Prime
It is hard for people to claim a stake when they have no steak
Author, Benjamin Rukwengye. PHOTO/FILE.
What you need to know:
- When the government reworked the O-level curriculum a few years ago, the logical thing would have been to make agriculture compulsory.
Last year on a trip to New Hampshire, my cohort of the International Visitor Leadership Programme visited a local organization that uses agriculture to resettle refugees. The two women we found tilling their allotted pieces of land had just harvested Egg plants (Ntula),
They were excited and offered me several Ntulas, when I introduced myself as coming from Uganda. One was Congolese and the other was Rwandan. I was taken aback by the idea that people would flee the labors of life in Africa only to end up in the United States as farmers again.
So I asked the Project Lead, a Rwandan too, what the ladies made of it. He explained that the average African will have interacted with agriculture and farming at some point in their life, especially if they lived and grew up in rural Africa. So when they move to a new country, finding and settling into work as waiters and cleaners is a lot more demanding than the familiar farming routine.
They love it because there is no boss to order them around, or strict routines and timesheets to fill in, no overbearing clients to deal with, and the fact that they can talk to each other in their home languages.
This week, there was a story about a group of over 400 Ugandans who are allegedly held captive by a rebel group in Myanmar. Many Ugandans will not have heard of the country or even know how to locate it on the world map. It is also not the kind where people would be flocking to look for opportunity so it tells you how bad things must be back home.
Yet as you read this, some key players in the coffee sector are currently embroiled in a nasty fallout with well-connected fraudsters. Apparently, using the sector’s good fortunes and the government’s proclivity for losing money, this group swindled about $10 million.
This story is important in light of the tens of thousands of young people who graduated this week. It is probably even more important for the hundreds of thousands who, according to the national examinations body (UNEB), either failed the Primary Leaving Examination or didn’t even turn up to take it.
One way to get angry is to think of how much good the stolen $10 million would have made, had it been deployed - outside the reach of the prevalent sharks - as a seed fund for graduates or dropouts looking to set up businesses.
Another way is to wonder what impact it would have had on the coffee industry if that fund was designed to get young people into the sector.
It is said that over 70 percent of Uganda’s population earns from agriculture, and that the sector’s contribution to the economy is that much high.
In fact, in the year 2021-2022, earnings from coffee alone were a whooping US$ 875.95 million. This effectively marks out coffee as the highest-grossing product produced and exported by Ugandans.
If we were serious, we wouldn’t have millions of Ugandan children in school who have never seen a coffee plant. Hundreds of thousands of others have no idea what stages of the value chain exist and have opportunities for them.
If statistics are anything to go by, we have, apparently, lost about 10 million learners before they completed Primary Seven over the last decade.
We know where some of them are - especially the girls - but only through supposition. We don’t know for sure but it is most likely not on any coffee shambas.
When the government reworked the O-level curriculum a few years ago, the logical thing would have been to make agriculture compulsory. If the idea is to follow the money and secure the bag then doesn’t it make sense to show everyone where they can plug in?
Not everyone is going to get into agriculture and coffee growing but it is unlikely that the hundreds of thousands who don’t even complete primary school would make some of the choices they are making if they had enough information to run with.
Our young people are not dropping out of the system, selling their ancestral land to move into towns and ride Boda-Bodas, or taking loans and overrunning their visas to do jobs they despise because they want to. So they look at those who swindle public funds and get angry but can’t do anything about it because they don’t have the means.
Mr Rukwengye is the founder, Boundless Minds.
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