Two Things Africans Must Seriously Work on now now!!!!

Firstly, Africans must unite at whatever cost if they are to survive being completely alienated and displaced by the next 500years from their mother land. We must learn to unite and begin to love doing thing together as a group of same identity. We have to look at each other as life partners and allies in all spheres of our existences.  We must drop the individual mentality and begin taking pride in working in groups and associations.

Black people must understand that they must love,build and support fellow blacks instead of idolizing and raising the white and the Asian?

Those long held and hard wired social fabrics /prejudices that have perpetuated disunity must be dismantled and construct new formulae for concrete togetherness.  If not, then be informed that,

The curve for economic displacement and land alienation is linear already and Africans still seem to be  in a deep slumber.   Take a simple observation at Uganda and Ugandans alone. More than 65% of the GDP is already controlled by aliens. The largest individual land owners and lard lords are already aliens. This has been possible in just only 30yrs.

Secondly, To rewind a little,  African kings and chief met immense difficulty to push away  the colonial masters as they still used rudimentary artillery of bow and arrow, spears and shields the assault rifle of the white man. Analyzing today’s reality, our Africans communities/countries are still as vulnerable as those kings and chief were. 

The Arab merchants tricked our leaders with things like “mirrors” and exchanged them for ivory and strongest men and women. The terms of trade are still similar even today. Take an example of how much from agricultural harvest one has to sell to sell to exchange for an iPhone 6. How can you explain the flux of our well educated young people to work as “modern day slaves” in the Arab world? Hundreds drowning in the Mediterranean Sea running attempting to run away from their motherlands?

Therefore, Africa must develop her own technologies to competitively grow her economies and guarantee its security. The continent is on the importing side of technology and military hardware. Unless the present “rulers” turn the course of this unfortunate phenomenon, it is a recipe for Africans to forever live on their knees to the powers that be.

End.

With Asian investors, Ugandans come back to the drawing board!

President Museveni has been on a crusade and has personally traversed the globe to wow foreign investors with the country’s investment potential. As a payback, a number of investors, conspicuously and predominantly of Asian origin have brought their investments to the country. This skewed investor phenomenon is a predicament by government actions that tend to repel other investors from Europe and America.

Corruption by government bureaucrats makes it hard for an ethical investor from Europe or American to make it through, leaving the game to Asians who can maneuver through the red tape by complying with bribery demands and trickery. Secondly, the governments paranoia of being held accountable by America and western democracies has pushed it into courtship with Asian countries especially china of recent, who can perpetuate impunity and hardly have any interest in domestic politics of the country.

This trend is detrimental both in short term and long term as it undermines the intended benefits of transforming the country’s economy and its people, how? The country is losing investments of cutting edge technologies from America and Europe. This polarized investor presence creates resentment in the local population that may culminate into a similar or a repeat of 1972 history of Indian expulsion. This is not to forget the xenophobic tendencies as most recently witnessed in South Africa.

The bigger problem though is that the local population that hoped to earn a better living through jobs created is getting a raw deal. The outrageously very small pennies paid in wages and unfavorable working conditions only enslave the locals to exploitation with no hope beyond subsistence living. It cannot be left unsaid of the discrimination in allocation of jobs that matter, these being given to fellow foreigners at the expense of un employed yet able and qualified citizens. With this, even skills transfer is a dream further away from reality.

The indigenous potential investor’s efforts are frustrated and pushed to the periphery as government allocates land, business contracts and investment incentives skewed to favor foreigners. This is dangerous as a country cannot enjoy the trickle down effects out of successful investments, with an already existing policy of open profit repatriation.   

Therefore, that said the government should re-think and act fast for the plight of its citizenry. The local investors, big or small should be budded and given more preference over any other.  An investor survey jointly done by UBOS, UIA and Ministry of Finance indicated that domestic private investors created more jobs compared to their foreign counterparts.( New Vision, May 2, 2013 Pg.16) The Asian tigers transformed by organizing and promoting small scale enterprises/industries but not through setting huge manufacturing factories.

The government’s paranoia of American, European investors should be rejected and neutralized with better governance practices. The red tape should be overhauled and professional work ethics implored while handling investors seeking guidance from government agencies.

Better policies and laws should be drafted and implemented to protect citizens from unfair exploitation. Such laws should extend to protect the environment that investors seem to care less and are ruthless to destroy it.

Author

Bruce Nkuba

nkubabruce@yahoo.com