Did Makerere make or assemble the car?

Kampala

Last week, amid much pride and publicity, it was announced that the students of Makerere University in Kampala had made, or invented or manufactured or created a new car. The car, named the “Kiira EV”, is electric, meaning it uses electricity rather than petrol for its energy. Kiira EV is a two-seater car, uses lithium-ion batteries (the same batteries used by mobile phones) and has a range of 80km.

The idea of making an electric car should, of course, be an inspiring breakthrough for Uganda. But it was not the first time Ugandans have “made” a car. In 1998, a young man called Armstrong Nsubuga created a concoction of a car and tested it on Kampala roads.
The Ugandan traffic police, rather than grasp the historic moment, grounded Nsubuga’s car, giving the reasons that it was not roadworthy! Nsubuga since then disappeared into oblivion.

From the way Nsubuga faded from public view rather than be hailed as a hero, there is no guarantee that eight months from now the Makerere students will not be forgotten by a nation that remains obsessed first and foremost with politics.

Part of the reason the Makerere car got so much media attention in Uganda was because the project received some funding from President Yoweri Museveni. However, a check up on the Internet indicates that interest in this car is largely confined to Uganda.
Several months since I first proposed the creation of a political party called the Digital Party and three weeks since I wrote about it in Sunday Monitor I am struck by how little interest the idea has aroused.

It appears that Ugandan society still finds technical, specific, scientific subjects boring and much prefers the social, communal, political and ceremonial. Even the current national discussion over the oil contracts is centred around the political rather than the technical angle of how much oil Uganda will produce, what type of oil it is, which might be the main future markets of Uganda’s oil, how much the country will earn each year from the oil, and when these oil reserves could get depleted.

Many of us are curious about this engineering development at Makerere. We would like to know exactly what is meant by “made at Makerere”, since most of the vital parts - piston, battery, braking system and so on - were not “made in Uganda” but imported.

This makes it similar to the radio sets built by the Sembule company in the 1990s, apparently made in Uganda but for all intents and purposes, more accurately assembled in Uganda. Some observers have cynically commented that Uganda cannot hope to manufacture electric cars when to begin with Uganda barely has enough electricity just to maintain a 24-hour uninterrupted supply.

A comment on the Daily Monitor website on November 2, by a reader called Mungich stated: “Only in Africa do we want to reinvent the wheel when we should be investing in realistic ventures that will have a positive effect on citizen’s quality of life.”
In March last year, Ethiopia also announced that its engineers and students had created an electric car, called the Solaris Elettra. Ethiopia became the second African country after South Africa to make an electric car.

Africa’s new “White elephants”?
These “inventions” of cars generate national pride for countries with very little to be proud of on the world stage. But we need to think a little more about them otherwise they become the latest equivalent to the grand “white elephant” projects that gained popularity in the 1950s and 1960s when newly independent African states sought to show the world that they had arrived on the world stage. As the BBC website commented on March 31, 2010, “[S]ome doubt if Africa, where erratic power supplies, low levels of personal wealth and poor infrastructure are common, is ready for electric cars.”

First things first
Ethiopia’s main priority should be to feed its huge population and end once and for all the international images of mass starvation with which we have become familiar. There are already so many Japanese-made vehicles on Uganda’s roads. It is disingenuous of President Museveni to, in his typical style, give money to the car project in his personal capacity when this should have been a national project, sponsored by the Uganda Government.

Furthermore, it does not say much about a head of state who can sponsor the Kiira EV project but seems content to let hospitals in Uganda go without drugs. It is unlikely that a car “Made in Uganda” can capture the world motor market any time soon. What Uganda most needs urgently today is first to supply medicine in government-owned hospitals. It needs to create a distribution system that can get the daily national newspapers to each and every sub-county in Uganda on the day they are printed. Uganda needs to work out a distribution network so that most of the milk produced in the country is consumed in all corners and does not go to waste.

Each year, an estimated 200,000 litres of milk are spoilt not because there is no demand for the milk but because there is no well-developed distribution system to market it. For most of this year, something has gone wrong with the mobile phone networks in Uganda. It is becoming harder and harder to hold conversations without the network suddenly going off. In several parts of one’s own home or office, there is no network signal.

Unclear mobile network
It is now nearly impossible to hear what a caller is saying when one speaks from inside a building or a car. While in 2010, the telecoms companies announced they were upgrading Uganda to the Third Generation (or 3G and 3G+) Internet, in reality the speeds that users in Uganda experience are not significantly faster than the older EDGE and GPRS. The average speed of 3G+ in Uganda is not much more than 7 to 10 kilobytes per second (7kb/s) for downloading Just to fix these distribution and phone signal problems is more important than token electric cars.

This is not to sound dismissive of the undeniable achievement of the engineering students of Makerere University. For one, it reminds us that whatever can be said about the much-declined standards at Uganda’s oldest university and one of the oldest institutions of learning in the country, Makerere University is still in overall terms the best university in Uganda. However, policy makers and analysts need to probe deeper into what the urgent priorities of Uganda are and how to attain them.