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STI minister’s drive has given Uganda revolutionary vehicle by Joachim Buwembo

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Uganda’s minister for Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) Dr. Monica Musenero is a woman on a mission. An epidemiologist of renown who rose to international prominence during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa some years back, she returned home in time to be a key national adviser on handling the Covid-19 pandemic. When the worst of Covid was over a year ago, she was appointed STI minister, which is under the presidency.

A scientist par excellence, Dr. Musenero taught had conducted research at Makerere University for 16 years before going international. Her scientific activism as a lecturer was student-like, leading to several radical changes in the examination formats. But now as a top national leader, would the same brand of activism work for the desired transformation?

During the pandemic, the government had been throwing money at Covid medicine researchers, so when Dr. Musenero became the minister for STI, the local artisans, known as Jua Kali in the region, started thronging her doorstep. Whenever the president gave them a nod of appreciation at trade fairs, they rushed to the new STI department seeking funds for their innovations.

Referred for guidance

While the good doctor was always approachable, her questions to the Jua Kali artisans drew blanks. One innovator was pushing his new engine but when asked what would make someone buy it, he had no answer. So she referred him, like many others, to the government automobile maker, Kiira Motors Corporation (KMC) for guidance. The scientists at KMC are from the university and they tried to make the jua kalis understand systematic development of innovation, where the word “prototype” featured prominently. The jua kalis mostly walked away disgruntled. This included the man who couldn’t say what his engine was meant to do. They just wanted the government to give them money for their products.

But the disgruntled jua kalis hadn’t reckoned with Musenero’s persistence. After they ran away and stopped looking for her, Musenero reversed the chase and, like a good African mother, started hunting for the unruly artisans. Turning up at their workshops and even homes, she kept asking for their innovations. Some of them go by names like Ghetto Crew, with their attire, dreadlocks and attitude reflecting rebellion.

Some started going back to KMC for guidance, but with their excitement dimmed almost to zero. Painfully, they are being taken through systematic product development, including defining their vision, proof of concept, prototype, training, feasibility study and quality assurance.

Got government funding

The engine man, called Rogers Mubiru, has finally got government funding, and developed an exciting trike that is not just a strong tricycle in name, but also has triple purposes in that it can cheaply carry one tonne of produce, generate enough electricity for a (farmer’s) household and irrigate several acres with water in a day.

There is excitement in Uganda’s agricultural and industrial circles over the trike. Mubiru is now a champion and inspiration for convincing jua kalis to accept to be trained in systematic product development.

The irony of the new STI approach is that the jua kalis are on the path to becoming more relevant for research than the university community. A couple of months back, during Makerere’s centenary celebrations, top professors dismissed the 100 PhDs awarded during the university’s 72nd graduation ceremony. The dismissive dons argued that the doctoral research topics are chosen by the funders, who are largely foreign, in search of knowledge that is in their interest, not the country’s.

Of course, the government has been funding research, only that it is not to the magnitude of the foreign organisations, especially at PhD level. So the new approach of taking jua kalis through the systematic approach to research for development is likely to be beneficial to the nation. The revolutionary trikes may be too few in a year, but it is a start. It is likely to inspire more jua kalis who have been impatient with Dr Musenero’s questions, and accessing government funding should be enough incentive.

Becoming famous is another and, if one’s product becomes commercially successful, what more can a struggling Jua Kali artisan wish for?

Buwembo is a Kampala-based journalist. E-mail: buwembo@gmail.com

Strictly Personal

Off we go again with public shows, humbug and clowning, By Jenerali Uliwengu

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The potential contestants in the approaching elections are already sizing themselves up and assessing their chances of fooling their people enough for them to believe that they are truly going to “bring development” to them.

 

I mean, you have to be a true believer to believe that someone who says they have come to offer their services to you as your representative in the local council or in the national parliament and they tell you that they are going to build your roads to European standards, and your schools are going to be little Eatons; your hospitals are going to be better and more lavishly equipped than the Indian hospitals, where many of our high-placed people go for treatment, and your water supply will be so regular that you have to worry only about drowning!

 

I mean no exaggeration here, for the last time we had the occasion to listen to such clowns — five years ago — we heard one joker promise he would take all his voters to the United States for a visit.

 

He was actually voted to parliament, or at least the cabal acting as the electoral commission says he was. He has never revisited that promise as far as I can remember, but that must surely be because he is still negotiating with the American embassy for a few million visas for his voters!

 

Yes, really, these are always interesting times, when normally sober people turn out to be raving mad and university dons become illiterate.

 

Otherwise tell me how this can happen: Some smart young man or woman shows up in your neighbourhood and puts up posters and erects stands and platforms for the campaign and goes around the constituency declaring his or her ardent desire to “develop” your area by bringing in clean and safe water, excellent schools, competent teachers, the best agricultural experts as extension officers, etc, etc.

These goodies

At the time this clown is promising all these goodies, you realise he has been distributing money and items such as tee-shirts, kitenge prints, khangas, caps as well as organising feeding programmes, where everyone who cares can feed to satiation and drink whatever they want with practically no limitation.

Seriously, I have been asking myself this question: Would you employ a young man who shows up at your front porch and tells you he is seeking a job to develop your garden and tells you that, while you are thinking whether to employ him, “Here is money for you and your family to eat and drink for now!”

Now, if we think such a man should be reported to the police or taken to a mental institution, why are we behaving in exactly the same way?

Many a time we witness arguments among countrymen trying to solve the conundrum of our continued failure to move forward economically, despite our abundant resources, and it seems like we haven’t got a clue.

But is this not one of the cues, if not probably the most important clue, that we have not found a way to designate our leaders?

It ought to be clear to any person above childhood that this type of electoral system and practice can never deliver anything akin to development or progress.

Now, consider that we have being doing this same thing over and over — in many of our countries elections follow a certain periodicity like clockwork — but we have not discovered the truth.

Put simply, our politics is badly rigged against our people, and elections have become just devices to validate the political hooliganism of the various cabals running our countries like so many Mafia families.

Knee-jerk supporters

We have so demeaned our people, whom we have turned into knee-jerk supporters of whoever gives them food and drink around election time, that now they say that at least at election time it is their turn to eat, which means, naturally, that at all other times it is the turn of the ones who “bring development” to the people.

Clearly, this is not working, and it is no wonder that dissatisfaction and frustration are rife, as our people cannot put a finger to the thing that holds them back.

Apart from these sham elections, from time to time, the rulers organise shows designed to make the people believe that somebody is concerned about their problems.

We have one such masquerade happening in Tanzania right now, where public meetings are organised so people can vent their frustration. But these will never solve any problems; they are just shows.

If the elections we have been holding had any substance, there would not be any need for such public shows, except those organised by those people we elected.

Where are they? What is the use of spending so much money and other resources to erect and maintain a political system that has to be propped by public shows, where people come to vent their grievances over the hopelessness of the system in place?

I am just asking.

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Strictly Personal

Road deaths are symbolic of our national failure, By Tee Ngugi

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“Killer roads claim 25 lives,” screamed the headline of the Daily Nation on March 18. Among this number were 11 Kenyatta University students, who died in a grisly road accident on the Nairobi- Mombasa highway.

The report gave chilling statistics on the ever-worsening road carnage. The 25 died in a span of three days. Between January and February 20, a staggering 649 people lost their lives on our roads.

What these statistics show is that we are well on our way to breaking the annual record of deaths on our roads.

Roads are deadlier

In a column in 2022, Kenyan roads are deadlier than some of the battlefields, I gave some comparative statistics to illustrate just how deadly our roads are.

I stated: “In 2021, more than 4,000 people lost their lives (in Kenya). By contrast, the UK, with a population of 65 million people and 32 million cars, recorded 1,400 deaths on the roads in 2021.

“In Germany, within a comparable period, about 2,500 people died on the roads in a population of 85 million people and 48 million cars.
“Thus, Kenya, with a population of 50 million people and only two million cars, registered more deaths on the roads.”

I went on to show that the deaths on our roads in 2021 were twice the number of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan in a 20-year period.

If these statistics are not enough to wake up our somnolent officials, then nothing ever will.

Not the avoidable deaths during droughts. Not the deaths caused by collapsing buildings. Not the sky-high cases of femicide.

Not the cry of millions who sleep hungry every day as officials fly around in helicopters. Not the alarming numbers of street families.
Not the despair of millions of unemployed youth. Not the squalor in our unplanned towns and cities.

Nothing will wake these officials. In any case, as the Daily Nation of March 19 on globe-trotting officials showed, when awake, our officials are travelling to the next European destination or, as the countless cases of theft being reported almost daily in all media show, they are busy lining their already saturated pockets.

Now, Kenya wants to send its police to Haiti to rein in marauding gangs that control most of the capital. Do our officials, or citizens, ever ask themselves how Haiti became what it is?

Cursed by God

Haiti is not cursed by God. It got that way because of systematic plunder by officials over the years.

It became what it is because of officials not performing their duties to required standards, and not being sanctioned for it.

It became that way because its officials love nothing more than to cavort in Paris or Miami, rather than think about how to transform the lives of their people.

Every day in our papers, we read about the conduct of our officials that mirrors the behaviour that led to Haiti becoming the broken country it is today.

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator

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