Once again Ugandan correspondent Arinaitwe Rugyendo takes RELATIVITY OnLine inside Africa and its complicated nuance and history. Rugyendo believes the past contributes to the current issues Africa faces, but also calls upon his people to take responsibility for themselves. He presents a realistic and hopeful vision of Africa’s future, one filled with potential and opportunity, if only the right steps are taken.
If I were to stand in front of a group of people from the other side of the world, what would I want them to know about Uganda and Africa? What might they be surprised by?
When I was thinking about what answers might fit this question, I realized with the coming of the internet, our world is becoming a smaller place. With no borders to cross, anybody could get all the information they want about Uganda by a click of the mouse.
But not everything can be accessed on the internet. There is so much to write about Uganda. There are stories of success, of brilliant people making ground-breaking scientific discoveries never recognized on the world stage, the best weather patterns in the world – where you don’t hear words like summer or winter – which results in the best greenery on the planet and the natural organic foodstuffs that dot the countryside. And I haven’t even mentioned the very warm and welcoming people. This is my Uganda, christened ‘The Pear of Africa’ by British Britain’s World War II Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill.
Beneath the reportage about wars, destruction, disease, dictators, corruption and underdevelopment, is a story of hope for the African continent; a continent usually known for its dark side, a continent many prefer to call ‘Third World.’
“There is a true picture of Africa, a picture of hope and progress, of opportunity and optimism,” I wrote back to my editor who asked me about my next topic for Relativity Online Magazine.
But most importantly, judging from the comments I got from my last month’s article, I realize that more than ever, Africa is faced with opportunity, meaning that the whole notion of it being called the ‘Third World’ is no longer holding ground. What we have is a flat planet, where Africa is slowly being exposed to similar environments and opportunities. Only the way we respond to what lays before us appears to be different.
Through the continued importation of technology and goods and services from the West, along with hundreds of tourists visiting the so-called ‘Dark Continent,’ business people hunting for its assets , industrialized nations donating huge amounts of money to African governments to keep Africa green, and countries like China dashing to Africa for its natural resources, Africa’s place in the international trade system has been guaranteed as the real donor to the rest of the world . . . and therefore is an ‘equal.’ And if that is the case, then we can safely say that there is no 1st, 2nd or 3rd world. The world is now flat!
Uganda, for instance, has the best coffee in the world, but because we export it as a raw material to the West, value is added to it. By extension, when the West sells this processed coffee back to Africa, it’s monetary value increases and is able to employ more people. If a kilogram of Ugandan coffee beans fetches about $10 on the world market, the processors in the West are able to earn ten times what Uganda takes home by exporting it back to Africa as a finished product. Therefore, in the world trade system, Uganda and the ‘third world,’ seem to be the real donors and matter most to the rest of the world. So, how can they be ‘Third World?’
The world should be told why gold necklace they wear, the diamond ring the buy for a wedding, the organic food they eat and the market that opens up to its product is African. The fact that Western industrialists and businessmen continue to interest themselves in African raw materials and then send these goods back to into the African market in exchange for money, means the world has been flat.
This is the world that 24 year-old Marlena from Australia, seemed to envisage while commenting on my last month’s article.
She said:
“Although I have not been to Uganda, I have visited Africa 3 times. Tanzania, Kenya and South Africa were all beautiful and I want to see more of Africa in the future. The word that kept going though my mind when I was there was ‘why?’ Why is a continent so rich in natural resources, so poor, so malnourished, so embroiled in conflict, and so lost? I mean no disrespect with this question, but just wonder why so much potential is being untapped. A part of me wonders if the problem is learned helplessness, the leftover psychological scars of colonization.”
My response is straight and simple- bad leadership and poor technology!
Although every development-oriented African has been grappling with this same question for the last 50 years, colonialism, which is largely blamed for our underdevelopment, has been away for nearly the same time. True, colonialism left a huge scar on many African potential economies. Their growths have been largely hampered by the effects of colonialism. Africa was largely Balkanized as different colonial masters competed over its resources. And there is no doubt that much of the fine infrastructure we see dotting Western capitals like Brussels was largely built using the plundered resources of Africa. The question of slavery and how it depleted Africa of its human resources is a further vivid example of why Africa largely lagged behind.
But I do not entirely blame this for the African misery. No African country is under colonialism now. I believe we were colonized largely because we were disorganized. Our chiefs were greedy and gave out huge resources and land to the colonialists for exchange of things like necklaces. Colonialism cannot be the reason why this disorganization is still with us today.
The answer is that the African political leadership is corrupt and bankrupt. 400 million dollars of Uganda’s annual 3 billion dollar budget is stolen by public officials and politicians every year. What this means is that if the leadership cared, this stolen money would be invested in developing technologies and add value to our raw materials, so we can more ably compete with the rest of the world.
Africa needs three things: good and patriotic leadership, Western markets for our products and push for more science. But because the leadership has played into the unprincipled stereotypical classification of Africa as ‘third world,’ ‘developing,’ and ‘backward,’ meaning that nothing good can come out of the continent, a sense of hopelessness keeps hovering over everyone, with no attempt to harness our huge natural resources.
But now that Africa has been exposed through the media and the internet, many of our scientists are beginning to get down to work.
One such scientist is a man named Vincent Twinomusinguzi, a Ugandan who has invented organic bio-chemical compounds that that can preserve organic foods in their natural form for a long time, preventing animal and plant diseases. It is a near guarantee for food production and security, and also includes compounds that can cure human ailments. What this revolution is hoping to achieve is that it will be transforming Uganda, and Africa, into the undisputed organic food basket for the rest of the world. All this is happening from a ‘Third World’ country, yet inventors are supposed to come from the ‘Developed World,’ an indication that slowly, the world is becoming flat.
From Arinaitwe Rugyendo. . .
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