Why we should not eat the "mad one"

By Nyombi Thembo

I spent the greatest part of my lower youth-hood in Semuto-Lukaaka Bulemeezi, a place reputed for catching white ants (Ennaka, ensejjere and empawu). White ants trapping and snaring all kinds of animals and wild birds (Enkwaale, enkofu, engabi, empeewo etc) is one of the redundant life skill I am endowed with. Those I grew up with in Semuto, Lukaaka and Makulubita can attest to this.

One of the cardinal rule in trapping white ants is never to eat that first white ant that comes out of the ant hill --which is called "omulalu", interpreted to mean the mad one. The mad one is supposed to be left to go without disturbance.

Even when it lingers around, you are not supposed to touch it - it is for the gods who would get annoyed, if you touched their treasure-the mad one. In hunting, a similar rule is never to make noise before you have laid all your traps and each member of the hunting group is in the designated place. This is called "obutayogerera ku kizigo"- in fact sometimes you could be speared to death for breaking this sacred rule.

These African traditions are very interesting. Actually, some of them are rooted in pure science. Taking the case of eating the mad one, the logic is simple. When you stampede around the anthill trying to catch that first white ant, the noise you make will alert the worker ants (enkuyege) to signal danger. As you are aware these social animals are very smart, when they smell danger they will deploy and close the openings (amaaso g'enswa) on the anti-hill and the white ants will be commanded to go back. That is where all will stop, you will catch nothing. Imagine loosing sack loads of the catch on account of eating one or two first white ants. That is what we call eating the egg and you miss chicken (okulya eggi newesubya omuwula).

What I hear these days regarding foreigners who are doing petty business in Kampala and other parts of the country, if implemented by the Government, will be like eating the mad one. The narrative goes: why should these people: Indians, Chinese, Sudanese etc do business that should be for the locals. Makes a lot of political sense, isn't it.  And I can see a number of our wonderful politicians getting sack loads of votes for this. But I posit, let us go slow on this, lest we destroy the international relations achievements we have made in the past 30 years.

Of course, I also shudder on seeing foreign watchmen and delivery truck drivers in our country. These are jobs that we should be able to do ourselves. Indians and Chinese owning kiosks are also a challenge. There was one who used to hawk suits. He would take your measurements claiming that he was doing the knitting in Hong Kong, when he actually had tailors hidden somewhere in Nakulabye.

That one fleeced many including myself. But as I got angry with him, I asked myself, what happened to our good tailors; Tutuuse on William Street and others? One could say that our good tailors in Kiyembe, Tutuuse and the like collapsed because of these hawking foreigners. I do not agree. By the time we resorted to these hawking foreigners, we had been utterly disappointed with our local tailors where you would pay much more for checking on whether your cloth had been finished than the cloth itself. You know our wonderful tailors, carpenters and mechanics. They will never finish a job on schedule.

All that said, however, my humble view is that these so called petty traders should not be looked at as exploiters but rather as smart business people who are covering a supply side problem. That is why you will rarely find them selling bananas (matooke) or potatoes (lumonde) in our markets. Retailing for example is a key micro economic aggregate. Get it wrong at the retailing level you can cause immense suffering to the majority of consumers who would pay for the inefficient retailing sub sector through high prices. As we condemn these foreign petty traders, we need to ask ourselves: are they also bad to the consumers? I always tell young people working for these Chinese and Indians than they should pay more attention to learning the working culture of these people than minding the low salaries they are paid.

Societies grow by learning positive attributes of other cultures. Yes, we agree; these so called foreign petty traders crowd out our local retailers but what about the consumers who enjoy a variety of choice of merchandise and comparative low prices.

 I have heard rumours that these petty traders are protected by the Government by not paying taxes making it very hard for the locals, who pay taxes, to compete with them. This is not correct. If some of them dodge taxes, they do it the same way our local people also dodge taxes. History tells us that demonising the foreign traders as the source of our suffering does not add up. When Amin chased away the Indians, Israelis and other foreign nationals, he was praised as a nationalist and indeed this had impact on our business acumen as Ugandans.

I hear we are the most enterprising nation within our league.  Given, but you recall on the other hand the suffering that came along with that populist policy, a few months after the expulsion of the Indians the then robust retailing sub sector in Uganda collapsed and the whole country was mired in scarcity. It has taken the Government a lot of convincing to bring some of these people back.

When you are a country that has close to 70 companies solely exporting labour to other countries and you start exhibiting commercial xenophobia, it is self-defeating. Before the war in South Sudan, I hear we had close to 400,000 Ugandans working in that country.

In Ghounzhou and other cities in China, you have a sizeable number of Ugandans doing petty trade there and now you are saying you do not want to see Chinese doing some kind of business in Uganda? What are we fomenting? By the way, China is now the major financier of all major projects in the country such as roads, airport, dams and ICT. In the next 15 years, China will be the next lucrative destination for unskilled labour from developing countries. What we do today may complicate our participation in this lucrative labour market.  

I also hear we have more than one million people in the diaspora and many more continue to go; most of whom do odd jobs in those countries. Can we be the ones to chase other people from our country on account of doing odd jobs in our country? What if you send away these so called petty traders and the countries concerned retaliated by boycotting our exports, restrict their dealings with us and tightened visa issuance to our nationals. And we need to know that the way we treat these petty trade foreigners may have impact on the big ones whom we want for industrialisation, technological transfer and a host of other international exchangeables.

Let us be pragmatic in dealing with the matter of foreign petty traders otherwise we are sort of "eating the mad one". Populist nationalism which boarders on xenophobia has no place in a world that is increasingly becoming a global village.

The writer is the chairman of the Governance Plus Advisory Group

** The views expressed in the article are solely mine, have nothing to do with my employer and associates