#OutToLunch: Africa must level up if the continent is to create a trillionaire

By Denis Jjuuko

There was hullabaloo recently when the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, yet again launched another initial public offer (IPO) this time for his space exploration, satellite internet, artificial intelligence and social media company SpaceX. The IPO made him the world’s first trillionaire in US, not Zimbabwean, Dollars!

It didn’t take long before the usual commentators in Uganda and elsewhere on the continent went into overdrive with many of them running out of superlatives in praise of Musk. Some owned him as an African, since he was born in South Africa while others blamed everyone else but themselves on the state of innovative companies on the continent. Why aren’t Africans developing AI products and companies, many wondered.

Many people have probably tried but to scale them is difficult. Look at how many Africans have developed payment applications. In every innovative hub in Kampala, Nairobi, Lagos or Johannesburg, there are many people developing all sorts of payment apps but they remain relatively unknown outside the ecosystems in which they are being developed.

Once in a while, a founder will get some funding and there will be some noise evidenced by billboards in various capitals featuring Nigerian musicians and once the rental fees are done, you will hardly hear about them. Until when they receive another round of investments. I have a feeling many founders’ dream ends at raising a certain amount of funding. Once they have money to pay bills, they sit and relax a bit. I hope I am wrong.

But I wouldn’t blame many founders or entrepreneurs on the continent. Creating innovative products like building re-usable rockets or even AI applications that can be scaled requires enormous resources that are hard to realize. How many founders or entrepreneurs will refuse a job that pays money immediately to work on a product whose success can’t be easily determined? They need to pay bills and can’t always look on when their beautiful ex-girlfriends remind them that they couldn’t “eat potential.”

Many American innovators have become successful because the government provides them tax breaks and subsidies. Elon Musk wouldn’t have been able to scale Tesla and SpaceX if he wasn’t receiving a lot of subsidies, soft loans and even contracts from the US government. How many African governments offer contracts to a start up? How many provide soft loans and subsidies? Nobody wants to do so. We easily run to Indian multinationals to develop simple things like an integrated website for tax collection.

Had SpaceX or Tesla been founded on the African continent, most likely Elon Musk would still be operating in a shared space at an innovation hub at Ntinda Complex or Motiv around Bugoloobi. Unless of course if he knew someone who knew someone whose relative worked in the presidential palace.

If he was lucky, he would have been given a flyer to borrow money at 10% payable in four years and he would need to be super lucky to actually get the loan amount credited on his account. Banks don’t look at you if you don’t have a statement that shows a lot of cashflow. I won’t talk about collateral today.

That is why you find many people going to Guangzhou in China, bring in whatever that can fit in their checked in luggage, clear taxes, sale and repeat. A few trips over a period of 5-10 years and loan officers are knocking on their doors every day. By this time, the innovator at the innovation hub is most likely still scavenging for the next investor, prompting AI to design some fancy slides for the virtual seed funding presentation to potential investors. The investors listen, love the idea, but they are more likely to get their money back if they backed an 18-year-old kid working from his father’s basement somewhere in California. If they decide to invest in an African’s start up, it is very little money.

The Africans who have some money don’t want to invest in “weird” things like space exploration or even AI data centres. They rather invest with a guy claiming to be rearing goats or keeping poultry as long as he promises a huge monthly return. The innovator capable of developing an AI product or a rocket sees the chicken guy rolling on Bandali Avenue in a Subaru with some bimbos and wishes he did the same. If he is a honest person, he would join those opening salons and boutiques in Kyanja Mall. No need to reinvent the wheel, he would console himself.

I know that some African governments have funded some startups but they are really few and founders are usually well-connected people. Would an African stock exchange list a non-profitable start up? There is a need to level up to create a critical mass of innovators. If we do, once in a while we’ll have an African Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or another Aliko Dangote.

The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com

Tags: African governments, Denis Jjuuko, Dollars, Elon Musk, Government of Uganda ., initial public offer (IPO), Kampala, Kiira Motors Corporation, Lagos Johannesburg, Nairobi, Nigerian musicians, Out to Lunch, Prime Time Communications, scale Tesla, South Africa, US, world’s richest man, Zimbabwean

Out to Lunch

#OutToLunch: Stronger African economies will create a World Cup winner

By Denis Jjuuko The football World Cup ended recently with Spain lifting the golden trophy after defeating Argentina 1-0 in extra time. This year’s tournament has seen the teams expanded from 32 to 48 of which 10 were from Africa. It is by far the biggest football World Cup ever in nearly 100 years since the competition was first organised in 1930. The organizer, FIFA, is even now talking about further expanding it to 64 national teams. One of the major talking points of the tournament has been the performance of teams from Africa. Only Morocco made it to the quarterfinals. Unlike in the last tournament in 2022 in Qatar, Morocco reached the semifinals. It is the only time an African team had reached that far in the tournament. Countries outside Europe and America didn’t do much either this year. Of the four countries that qualified for the semifinals, only defending champions Argentina is outside Europe. Needless to say, that Argentina was being inspired by Lionel Messi, probably the best player the world has ever seen since Pele and Diego Maradona. Anyway, why don’t African teams perform that well in the World Cup competition yet unlike Asia or the Middle East, football is the most popular sport on the continent? Many young boys on the continent wake up to kick the ball in the streets. Many others try to create professional careers while others watch it for hours on end especially over the weekend. Even though the interest is immense, sports, not just soccer, isn’t considered a major career pathway for many people on the continent. Parents rather push their children into other professional careers than sports. Go to school, get an education, find a job and live a better life thereafter. Sports such as soccer provide very short careers. About 10 years if you are lucky. By the time a player is 30, most likely their career is over. Of course, there are outliers like Messi who is 39 years old and still performing at the top level and Christiano Ronaldo who is 41 years old. But for the majority of players, they don’t stay in the game for that long. Of course, there are other areas in which they can earn after retirement such as coaching, television punditry and podcasting, scouting and even management but the openings are even fewer. Look at the premier league for example, there are only 20 teams and each team has about 30 players, which translates to a paltry 600 players. To make it to the premier league or any of the top leagues in the world is for the exceptional. I think that is why parents usually guide their children away from sports. Besides it is expensive to support a child’s career to develop to a level where he can attract interest of the big highly paying professional leagues. If you are in Africa, the odds are highly against you. Sport is poorly funded. Infrastructure is almost non-existent. A kid with talent needs high quality coaches, kits and infrastructure to make it. Do they exist? Hardly. In many communities, the kids play on bare grounds and in urban areas those grounds are being turned into bland shopping malls. A parent would have to invest in flying a child to European academies to get the best training they need to make it. How many such parents have such resources? And if the kids are good, they would be assimilated in Europe. If you look at the three European countries that reached this year’s semifinals, there are quite a number of immigrants. Some may have been born in Europe, but there are also others who weren’t born there. England’s Marc Guehi was born in Ivory Coast. Of course, north African teams had players born in Europe but usually those are few. And many only chose African teams after failing to impress European countries. We always talk about professionalizing our leagues but it is difficult if the economies are weak. Unless we prioritize developing our economies, African teams will always struggle to win the World Cup. Weak African economies can’t afford to pay top young modern coaches. We end up picking hustlers from eastern Europe or pensioners from western Europe, whose ideas and methods are way past their sell-by dates. Stronger economies would create big companies that can invest in sport as sponsors or even in club ownership (many private equity and hedge funds own clubs in Europe/America for example). Clubs would be able to sell tickets and merchandise at premium rates, develop players they can sell to other clubs in Europe and elsewhere at world market rates and create a sports ecosystem that generates millions of dollars every day. If our economies remain as they are today, we can kiss the World Cup goodbye. The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com

August 5, 2026

Out to Lunch

#OutToLunch: Students joining universities could self-teach themselves AI to disrupt sectors like agriculture

By Denis Jjuuko The month of August sees public universities open their gates to first year students. Joining university is one of the milestones many young people celebrate, the last step in the journey to the pinnacle of education. In a few years, they would be out of university and joining the workforce. But also, university in Uganda is really the first time somebody enjoys adulthood. The pampering starts to end once you join university. There are no teachers and wardens chasing you out of your room to attend class. Most universities don’t care much how you dress. If you are female, you decide whatever you want to do with your hair. Nobody sends you back home for having a mobile phone. It is in fact a taboo not owning a smartphone. You can return or not even return to your digs. Real freedom is perhaps only enjoyed while at university. When you leave and get married, you start being accountable for every little thing but then I digress. However, it must also be a mixed feeling for many parents, guardians and the students themselves. Have they chosen the right academic course? Will the jobs be available when students finish their academic journeys given the artificial intelligence (AI) disruptions we hear about every day? Many decades ago, a university degree meant a good job. Employers booked future workers before they even graduated. And upon graduation, people found themselves with decent jobs, housing, cars and whatever they needed to succeed. Today, there is no guarantee. The numbers of people joining the labour force are higher than the jobs available. The majority of Ugandan jobs, more than 70%, are in agriculture. Many young graduates aren’t very comfortable working there. In many poor agrarian economies, the pay is usually low and work is in remote areas. The majority of students are from rural communities and they want to try life elsewhere. They have been told for nearly two decades that education is the clearest pathway to a better life, which it is. If they attain education at the highest level only return to the village to work in agriculture, many people would look at them as failures. Yet it shouldn’t be. If you remove gold, coffee is Uganda’s biggest export earner bringing in billions of dollars annually. People have turned their lives around recently because of coffee. The agronomical practices may have changed a bit thanks to campaigns like Mmwanyi Terimba of Buganda Kingdom but there is still a lot that needs to be done. If we are to reach our target of 20 million bags of 60kg annually from about 8.6 million, we need to send some of our educated people to agriculture. The knowledge acquired at university should be used to improve the coffee value chain or any other agricultural product. It could be sales and marketing, post harvest handling, agronomy, logistics, finance, investments, procurement, accounting, value addition etc. Farmers would also have to appreciate the value that graduates bring to the field if they are to see improved yields. Many people employee the least educated and qualified people to look after their investments in agriculture. Pick a boy who can’t even write his name and put him in charge of a poultry farm of 20,000 birds or a 20-acre coffee farm. The results are expected. Frustrations upon frustrations. Africa’s food import bill is nearing US$100 billion a year yet we have a youthful population that is looking for work. How do we put young highly educated people to work in agriculture? If coffee is improving the lives of farmers in Bukomansimbi, it means it can employ young people and give them decent salaries. And the young people will work hard to improve yields on the farms or profitability in the value chain because that is a guaranteed way for them to improve their incomes too. If we reduce how much food we import, that can be money directly put in the pockets of young people. However, the policy makers might be on other perfunctory things. As young people join universities, they need to think of how they can work in sectors like agriculture and turn them around using whatever qualifications they acquire. That is where the jobs are. The universities will likely teach them basics. The majority of university students have a lot of time. Some have classes for a few days a week or just in the evening or a few hours a day. They can use new technologies like AI to teach themselves a few things that may help them disrupt sectors like agriculture. That way they will create value that leads them to securing decent jobs. The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com See less

August 5, 2026

#OutToLunch: Xenophobic attacks call for investments in home countries

By Denis Jjuuko In the early 1990s, the world started to witness the dismantling of one of the most antediluvian official racist regimes ever assembled. Nelson Mandela, leader of the African National Congress would be released from prison in 1990 after 27 years of inhumane confinement on Robben Island. A new South Africa was on the horizon. Mandela would win the country’s first multiracial presidential elections in 1994 after his ANC won a large majority of parliamentary seats. Mandela and his ANC’s victory marked the end of official apartheid in South Africa. Mandela mentioned from the beginning that he wasn’t replacing official white racism with official black racism. He called the new South Africa, a rainbow nation. A country that embraced you regardless of the color of your skin. Unlike the majority of the so-called revolutionaries, Mandela ruled for one term. He ended up as one of the world’s most revered statesmen and even became a celebrity! At home, after the euphoria of the 1994 elections, many black South Africans realized that the end of apartheid didn’t mean that they would move from their shebeens in the townships to white homes in leafy suburbs and take over white businesses and send the whites to wherever. South Africa wasn’t Idi Amin’s Uganda. They realized that the rainbow mantra meant co-existence. They rejected it but they were still a bit hopeful. The ANC understood the sentiments of many black people and created policies like black economic empowerment (BEE), which provided opportunities for blacks and other people of color. If a white owned a business, they needed some black people in top management and on the board. Some black people also needed to own shares. Government tenders were reserved for business that embraced BEE. But such opportunities were of course reserved for elite blacks — educated in Europe, America or even in the exclusive South African universities. The majority of the beneficiaries of BEE were ANC stalwarts and that is how they became billionaires and today’s captains of industries. Others became tenderprenuers (influencing government tenders). Apartheid had denied the majority of blacks quality education and other opportunities. They didn’t have skills. The apartheid regime preferred to import professionals from elsewhere to work in black communities or do jobs the whites didn’t want to do. That is how Ugandan teachers and medical doctors ended up in South Africa in the 1980s. They settled there quickly and established themselves as hard working, set up private practices and generally built better lives than many of those they left at home. South Africa had (still does) world class universities and when they opened up the country in 1994, many people started attending school there. I would also end up at an elite South African university 10 years after Mandela had been elected for my graduate education. South Africa was and remains the continent’s most sophisticated and largest economy. As economies of many African nations crumbled, South Africa’s soared. Many Africans unable to be externalized to America or Europe for kyeyo saw it as the next perfect frontier and arrived in droves. Many had seen the doctors and teachers who had migrated earlier living better lives. Those who visited Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban or Pretoria saw a modern country where they wished to work and live. South African TV soap operas Egoli, Generations and Isidingo created a desire that many people wanted to experience themselves. Those who had made it to South Africa arrived back in Kampala every December with fancy cars and threw white-dress themed parties. Another Bantu migration of sorts had to happen but this time to kuyiriba (hustle) including becoming Sangomas (fake traditional healers). In South Africa, ANC riddled with corruption forgot to create jobs for the majority of blacks who were largely uneducated and unskilled. Populist politicians like Julius Malema saw an opportunity and fanned the flames that lead to today’s xenophobic attacks against blacks from outside South Africa. Hundreds have been evacuated back home in Uganda. They are now chilling in Kyankwanzi, ostensibly undergoing orientation. I am not sure what that means. But the xenophobic attacks should be a wake up call for migrants as well as governments of their home countries. People largely migrated to South Africa to find better opportunities for themselves. If we created jobs here, the majority wouldn’t have left. There must be a deliberate way to encourage migrants to invest back home. NSSF should be pushing them for voluntary savings. Capital Markets Authority should be doing drives for collective investments. National Housing should be building houses they can buy. Uganda Investment Authority should be making presentations on where to invest. It used to happen until when politicians hijacked platforms like the Uganda North American Association Convention. Buganda Kingdom is trying with its Buganda Bumu Convention but it is a drop in the ocean. If we refocused, people wouldn’t be evacuated or even deported and returned home with nothing. And lastly an enabling environment that enables businesses to thrive. The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com

July 22, 2026