During her weekly “ChatWithAnite” X space, Anite proposed the idea of creating a “Uganda Town,” where all products sold would be locally manufactured, advocating for this initiative over Chinatown, which sells imported products.
Anite noted that by shifting from purely commercial agriculture to value addition, we can maximize our God-given resources to create job opportunities and generate income for ourselves.
“We have maize, if you sell a kilo of maize without any value addition and converting it into cereals, you’re going to sell it at Ugx 1000 per kilo, but if you do value addition, you sell that corn of yours for not less than Ugx 50,000. If you do Posho value addition and convert it into Posho, you sell a kilo at Ugx 4000.” She said
The minister explained that the Chinese purchase our products, add value to them, and then sell them back in our supermarkets, profiting significantly. She emphasized that this must stop and suggested that we should add value to our own products before exporting them.
“You go and buy cereals that we feed our children, we import it, you go to the supermarket, all you see is products coming from China and why, and yet they come and buy the cereals, the maize from us. That is maize. What do you think that is in cereals? It is just corn, it is maize.What they call corn, they make it look some fancy, but it is maize..” she explained.
She urged coffee farmers to add value to their coffee, stating that exporting coffee beans alone is insufficient for increasing their income.
“How much value addition are we doing on our coffee?, It is, until recently that we’ve grown our coffee, export of coffee to 9 million bags of coffee. But we are still exporting coffee beans. We must make sure that actually we’re doing value addition to our coffee. There are over four products that I know you can get out of coffee. You can get body scrub, you can get body skin products, skincare products, you can get body Vaseline, You can drink that coffee.” Minister encouraged coffee exporters to adopt value addition.
Anite highlighted that the government, particularly her ministry, has a responsibility to get Ugandans away from just building Arcades to doing value addition.
“Ugandans are not poor people, when you go down town, most of those arcades are owned by Ugandans, we just have to to get these citizens away from building Arcades to doing value addition on our God given minerals. We have over 35 minerals. Can you imagine 35 minerals so far? How much have we exploited?” She asked.
Anite stated that the issue of unemployment in Uganda can be addressed only through the country’s industrialization.
“We have to be very deliberate and credit jobs. And how can we do that by industrializing our country. And let me tell you, it is not about big industries. I have traveled to China, to India, I can tell you the cottage industries outnumber the big industries. Ugandans must do value addition to creat jobs.” She said
However, she pointed out that the government is making significant efforts to reduce imports by providing incentives to those entering the manufacturing sector.
“Government is giving incentives, and one of the incentives that we have in place is that anybody who comes in the sector of manufacturing, we give them land for free.” She said.
