@Masukuma,

I wish your rant could focus on areas where we have comparative advantage, example, we make tea, semi process and export to countries who reprocess, blend and sell at slightly higher margins.

In your analysis, what should we do to our tea as Kenya to reap maximum benefit, bearing in mind the target consumer?

Apply the same logic to oil in Uganda, Museveni has struggled to get the oil companies to agree to refine it in UG and has suceeded in wasting a whole 4 years (which he will never recover) and has now resorted to going back to exporting crude. What would you do if you are Museveni, you have oil under lake Albert but because the world has already factored in this find in the world prices, they are happy to sit back and wait for you to give up your position. however you as Museveni/Ugandans cannot afford to wait too long as you need to make money to raise your country out of poverty

Kazi kwako

I don't have all the answers - but I am calling out the problem! The one of the reason we have these issues is because we are divided. these borders are the problem - Uganda cannot do it alone however as East Africa we can. We still have beef over small issues like Migingo.

Kindly remember that to some random European this could be your brother, cousin, kins man... you of course will start classifying yourselves ... no that is Somalia oh or that is Turkana... boss we are in it together.

I have once said that until all africans are out of the doldrums the Image of Africa will always be the least of us - the poorest of us. the Image of africa now is Somalia not South Africa so the sooner we start questioning the viability of these borders the better!

We have a bad culture already - where the most energetic young people clear college and want to get into 'NGOs' coz people who work there make the most money (in our eyes). NGOs are begging arms (I should know this). Leadership needs to visualize the future we are desiring and work backwards. We must have a leadership that will make difficult decisions today for a better tomorrow. This leadership must ensure that the status quo i.e. NGOs taking our best brains is brought to a stop – this can only be done if Gava embraces local enterprise. Leadership needs to focus on making sure that African companies have somewhere to sell their produce i.e. eating our own dog food! Since no one else wants it.
At a local level we need to groom leaders for our small groups. I am in the software development world where each random talented guy wants to start a company to build an app... a mKitu here and a mKitu there. We have brilliant individuals however we cannot seem to create lasting synergy. We need to ensure that our leadership communicates that these small small applications we are building to get on the newspapers are not commercially viable - perhaps we need to join hands and do something viable for our context.

that is the norm...I am used to that.

Sad . Could have taken that opportunity to learn .