Electric Vehicles

Out to Lunch

Out to Lunch: Giga factories could provide solutions to Africa’s job challenges

By Denis Jjuuko There used to be a TV series on the National Geographic channel that showed some of the biggest or busiest things in the world. From the busiest hotel in the world, train station to the airport. Imagine a hotel with 7,000 rooms, fully booked and all the guests eating breakfast at almost the same time or within a few hours. And then meals have to be prepared for a similar number as well as walk in clients. Think of an airport that handles more than 250,000 passengers a day. The same TV program also had a segment on mega factories sitting on hundreds of acres of land with thousands of employees producing some of the famous brands we know today. These series were some of the most fascinating things one can watch. A single factory as big as some of the suburbs of Kampala. If you are a regular reader of this column, you may have noticed my fascination with manufacturing. I think most countries develop by manufacturing stuff even though some have done so through financial services and being trading outposts. But the majority, it is manufacturing that creates the jobs and propels economic transformation. The United States, the world’s biggest economy, is desperate to have the factories back from China and elsewhere. Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, is known for manufacturing. Japan is also known for the same. Without mega factories in China, the majority of Chinese would be unemployed. Manufacturing creates sustainable decent jobs where the majority of people can work. It doesn’t require sophistication for workers to get things done because what the majority of factory workers do is repetitive. Within a few days on the job, a worker can easily be trained to press a button or fix something before the product goes to the next person on the line even for the most sophisticated products. Africa plays a decimal role in manufacturing relying on other countries to do so. A report by McKinsey says that Africa will need to create 18 million jobs a year to absorb the growing labour force until about 2035. Payment apps and all sorts of apps built around the Airbnb and Uber models that are attracting lots of funding from angel investors won’t be the only solution for Africa’s development. In fact, the majority of those apps are collapsing because they were surviving on capital being raised from Silicon Valley without enough customer base to sustain them. They should have known that unemployed people have no money to transact through the payment apps and are too broke to order for food on delivery apps. One of the things Africa can do is to build factories. They don’t have to be mega though like those in the TV series. We could build giga ones instead and get the continent ready for the battery market in preparation for a transition from fossils to electrification of mobility. Oil, as a scarce resource, made the countries where it was discovered wealthy. Countries couldn’t just manufacture oil. They had to drill it in the wells where it was discovered in commercially viable quantities. The world relied on them and they could sometimes refuse to pump or pumped more than required. As electric vehicles become the norm, those who will have invested in giga factories will become as important as the Arabs have been with their oil. Unlike oil which couldn’t be found anywhere in sufficient commercial quantities, anyone can build batteries and electrification components if they focused on them. There are more electric boda bodas in Kampala than ever and people have started importing electric and hybrid vehicles given that this financial year there is no import duty charged on such vehicles. The countries that are developing this capacity today won’t pass on the knowledge to Africans. The continent will continue to organize conferences sponsored by the west to talk and talk about the imbalance between the north and south and issue communiques after communiques like it has been the case for more than 60 years now. Nobody will transfer knowledge to the continent because some technocrats attended a conference and talked about it. Many of the raw materials required to make the batteries are here. What is required is to build our intellectual property to play a part in this industry. Building the giga factories on the continent will not only create sustainable decent jobs but also enable vertical integration of automotive and mobility businesses and wean Africa off its reliance on global supply chains that can easily be disrupted by geopolitical maneuvers or pandemics like we saw in 2020. The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com

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Out to Lunch

#OutToLunch Align university government sponsorship to national development plan

By Denis Jjuuko For decades after its founding, Makerere University admitted students according to their performance. Success for most students (and even parents) meant studying hard to qualify to be admitted. Getting admitted to Makerere on government sponsorship was the holy grail of success. Parents bragged about it. School administrators’ profiles were enhanced. Somebody told me, an entrepreneur even named his school “T-Junction to Makerere Secondary School.” In the 1990s, Makerere started admitting self-sponsored students and government set up other universities. What you needed was money and two principal passes at A-level. Entrepreneurs set up universities too and hostels to offer accomodation. Getting a university degree was demystified even though the percentage of Ugandans with degrees isn’t that high. With all changes that the government made to ensure more people get admitted to universities, one thing remained unchanged — how to get admitted on government sponsorship. The criterion for one to get admitted is solely based on academic performance. Score the highest points in the final national secondary education exams and you get admitted to a public university on government sponsorship. The majority of people who score the highest grades are from premium schools where parents and guardians have been paying a lot of money a year. Of the 1,474 students admitted to Makerere on government sponsorship this year, 346 students representing 23.4% were from schools (Kitende, Buddo, Gayaaza, Mary Hill, Mengo and Namugongo) where annual tuition fees on average is Shs6m. At Makerere, the average annual tuition fees is Shs2.4m. So why give a scholarship to a kid whose parents can afford Shs6m in fees a year in secondary schools? Although they introduced a system that picks highest performing kids per a district, still these are kids attending the most expensive school in that district. There is therefore no need to reward them with government scholarships. They are already privileged. There was even a student from an international school where the average fees is Shs30 million a year that was admitted on government scholarship! It is a mockery! In fact, I know a few who get admitted to Makerere on government scholarships but their parents never send them there as they can afford fees in ivy league universities in America. When I was at graduate school at Rhodes, I saw a few such kids. Others don’t like the courses government admits them to, so they instead opt to pay for themselves as privately sponsored students. The blanket admission of students to universities solely based on their academic performance needs to be rethought by introducing a scholarship program that rewards those who actually need and deserve the government programs. Makerere University already runs the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program for bright but needy students. You only get this scholarship if you really deserve it. To be admitted on the program, the administrators visit your home, talk to the neighborhood, parents, previous school and establish that you truly deserve the scholarship. Makerere and indeed other universities can replicate this. Of course, this would need parliament and government to think beyond the next political election and make this hard decision. Afterall, the majority of people who vote will never have their kids admitted on government scholarship as they won’t afford the secondary school fees where the majority of those admitted on government sponsorships attend. But selling unachievable dreams is big business for politicians. Secondly, government can identify academic courses aligned to the national development plan or Vision 2040 and ensure students on government programs are only admitted to those ones. Let us for example look at the automotive industry which is one of the ways through which industrialization can take place in most countries. We can ringfence government sponsorships to those studying courses to do with the automotive and mobility sectors. That way we can build our capacity for this sector. Electric vehicles are here but what are our universities doing about it? Artificial intelligence (AI) is herald as the next big thing that is changing the world. Are we investing in human capital development for it or we can explain? Thirdly, once anyone is given a government sponsorship, there should be a contract that they will work in the country for a number of years or have to pay back the money with interest. But we sponsor the students to study medicine and they end up working at Aga Khan and Nairobi hospitals in Kenya. The teachers we previously trained ended up in South African schools. Many others we are sponsoring today are ending up in Saudi Arabia and Oman (of all places!). We need to rethink our return on investment when it comes to government sponsorships. The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com

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Out to Lunch

#OutToLunch Rising fuel prices can be countered by electric vehicles

#OutToLunch Rising fuel prices can be countered by electric vehicles By Denis Jjuuko Fuel is the most common word on people’s lips especially in urban areas where motorized transport is the most used form of movement. Rural areas aren’t spared though. Moving produce to urban areas must be a challenge. Usually, trucks that bring produce to the urban areas return with essentials to the rural areas. Life must be tough everywhere.Some fuel stations in Hoima were said to have sold a litre of petrol at more than Shs10,000. I think this is the first time since the 2007 elections in Kenya where supply lines to Uganda were cut off due to the post-election violence that erupted that fuel has cost as much as or more than Shs10,000 a litre. This time though, the result isn’t a violence after an election rather our approach to testing drivers for COVID-19. Truck drivers went on strike than paying what they considered exorbitant rates.In Kampala this week, in the areas where I live, a litre of petrol is going for Shs5,000 and some didn’t even have. At some stations, people end up buying a litre of the premium types at Shs5,190 or more. Some organisations have advised their employees to work from home given the increasing cost of transport. Although the increment in prices has been solely blamed at the strike by drivers, fuel prices have been on the rise steadily climbing towards the Shs5,000 per a litre mark. I believe regardless of the strike, a litre of petrol will be selling at more than Shs5,000 before the end of 2022. Of the 6.5 million litres of fuel sold in Uganda every day, the majority of it is used in vehicles. This makes everything in the country expensive.Yet there are some solutions that can help address this challenge. Electrified transport especially in urban areas can lower the cost of doing business. This would call for the deployment of electric buses in the city. You need less than Shs50,000 to charge a bus for 300km. The cost of running a diesel bus covering the same distance in an urban area like Kampala is almost three times more than an electric one. Operators of public transport would actually make more money if they went electric. I have listened to testimonies by Kampala boda bodas who are switching to fully electric motorcycles. They say they make Shs11,000 more every day using electric motorcycles than when they used to operate ordinary motorcycles. That is when there isn’t even a single incentive from government to use cleaner cheaper motorcycles. Imagine if there were some incentives! How many public transport operators would be using electric vehicles?If enough reliable public buses were deployed in greater Kampala, many of us would abandon our private vehicles as they are costly to operate. Also, most private vehicles carry on average two people and are parked for the greater part of the day. Lack of parking in Kampala is another issue buses would solve. These buses as we have already seen with Kiira Motors can be locally built thereby not only solving the country’s transport nightmare in urban areas but also creating millions of jobs. Besides public transport, the government should offer incentives for people to buy electric and hybrid vehicles. Such incentives should be in lower import duty and other taxes so that we import less internal combustion vehicles that not only increase the cost of doing business but also destroy the environment. Not so long ago, Kampala was listed among the most polluted cities in the world. This is a result of our reliance on extremely old vehicles in a congested city.Incentives for charging infrastructure would then also be provided such as tax rebates for fuel stations, hotels, and shopping malls that install car chargers. More incentives can be provided for school shuttles and companies that transport students and workers respectively in electric buses. Companies can be encouraged to use electric vehicles for their city movement as well. The government can do the same for vehicles that are mainly used for city movement.The Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development would then introduce an electric vehicle tariff similar to the newly introduced cooking tariff. You pay less for electricity for charging your vehicle. As fuel prices rise, given our generation capacity, the cost of electricity should be going down. Today, a big budget of many households in greater Kampala is on transport. Cars are expensive to buy and service and even more expensive to fuel every day. Money saved from transport would boost household incomes leading to more spending in other areas. That is how economies grow. The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com

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