In response to Nabusayi’s article

Jul 12, 2007

Thank you for your offer of right of reply to Ms Nabusayi’s article: “Nagenda tobacco is disastrous to West Nile”. I am aware that to use space equal to Ms Nabusayi’s is like targeting a mosquito with an AK 47.

John Nagenda

Thank you for your offer of right of reply to Ms Nabusayi’s article: “Nagenda tobacco is disastrous to West Nile”. I am aware that to use space equal to Ms Nabusayi’s is like targeting a mosquito with an AK 47.

(1) I have never called H.E Vice President Gilbert Bukenya Mr Mountain Rice. That would be insultingly restricting, as indeed the professor has many other attributes, including Medicine at a top level.

(2) If Ms Nabusayi wrote, not as the Press Secretary to the VP, but as a journalist, so be it,but she should have said so.

(3) It is cheap and immature of her to state that I wrote what I did “to protect (my) job on the board of BAT”. Heaven knows what she does to supplement her salary but I would not suggest it!

(4) When I talk about sh50b earned from BAT annually, it is the combined taxes paid into the Uganda exchequer. It is a vast sum. How it is spent is not decided by BAT.

(5) Upland Rice is fine, but I suspect it will not earn Uganda the equivalent of sh50b in the next two decades, if ever. By all means let it be grown, with as much fanfare as Ms Nabusayi can drum up. But it is an unnecessary Ugandan habit to down-size one thing in order to up the image of another. Let both thrive.

(6) What are tobacco farmers to do while waiting for the next crop? Grow other things, including Upland Rice.

(7) Ms Nabusayi seems to think that West Nile was covered in forests until BAT and its tobacco farmers cut all the trees down. Has she heard of savannahs? BAT instead encourages and funds the growing of millions of trees annually.

(8) Waiting for West Nile farmers to acquire 20 acres individually is pie in the sky. But there is nothing to stop them forming Unions for the purpose.

(9) None of the alternative farming activities mentioned by Nabusayi (such as zero-grazing, fruits, fish farming, poultry etc) have been proved to make more money than tobacco. She could have added coffee and cotton.

(10) The advantage with tobacco bought by BAT is that prices are agreed before the season, and are paid accordingly. And all the crop is bought. (11) I am sorry about Nabusayi’s father’s death by smoking. But, as she says, nobody forced him. Finally, let me add that there is always room for improvement, including in the tobacco industry.

BAT, regardless of Ms Nabusayi, has improved the lot of the majority in West Nile. It will continue on this mission, while making reasonable profits for its shareholders, as well as money for its farmers, and the country at large. Incidentally, BAT management has all this and much more information. The sooner it passes it on to the general public, the sooner any ignorance of its true role will disappear.

The writer is the Senior Presidential Advisor on Public Relations

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