Prime
Kenzo fell short, Mr President
Author: Phillip Matogo. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- Government must provide other forms of support in the shape of tax reliefs
On Monday, President Museveni tweeted: “The service sector, including preachers are employing many Ugandans. The music industry is employing about 1.4 million people. There’s a boy called @eddykenzoficial, who came and briefed me about their issues. The government will help them to protect their innovations. Otherwise, with the peace we have, this sector has been thriving.”
I believe that the deputations and emissaries to Mr Museveni have narrowed down the issues of creative economy to copyright protection. This is not only wrong, it is well-nigh countervailing.
Allow me, if you will, to explain. I worked in Nakasongola Barracks for 15 years, at the ministry of defence ordnance factory called Luwero Industries Limited.
While there, I curated Songs of Kiguli. This is a poetry anthology written by the children of Kiguli Army Primary School and published in America.
We produced four anthologies over a four-year period, along with my second book: Whispers in the Sky.
These five books convinced me I should leave the barracks to pursue my passion in creative writing and its related activity of promoting the spoken word artistry scene.
To say that we suffered is an understatement.
Things got so bad that, for a run of over eight months, I lived weekly off shs20,000 per week!
You may dismiss my efforts as having been misplaced, arguing that the money is in the music industry and not its auxiliaries such as performance poetry, and writing.
However, in economics, there is what we call linkages.
These, in lay terms, speak to the interdependence of varied sub-sectors in creative economy. Thus, the music industry does not operate in a vacuum.
Accordingly, I and several poets wrote songs for musicians.
We thereby hitched our wagons to the musicians’ stars with respect to capital accumulation and profit.
Thus, it is fair to say that when part of the creative economy is struggling, it yanks askew other links in the chain of sales, distribution and production thereof.
Rock bottom being a college education, I learnt from my locust years that the protection of intellectual property is not a singular nor superseding concern in creative economy.
Instead, government should provide direct funding to creative industries. It must also provide funding through arms-length bodies such as, say, the Poets Association of Uganda.
This will stop such organisations from seeking funding abroad, as the Uganda Women Writers’ Association (FEMRITE) was forced to do. As a result, FEMRITE’s principles and practices do not always jibe with government policies and purposes.
Also, the government must provide other forms of support in the shape of tax reliefs. This, as in the United Kingdom, must provide reliefs not only for creative individuals but also for museums, galleries, the performing arts and other art forms. ,
Government support for the cultural industries and the arts in Uganda will in turn grow the Uganda economy by strengthening the economic linkages in terms of job creation, investments.
However, these linkages are not there today. That is why the president and his visitors tend to boil down the issues affecting creative economy to a single issue: copyright protection.
As a result, creative institutions are left in limbo. While creative individuals, those with access to Mr Museveni, laugh all the way to their bank counters.
If this is what we call “thriving”, then give me declining creative economies any day.
Conversely, a thriving creative economy embodies a given country’s endowments to the extent that it redefines them towards national identity and development.
This is why Pushkin reflects Russia; Shakespeare reflects Britain, the Louvre reflects France while Hollywood reflects America. What, pray tell, reflects Uganda?
Mr Matogo is a professional copywriter
