We’re children of our 16th Century slave-trading chiefs

Author: Charles Onyango Obbo. PHOTO/FILE

What you need to know:

Power in Uganda today, the realm of ideas and philosophy, the ownership of the economy and means of production, are exercised and controlled by Ugandans born between 1942 and 1988. 

As the agreement between the Uganda government, and the Uganda Vinci Coffee Company (UVCC), owned by controversial Italian businesswoman Enrica Pinetti continues to give us all migraines, we are missing a big historical element of the saga.

The agreement guarantees Vinci access to a portion of green coffee beans Uganda’s coffee farmers produce, and then gives it tax waivers and other sweeteners as long as the Entebbe Expressway.
We need to get a few things out of the way. It is not true as some have argued that the agreement gives Vinci a monopoly over coffee. Secondly, the broad goal of adding value to Uganda’s coffee before export is admirable. The problem is that the agreement goes about it in the worst possible way.

In the process, it says some very uncomfortable things not how about the NRM government after 37 years in power, and two generations of Ugandans, your columnist included. It is about a colossal failure of imagination, and political poverty that has left us responding to the demands of the time in the same way our African forefathers who were chiefs and generals between 1500 and 1900 did when the slave traders, the missionaries, and the Arab and European colonialists arrived on our lands in the new world that had emerged from feudalism, and in the 19th century.

That world had been dramatically changed by the Industrial Revolution. Seafaring had taken a big step forward; the global population was expanding rapidly; the scramble for resources had been unleashed, and globalisation had started its unstoppable march.
The central questions were labour to produce for that world (hence slavery); the belief systems and organising logic (hence the spread of Islam and Christianity; the demand for resources and markets (hence colonialism).  The African chiefs and generals who dabbled in the slave trade sold people, a resource that they didn’t own, or hadn’t nurtured. 

The missionaries triumphed over souls and minds whose development they hadn’t been part of. The chiefs and kings who accepted beads, mirrors, and old guns in exchange for land and natural resources from the colonialists, gave away soils and riches that weren’t theirs to give.

The four dynamics above; labour, organising ideology, resources, and markets are still present, but in different and more intense forms. The Vinci coffee is really all about creating wealth for a population expanding at speed; meeting the ever-growing global demand for a caffeine fix; and how to reward the labour (and capital) that makes the fix possible.
When that question was asked of the government and us, our answer was much like the slave trading and weak chiefs of the past centuries; the government gave them coffee on terms that made it free for the foreign investor. The government doesn’t grow coffee; a crop grown on land that it doesn’t own; with labour it doesn’t pay for; raised with capital that it neither owns nor provided.

In the bureaucratic and political class, there was a philosophical capitulation, of the kind that made the triumph of Islam and Christianity in these parts possible: the acceptance that it was fine to privilege a foreign investor over Ugandan capital and to distort the coffee market against local entrepreneurs using the power of the state, and distribute the economic fortunes that comes with it away from “native” and possibly “pagan” hands.

Power in Uganda today, the realm of ideas and philosophy, the ownership of the economy and means of production, are exercised and controlled by Ugandans born between 1942 and 1988. That is why the Vinci deal is only partly reflective of the shortcomings of the NRM today. It is also indicative of our failure to build an impregnable ideological wall against such bad ideas.

Not to sound jargony, two examples will illustrate the point. As the post-Cold war and globalised world broke out, a new era of stability and growth came to be in Africa. However, there were millions of unbanked people outside the formal economy and its financial system. Some clever East Africans came up with M-Pesa, and Kenya telecom giant Safaricom shepherded it. The rest is history. Then a small rural Kenyan bank called Equity developed a model for the market women and small businesses (it even poured sawdust on its floors so they wouldn’t feel ashamed walking in with their muddy boots and shoes). It is now one of Africa’s banking giants.

And at a philosophical level, the Kenyan political, intellectual, and bureaucratic classes agreed that they would privatise and liberalise the economy, but it would all be via the stock exchange so as many Kenyans as could get a piece of it. There are many ways to approach that, but put simply, these are what didn’t happen in Uganda cohesively. The Vinci coffee deal is the child of our defeat.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3