Come Uganda coffee, dance with me

Value addition has become the most fetishised thing in Uganda. It is touted as the magic wand that will unlock an industrial revolution, and firmly launch Uganda into a middle income economy. Perceived critics and skeptics have been denounced as unpatriotic. In the name of “value addition” of, especially, coffee, billions of Uganda shillings have been given over the years to good men, wonderful women, and false prophets including some who were supposed to teach Ugandans to drink coffee!

Value addition is not rocket science, good people. It’s something Uganda has actually done well – here and there. For 60 years, Uganda has possibly had one of the most precious “value added” products. It is a gin called “Uganda Waragi”. I have been around the world a bit, and everywhere I have gone and met someone who drinks and has visited Uganda, in nearly 90 per cent of the cases they ask the same question; “why is Uganda Waragi” not available in international markets. Some have even told me that it is “several times better than Russian vodka”, and other gins. The global vodka market is projected to reach $104 billion by 2030. If Uganda Waragi is better than any vodka out there, and it was globally available, we probably would get $5-10 billion, why not, and we wouldn’t be getting so agitated over coffee.

The reason Uganda Waragi isn’t a global drink has partly to do with the product politics of its maker East African Breweries, but that is only a small part of the story. Uganda’s troubled history, and the universal problem of market barriers for African products are a bigger part of the problem.

Andrew Rugasira, in his frustratingly difficult journey with Ugandan coffee, perhaps appreciated this better than anyone else. That the primary hurdle to realising greater value for our products is not a lack of value addition (though that is important), but global market access.

Value addition in coffee, ultimately, is no more than five things; finely roasting it, grinding it, turning it into instant, creating things like chocolate, or ice cream out of it, and marketing it. I have taken coffee notes in Nairobi supermarkets, Ugandan supermarkets, and Entebbe airport to see how many ground, roasted, or instant coffee brands produced in each country are on the shelves.

The Ugandan coffee brands (especially roasted and ground) are more than double the number of those of Kenya I see in Nairobi.

So, when it comes to basic value addition, Uganda has actually done a passing grade job. There is really not too much a difference between the German coffee (that they make from African and South American coffees) and ours. Or rather, the difference has nothing to do with coffee.

First, as we noted earlier, the key difference is that theirs have access to rich western and Asian markets. However, a large part of the big money Starbucks and the Germans make from coffee, has to do with something very simple but difficult to do – the story they tell about it. We see this elsewhere; the reason the beauty world pays over 10 times for a Chanel body lotion, than our Movit body lotion isn’t because the former is better. Movit is likely better. However, Chanel is a more glamorous story, and that is its biggest value add.

Also, some of the most lucrative value addition isn’t coming from industrial processes, but at a boring level. Some of the most valued coffee from Colombia is honey coffee. To cut a long story short, the beans are dried in honey. That sends the price sky high.

So, we need to discard the myths and shibboleths around value addition. Among this, is the idea of value addition for a foreign market. There is virtually no global product that was first made as a value add for the international market (except perhaps the limited case of the World Wide Web).

All global brands, phones, clothes, foods, cars, drinks, name it, were made primarily for the local market, and then grew into global products from there.

Uganda is currently producing about 7 million coffee bags of 60 kilogrammes. We drink only a miserly 510,000 (0.73 per cent) of that. It’s possible to get Ugandans to drink maybe 2.5 million bags, but it won’t be via teaching them how to drink coffee. “Invented” in Ethiopia, coffee drinking grew globally from the Middle East. Why? Because the deserts chased people into urban settlement early, and a café culture evolved. The Industrial Revolution in Europe drove more people, workers, into urban areas. Coffee drinking needed weary workers needing energy to grow.

If Uganda got heady economic growth and urbanisation brought 10 million working people with good pay into towns and cities in the next five years, they could well drink all the coffee we produce, and swig all the high value brews one can throw at them.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”.

Twitter@cobbo3