Coffee’s political storm in a teacup

One angle has it as Buganda’s lifeline and there’s plenty of suspicion and conspiracy theories that having failed to break Buganda, President Museveni is now going after this lifeblood by seeking to disband the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA).

Coffee-growing in Buganda as urged on by Katikkiro Charles Peter Mayiga is an extension of the “Etofaali” fundraising drive he spearheaded upon becoming chief minister in 2014.

The logic would be that as the Buganda Kingdom currently does not have the power to levy taxes on its subjects, one way to change their economic circumstances is by a do-it-yourself approach; if Baganda can grow in large numbers this important cash crop, it can bring in much-needed foreign exchange and an overall lifting of the rural economy.

As with the recent Uganda Law Society election, coffee is now acting as an unwitting barometer to measure the national political mood and mini-referendum on the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government.

The remark last week about the Baganda by Speaker of Parliament Anita Among couldn’t have come at a worse time and angered Museveni.

Her statement, caught by a live microphone, was one of those “A-good-Muganda-is-a-dead-one” type that live on for decades in Buganda’s history.

Among in that one statement undid all the political work Museveni has put in to repair the landslide sweep of Buganda by the National Unity Platform (NUP) party in the 2021 General Election.

As for the government, the main reason behind the consolidation of various agencies under ministries is the same challenge facing the Kenyan government: China is starting to demand the repayment of loans that went into building the new hydropower dams, dual-carriage bypasses, and airport upgrades.

About a third of Uganda’s GDP now goes to debt servicing and unlike the Western world, plagued by guilt over its colonial history and the new politically-correct identity politics, the Chinese tell it as it is and insist on being repaid.

China itself is currently in the grip of a structural economic slowdown, with the very real possibility that it could end up like Japan, an Asian economic tiger that appeared set to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy, only for it to slow down in 1991 and enter a three-decade period of near-zero GDP growth.

China needs back every dollar or yuan that it lent out. This is the broad background.

Given the frequent friction between the central government and Mengo since 1998, it’s curious that the Buganda government and political establishment are crying louder than the bereaved NRM government at the impending transfer of UCDA to the line Ministry of Agriculture.

The political analyst, Charles Rwomushana, appearing on a Kampala Luganda radio station last week, did in fact say he has first-hand experience to the effect that the UCDA is a typical Ugandan institution.

The UCDA, or many of its staff at least, according to Rwomushana has been helping Ugandan coffee farmers cut corners in quality control and grant certification to these farmers for their export to Europe and North America, allegedly in exchange for a bribe.

But for now, let’s turn to the crop in the news. Is coffee really the lifeblood of Buganda and the gold, that keeps Uganda afloat?

For all the romanticising and politicising of coffee’s vital place in Uganda’s economy, the reality is rather different.

Even with coffee as our main crop export earner, there has never emerged a seriously wealthy coffee-growing or coffee-exporting class.

Ever since the British colonial government turned its attention to the cultivation of coffee as an export cash crop in 1910, coffee in Uganda over the last 114 years has remained largely a smallholder and sharecropper sector.

In testimonies last week by various people on how coffee changed their lives, the typical case was of rural farmers whose benefit from coffee was to build a two-or three-bedroom house with iron sheets and glass windows or afford to send their children to school.

While important at an individual homestead, building a house in rural Bugisu or Kyotera is not a resounding success story of coffee in Uganda.

Other than the old Coffee Marketing Board plant in Bugolobi, Kampala, there is no iconic building in Uganda that stands out along the city or any town skyline as a symbol of coffee’s historic role in Uganda’s economy.

We don’t have a centralised settlement, an ecosystem of coffee growing, processing, exporting, schools, sports clubs, and housing in the way we have, say, the mini-townships of the Mehta’s Lugazi and the Madhvani’s Kakira that grew out of the sugarcane plantations.

The closest to a coffee ecosystem is that around the Bugisu Cooperative Union in Mbale with a processing factory, radio station, and storage.

The 1.8 million Ugandan coffee farmers are scattered across the country, each eking out a precarious existence in rural Uganda.

According to the UCDA, in the 2023-2024 financial year, Uganda earned $1.14 billion from coffee exports.

This sounds like a huge amount of money until you view it in per capita terms, which is about $25.4 for every one of Uganda’s 45 million population.

Even the main exporters of Ugandan coffee today are foreign-owned companies.

So, coffee is certainly the most important commodity ever produced by Uganda.

But it is not as decisive as it’s being made out to be.

Uganda still needs Western and Chinese funding and technical support to stay afloat.

Coffee – along with other exports like flowers, fish, cement, and gold – has not yet weaned Uganda of foreign aid in almost every area from public health to funding education and the Judiciary.