Museveni Tips investors on 7 clusters of value Addition
President Museveni has called upon investors to ensure value-addition to Uganda’s raw materials in order to make it to a first world economy.
“This economy can quickly become a first world economy. It is now entering the middle-income level, but it can easily go faster, why? Because the raw material base is already big,” Mr Museveni said, mentioning coffee, which is fetching Uganda $900 million (about Shs3.4 trillion).
He added that Uganda is also doing well on steel production.
“For a long time, we didn’t have investors in steel but now they’re rushing to develop a steel industry inside the African continent so that we don’t have to get steel from China, Ukraine or India,” he added.
While addressing the Lohana International Business Forum (LIBF) at Munyonyo in Kampala, the President highlighted seven key clusters of raw material base in Uganda ready for value addition on Wednesday.
These include Agro-processing (fruits…oil seeds, agricultural products), minerals (iron ore, steel, copper, phosphates, cobalt, gold, Nicol, lithium and niobium), fresh water resources to facilitate fish farming, forest products (furniture, ceiling boards, paper industry), knowledge sector like the automobile industry, services sector and pathogenic economy.
“These human diseases are a problem but also a very big opportunity. Our scientists here discovered one substance called Covidex which cured many people of corona. Uganda only lost 1,600 people to Corona,” he added.
About the automobile industry, the President said Uganda is on the right track when it comes to production of motor vehicles and would soon stop importing from Japan and other countries.
“We have designed our own buses and electric cars. I don’t want to hear about assembling, that one I will not accept. We must manufacture and fabricate here not assembling,” the President said, adding that part of the problem of Africa has been confining ourselves to producing raw materials and not adding value.
He gave an example of coffee whose global business in the world is $460 billion but the coffee producing countries only share $26 billion.
“When we produce and sell a kilo of coffee beans, we get $2.5 per kilo. But when somebody roasts and packages that same amount of coffee, gets $25 from our product and all the jobs are exported,” Mr Museveni said.
