How many PhDs does it take to install a traffic light in Kampala?

If you slaughter a five-year-old Ankole bull and then hang the carcass by the pelvic bone in a cooler for 48 hours the beef will be 30 per cent more tender than that from a similar bull that did not receive this spa…rather special treatment.

I don’t know what happens if you hang the bull by the horns, the legs, or the gonads. I don’t know what happens if you hang the bull before slaughtering it, if you soak it in a cattle dip, run a hot bath with scented candles and play it soft jazz music.

I also don’t know what happens if the bull is four or six years, instead of five, or if it is kept in the cooler for 72 or 120 hours, instead of 48. In fact, I have not even read the abstract let alone the full thesis but what I just shared is a summary of one of the PhDs that was awarded by Makerere University this week.

We know this from a wonderful two-page spread in yesterday’s edition of this newspaper that summarised the key research areas and findings of some of the newly-awarded PhDs. It made for an interesting read.

Apart from knowing how to grab Ankole bulls by the pelvis, your columnist also learnt, for instance: that building houses in wetlands instead of planting yams increases food insecurity; that folks like the idea of fighting carbon output as long as it does not stop them from clearing forests to harvest firewood and grow food; and that wild animals in Lake Mburo National Park still kind of like to hang out in the nearby ranches that were carved out of the park a generation or so ago. No kidding.

It is possible that a lot of this is revolutionary stuff. And your columnist, if it hasn’t always been blindingly obvious, cannot hold a candle to our best and brightest academics, having had an academic career than was more smoking ruins than bright sparks. I have always been less viva voce, more viva la vida.  But we need to go out on a limb here and say maybe it is time for us to have a conversation about bridging the gap between what our society needs and where we invest our meagre financial and mental resources.

Let’s take a few ‘pedestrian’ scenarios. Every day the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of motorists in Kampala lose manhours trying to navigate through traffic, a lot of which is caused by inconsiderate and unregulated road use. Many of these motorists are smart people, including PhD students, and post-doc fellows. 

Why then is it that most junctions do not have traffic lights to regulate the flow of cars? Has anyone invented a low-cost traffic light system that can be manufactured locally and meet this clear demand? Also, when the installed lights fail they are often off for several days, ostensibly as spare parts are sourced and freighted in. Is this an area of academic interest in how to build replacement parts locally or even building a simple just-in-time supply chain?

If such inquiries require difficult manufacturing processes how about someone looking into the efficacy of traffic police officers standing in the middle of road junctions with signalised traffic lights and then ignoring them to direct the traffic manually? If the engineering PhDs can’t build models to see who is more efficient – man or machine – maybe social anthropologists can tell us how such conflicting signals contribute to disregard for the rules or help entrench a culture of impunity.

With any luck realigning research interests to local needs might spur home-based innovation, as we have seen with clever testing kits for diseases, and lead to local production, say of cheaper tractors, better solar panels or irrigation kits and so on.

One way of doing this is to create a financial incentive, say of a million dollars every year, to take the best market-facing PhD thesis from the pages of theory onto the fast track of production. 

I know that sometimes the pursuit of knowledge can be an end in itself, and that there are thousands of PhDs to show for it. But what we really want to see, a few months down the road, are thousands of Ankole bull beef carcasses swinging their 30 per cent tender hips in giant coolers, headed to the world beef markets. 

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and  poor man’s freedom fighter. 

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Twitter; @Kalinaki