Prime
Stop this electric car rubbish
Author: Alan Tacca. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
‘‘You do not have the billions of dollars that serious car-makers invest in this business”
Whether you are a gun-toting military general or an ordinary cattle-keeper who also owns a country, you cannot just wish your citizens into making electric cars. Or any cars for that matter.
Designing, developing and manufacturing road-going cars is not in the league of jokes that Uganda’s Myoga and Parish Development Model policy peddlers sell to illiterate villagers and semi-idle youths.
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When newspapers started spreading the story that Makerere University teachers and students had made an electric car that would soon be in production, I immediately understood that either the chaps at Makerere were honest but patently naïve; or they were very smart but extremely cunning.
With the best possible intentions, I have written several articles on the subject. You did not have to be an ‘expert’ on the automobile industry to debunk the projection.
Why? Apart from ‘Mulwana’s’ batteries, Uganda does not have a single industrial outfit that fabricates car components; whether for the transmission of power, the suspension, electronic control or electrical functions. Not even tyres or window glass.
That is not to mention the frames and bodyshells in which these components are fitted, or the heavy semi-automated machines that mould, fold and/or weld these shells.
I have deliberately postponed reference to the power unit of the car, a mystery that our Makerere University-linked corporate bigwigs alternately claim or run away from.
It is hard trying to piece together the journey of this project without doubting the integrity of the characters involved.
It is harder to understand why sections of the media keep treating a rather mundane university student ‘practical’ exercise as an automatic contender for industrial production.
And it is hardest to understand why the leader of a whole country, surrounded by over 80 ministers and perhaps 150 presidential advisors, continues to be misled and appears to believe that yesterday, or tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, an electric vehicle developed by Ugandans will be cruising on Uganda and East Africa’s roads.
Someone up there, explain how you will establish the network of component makers (or source) to supply just one car-maker who, at best, is dreaming of producing only a few thousand vehicles per year.
Are you planning to make the most primitive road-going electric car on the planet, but at the cost of a Formula-1 race-track Aston Martin?
You have squandered billions of shillings, but you do not have the billions of dollars that serious car-makers invest in this business.
My prediction of several years ago still stands. Gen Museveni can wish and command many things to happen. But he and his current bunch of scientists and ‘inventors’ will never see a Ugandan-designed and (genuinely) Ugandan-made electric car in mass production in their lifetimes. Period.
The same applies to disgruntled super-fantast Jeremy Ntambi, whether he remains sidelined or takes control of the racket.
You do not need high-sounding academic title bearers masquerading as automobile industry experts to assemble the handful of fat Chinese buses I see in the city; be they fossil-fuelled or electric.
There is absolutely nothing original about that. Many Third World countries make such arrangements; and without the hype, or squandering the billions of shillings Uganda has squandered instead of sorting out the city’s potholes.
We have people from serious countries on our soil. And I doubt whether our professors have a special right to make us a laughing stock. We already have the dubious reputation as a country of thieves. If this myth of an electric car made by Ugandans persists, we might earn another reputation as lunatics.
Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.
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