The Kiira Motors Corporation Open Day on August 16th ,2024 at the modern Jinja based car manufacturing plant has the potential to redirect the very future of Uganda if the intended message is picked up, internalized and applied by Uganda’s teenagers and young adults.
For unlike the older generation whose capacity to acquire new skills and even adopt new attitudes are limited, the youth are more adaptable and can easily transform from the largely rural African/Ugandan outlook to the digitally driven 21st century they were born in.
Uganda’s youth are blessed with a stupendously rich inheritance as their country is endowed with minerals which can be used for vehicle parts manufacturing including iron ore for automotive steel; silica sand for glass; rare earth elements for glass glazing, catalytic converters, batteries, & electronics; graphite for brake pads; oil for plastics; cobalt & lithium for batteries; kaolin, marble and vermiculite for paint; tungsten, columbite, tantalite, chromite and titanium for metal alloys; copper for auto electric conductors and motors, among others.
Unlike the older generation that was raised to somehow think that high tech innovations are only done in rich countries, the young Ugandans are almost at par with the most advanced countries in access to knowledge and are therefore more willing to dare dive into sectors like vehicle (parts) design and development which the older people take to be a preserve of Europe, America, Japan and recently China.
Uganda’s Millennials have already shown how they can take on the world and win. In sport there is no more doubt after Dorcas Inzikuru, Stephen Kiprotich and later Joshua Cheptegei, Perus Chemtai, Halima Nakaayi and a string of others went out their and claimed their place at the very top of the world ranks.
Sadly so far, the cutting edge technological advances in the automotive sector made by the Uganda’s millennials supported by the government have not been well appreciated by many in the public.
For some, it is just lack of information and our rural mindset that makes it hard to believe that the latest state of the art electric buses that have plied our roads for five years are brain products of Uganda’s young people, who have been at it for a decade plus, ever since President Yoweri Museveni rode in that little green car around Makerere University campus.
Unfortunately, however, the colonized mindset that ascribes such capabilities only to the white man also afflicts some of the elite, who poison the masses that assume that the elite know a lot. So when a rich, educated or ‘successful’ person dismisses the Uganda made vehicles as ‘merely’ assembled in Uganda, the masses are bound to believe.
Little known to the masses is the tendency of the local elite to defend their interests, in this case profits made importation of (used) vehicles and huge harvests from the fuel industry. So the masses are likely to take longer to wake up to the opportunities offered by the growth of an indigenous vehicle industry. The call for increasing the local content going into Uganda made vehicle could thus be answered by sharp foreigners who will employ a few Ugandans and possibly not pay them fairly.
The Expo in mid-August will thus be a big eye opener to the opportunities that have been brewing for over a decade and become more visible everyday.
Uganda is far ahead of most of Africa in vehicle design , electric mobility technologies and manufacture, so the work pioneered by Kiira Motors Corporation under Science, Technology and Innovation in the Office of the President is poised to create over a million opportunities upstream, within and downstream of the automotive sector.
Time for the eyes of the youth to be opened to what their country is offering is now. Hundreds for instance have already enrolled for free training in handling the electric buses, and the opportunities are still open.
Hopefully, many young people will attend the Expo and learn first hand what the industry and the country has to offer. Those who may not make it physically will certainly be able to follow/catch up online – where they ‘stay’.
