one. But I have also learnt, on good authority, of some very “unUgandan” things that are happening in agriculture. While government programmes like Naads continue to flounder and strangled by corruption, Ugandans with money are breaking ground in interesting ways.

A good pastor, whom I shall not name, has opened so much land in Bunyoro growing rice, maize and other food, he has more than 40 tractors, trailers, and ploughs on the farm. Recently, he harvested more than eight square kilometres of maize.

A friend, a successful businessman, has gone on “rampage” and is farming over 10 square kilometres, and buying up or renting every equipment he can find.

A relative recently travelled on some business to Ibanda, and returned suitably impressed by a chap in the region who had grown matooke (bananas) over an area of over 12 square kilometres! Madness. Ehhh, how shall I put it? Black, or let us say, indigenous, Ugandans never farmed on that level —even rich ones. Cattle, yes, we keep on some scale – and our own President Yoweri Museveni likes to project himself as the country’s First Cattle Keeper. In fact, even in Kenya, many large-scale farms have their history as British colonial settler affairs, or are mostly owned by multinational companies.

Secondly, for Ugandan men to make money, buy huge chunks to farm rather than building a house to keep a second or third wife there safely away from the angry first one, is a truly remarkable change. Me thinks this suggests that a sea change is happening in our country. Though these things are happening today, we shall argue next week that they have their roots in two events in Uganda – one that happened in 1988, and the other in 1998.

At the same time, the change is also coming at an opportune time for Uganda, with the election of Uhuru Kenyatta as president in Kenya, and William Ruto as his deputy. These two otherwise unrelated events (in the farms in Uganda and in State House in Kenya), that we shall also examine in this column, could combine to have the most far-reaching effect on Uganda’s economy and Kenya’s politics.
Stay tuned.

cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com