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Hi, I'm Natalie Bitaturi and here with my father, Patrick Biteture. Welcome back to our podcast, Uncommon Perspectives. Today we are talking about the great African future. Where we've come from, where we're at now and where we're heading. Like, how are we going to get there?

Thank you and hello to everybody out there. When we talk about the great African future. Let me first begin by emphasizing great, because Africa is a great continent. Africa is huge. Africa's got over a billion people. Africa is the continent that's probably got the most resources, the most forests, the most water. So it is a great. I can think of a small country that is called Great Britain. Tiny. What made it great? It's human resource, that's all. They had an edge over the rest of the world and chose to call Britain Great Britain. They got absorbed into the European Union and they still stuck to Great Britain. And they've broken away from the European Union as Great Britain. Now imagine Africa with all its potential, with all its people, with its glorious history. The transformation has caused in other parts of the world. The western world was transformed by our slaves. The slaves that were taken from Africa, our brothers and sisters were taken in those days. I don't want to go into the ugly history of what happened or finger pointing. I just want to say that we must acknowledge Africa is a great continent. That's where we start from. The big question is, why is it held back? Why is it seen as the dark continent? Today in 2022, we still see Africa as the most backward continent yet we've got all the potential. Is it the absence of opportunities? Was it the under development of human capital? This is something we should really explore.

True. It's so interesting. You know, whenever people talk about like the whole slavery thing, I agree it's a dark, horrible history. But for me, I'm always like, but why were we the ones who were the slaves? It makes me wonder about our own mindset and about how we think about things. Because even now we have so many more people, but we don't have the infrastructure, the skills. We're always trying to copy someone else or wait for someone to show us or give us or do it for us. Chinese come and build us a bridge. The Turkish, the Polish, the who invent things, bring them. Yet we need our own solutions. And yet when you look around in Africa, there's so many Africans doing such interesting things, innovative things, progressive things, things that even haven't been done in other countries. But we never look within ourselves for the solution first. We always have this attitude of like, let's wait and the Western world will come and tell us what to do, or let's wait and decide, they'll decide what we want. At least now they're involving us in the discussions. But still it's not coming from our side. And we're going to continuously be playing catch up. If we're always waiting for someone else or copying their solutions and implementing them here, I wonder why can't we have our own solutions to the challenges that we have here?

Therein lies the problem. We've got to understand our history and know where we are coming from, and know what happened to us that debilitated us, that set us at such a disadvantage, not by default or by bad luck, but by design. This was actually by design. If all the continents were in a race for development, as the whole world moved from being an agrarian society into the industrial age, the first industrial age, the second, the third, and we competed fairly, that would be fine. But the world is not fair, my dear. Those who discovered gunpowder, and I think the Brits discovered it from China, so that they could use this advantage of gunpowder in a gun to overcome the wicked race. Now the people came, they were mainly Portuguese that came to West Africa, around Ivory Coast, Senegal and those places. And they found these black people, plenty of them, running around. All they could see is manpower. Then they put next to that manpower, cheap manpower. Then the next thing they put is free manpower, because we have a gun. And then they started conquering. And from there they sucked all the black people who had strength, who had a good DNA, a good body frame, who had the capacity to work, to run, anybody who was strong and able, they wanted the manpower now, because they took some of the manpower. They needed women for them so that they can multiply them. They were just seeing us like how we breed animals. You have to keep breeding these guys. So they put us on ships and started taking us to Europe and to the West Indies and into America. They went on these people with superior gunpowder to South America and did the same. They conquered people in South America and also took some slaves there. But what it was all about was expansionism. They wanted more territory, they wanted resources. And as they developed, they wanted more and more, and it was never going to be enough. Later on, they wanted electricity, then they want water, then they want fuel, then they want copper, they want gold. So they kept exploiting us. So we are just a bucketful of resources, from human resources to minerals and natural resources. And that's where our history comes in. So they Depleted us of the best stock at the time. All the strong men, the big men, were being taken away. Unfortunately, also, they entered into an arrangement where they were paying or bribing our local leaders to sell the best people, separating families and selling them. So that history went on for 400 years. And that's a very long time when you look at it, compared to the industrial revolution, which was only about the last 180, almost 200 years. That's where there's been industrial revolution. But for slave trade, it ran for 400 years until they decided one day that, okay, it's really inhumane. We've got to stop. It's not acceptable. Then they decided to carve out Africa for themselves. They said, let's share Africa, because now Germany wanted a piece of it, the French wanted a piece of it, the British wanted a piece of it. And they said, rather than have a fight, let's have a meeting in Berlin, the great Berlin conference, and let's carve it out. You take this, I take this. Belgium said, I want the whole of Congo. And they hogged it. West Africa, most of it went to France, the rest of the mother countries, most of them between Germany and British, and very few were left in other places. Germany went to Namibia, too. Netherlands or in South Africa. They tried to get Ethiopia, and Ethiopians resisted. And that was very interesting at that time. This is the beauty of Africa. In one minute it's shining, and the next minute you've got a storm brewing. And we've had to move indoors because this storm seems to have come across all the way from Madagascar. It looks like quite a strong storm that's come our way, but we need the rain. Our farmers especially appreciate every bit of rain. So we continue with the story about this great continent called Africa. Africa was pulverized for so long by these different leaders, European leaders largely, who carved it up for their advantage as they moved from the slave trade era. They went into a colonial era, and that colonial era. They exploited us. They did some good for us. They brought Christianity, they brought education, they brought health. They took resources that they required, especially copper, because electricity had just been discovered. So they needed copper to wire up their homes, their industries, their businesses. They needed steel, they needed iron, they needed cotton. And these are the materials we had in plenty of. We have this beautiful weather here that you could plant crops throughout the year, and they couldn't because of the extreme weather. Winter, nearly everything is closed off. So they needed us for their own sustainability. And this went on for quite a long time until more and more Africans, as they became educated, started demanding independence. And in Africa. It began in Ghana, farming, kuruma, pushing for independence. And then the good news spread. Coming down now. We say it began in Ghana because you were the first country to get independence. But as a matter of fact, the first people to demand independence was South Africa when they formed a company there called the anc. That was the organization, and that was formed a hundred years ago in 1920, thereabouts. 1919, 1920, they formed the African National Congress, demanding independence. Unfortunately, and as irony would have it, they were the last country on the continent to be given independence much later than even Zimbabwe, which was late earlier known as Rhodesia. They were the last two countries to get independence. So eventually we got independence as Africans. What did that mean? It means you have got a right to vote. The right to vote does not mean you have a right to everything else. A right to money, a right to make money, a right to pursue your happiness. So these have taken a bit longer. And many of us thought, okay, we've got independence, then what? We need to learn how to make money. The right to silver, the right to making money. And that's been a secret to most people for so long. And slowly it's coming out. The magic of the compounding of capital. So what did they do? They brought neo colonialism in the imf. The structure, adjustment programs, the controls, where they control you with the use of money. You can't do this if you earn money. You can't do this if you earn so much money. We'll build this for you, provided you do this. They meant well from their perspective, but it was not enough for us. When I look at the level, the low level of electricity throughout Africa, the only place that had decent amount of electricity was South Africa, maybe Egypt today and a bit of Morocco. The rest of Africa has very little. The country, Spain has more electricity than the whole continent of Africa. Now, if you talk about the megawatts, South Africa alone has about 55 megawatts, which is 55,000 watts of power. Uganda hardly has 1,000 watts of power. Even today, we have 800 watts. That is on the grid. When Karuma comes on, we'll get another 600 miles. So it's been a terrible story in terms of electrification. And without electricity, you cannot industrialize. When I talked about the Industrial revolution happening almost 100 years ago in Europe, it was because electricity had been harnessed. People moved from muscle power to steam power. That's Industrial Revolution one. And then moved to electricity. Industrial revolution too. And Then move to the computer Industrial Revolution 3 and now they move to the next iteration which is the era of knowledge, Internet of things, artificial intelligence. That is Industrial revolution four. But where are majority of Ugandans? Where the majority of East Africans. Where the majority of the Africans were still in the agrarian age. We are digging with a hole, the primitive tool, a hole women go out and children, even men digging with a hole today. Now that's terrible. For this great continent that I talked about. We need a big push to get out of the agrarian society and into the industrial era and beyond. But what do you think about that without history?

I think it's interesting and it's true. We have to acknowledge where we're coming from. And like you said, it was major depletion. It's hundreds of years of taking us in the wrong direction. So it's very hard to catch up. But I still feel like with technology and what is available today, we should be able to catch up. And not just catch up, but take control and start to set the direction for ourselves. All the different industries you've talked about how they still need resources from Africa, they're still taking cotton and coffee and copper and resources, all the bits for your phones that come from Congo and all the different industries we're still growing everything, export, importing it and then importing it back. Because we all want phones and T shirts and clothes and things for the house, but we don't make any of those. So like you said, we're still stuck in the first industrial revolution and yet the world is at the fourth. But why does this keep happening to us? Why can't we change the narrative and change how things are moving? Why are we always the ones on the losing end? We're always the ones providing, yet we need these same services. It's so heartbreaking to see see Africans trying and still failing. And now our voice is so small because we have no power. It's very difficult to leverage in the world, yet we have all the resources to this day. We are still feeding so many people around the world. We're still growing so many things. And our continent is still rich when it comes to minerals and different types of resources. But more than that, we now have people. And what transformed China was they grew the population, but they educated them and empowered them and continued completely transformed the country in less than two generations. How many Asian countries started with us when you were a child and were as at the same levels of their GDP? And like now 30 years later, they are completely out of it. South Korea is One of the only countries in the world that went from receiving aid to giving aid, it's joined those countries. Why isn't that happening to African countries? Even countries like South Africa, even countries like Egypt, let alone countries like Uganda? So there's something that I'm missing or that we're doing wrong as Africans, because we can't stay playing this game for the next 400 years.

Exploitation is a terrible thing. When you are so exploited, you're not coming from zero, you're coming from minus 10. We are coming from a whole of minus 10. And a country like Uganda, where Amin took us to minus 15. We can't even compare ourselves to Kenya or Tanzania. So we have come from a very low base. But we are digging ourselves out of this deep hole and we are seeing light. We see light now with hope that we are doing the right thing. We have addressed infrastructure. There are roads in Uganda, electricity in many areas. The tariff is still high, but it's something that's being addressed. We need to access many more people who have got to access electricity and take it for granted.

So now when I'm looking at young Africans, I'm trying to think, how can we achieve what China did? What kind of education do we need? What kind of skills, what kind of attitude? Firstly, I think we're way too many Africans. Even if all our governments magically get it into gear, there's just too many young people. You see on TV every how many weeks, how many young Africans are dying trying to go to Europe on boats? How many Africans are in Europe who are not able to get employment, who are learning the language, who are trying to resettle? Europe has this huge problem of refugees because of the war in the Middle east, but also because we are too many Africans and our countries are not able to create these jobs. We have to be able to create jobs. But it's so baffling to me because we have so much need. We need so many things, and yet there's all these young people with all this energy who want to work and want to earn, but somehow it's not adding up, it's not matching. We have all these resources that need to be taken out of the ground or mined or farmed or anything. But we need to process, process them. And then we also need to create, like, the distribution channels within ourselves to make sure that it's happening. So we need to get the people. Because when I look at the variables, the one that is the best to tackle is the people. Because there we have such a huge resource. It's not finite like the oil or the forestry or anything else that we're taking out the minerals. And it's something we can easily change with different types of training and a different system to process all these young people. We should be able to handle our own ecosystems and build these business ecosystems and create all these jobs. But I'm struggling to see what are those skills and how we can get them to young people and change the system. When you look at travel within Africa, it's so expensive to just go from here to Nairobi. It's 100 times more expensive than London to Paris, yet the distance is the same. So it just doesn't make sense. We're not trading with each other enough. We're not dealing with each other enough. We're all still reliant on Western countries or China for everything. Yet they all come here like mine, all the things we need, take out all the raw materials, go and process them, which is where all the value is added, and then sell it back to us. So I feel like we're having a double loss. We have all these unemployed people who are still having to buy things that are made in other countries. It just doesn't make sense.

Now. Why I began with the history was because the group of men who went for the Berlin conference, they were really very cynical. And I think they were mainly men. I don't want to blame women anymore. Those men had a very morbid sense of humor. When they decided to carve out Africa, they made a deliberate effort to put it in a way to cut it in a way that would be very hard for us to integrate, to reintegrate, to be one common people. They made sure our infrastructure is designed to hold us back. They believed in divide and rule. When you look at the people of a country where you choose the natural boundaries, where the natural boundaries would be, they overlook those natural boundaries. Look at the country as large as Sudan before it broke up with South Sudan. The southern people were Christian. The northern people were largely Muslim and Arabic origin. And they decided to call that one huge country. It was the biggest country in Africa, Sudan. Now, how do you govern a people that are completely asymmetrical? These are very dark. They are largely Christian. They are largely looking after the animals. Those are largely Arabs. And then you put, how do you have leadership there? Look at the people of Rwanda and Burundi. They are more or less the same people. They cut them right in the middle. Look at the people of Kisoro and Rwanda. They put the border there. Look at the border of the people of Northern Uganda, West Nile. They cut them off from the other people who are similar to them who are living in the DRC or southern Congo and said, no, you are part of Uganda. Look at Kenya, where they cut the boundary. In fact, there's a famous family, the Awori family, where one brother here was a minister and the other brother on the other side in Kenya was a vice president, the same family. So these divisions were almost cynical. And whoever had this sense of humor was not a very funny guy.

But after all these hundreds of years, we have not out thought that what.

They did was manage to keep us so divided and put us in a mindset that this is your territory, your country, you've got a sovereign right, build an army and protect every inch of it. And that puts us at war. So we are always fighting one another. Today when you look at the number of military coups that are in West Africa, in Mali, in Chad, in many of those countries, it is always because somebody is pulling the strings from behind, causing this disruption, this inequity. And when you have a bit of education, you are sure that this has been planted. You reach there and you find a roadblock. That's why they are now disrupting. We've gone through an era of military coups in Africa. We thought we were past that, but it's begun again in West Africa. It's a shame. So the main point I'm trying to say here is what transformed those societies. First Europe, then Asia, of course America too. Investment in human capital, A change in mindset. Strengthening of institutions, not individuals. Here we have strong leaders. Until we have strong institutions, however strong the leader is, the country will outgrow that strength. And many of our strong leader men, especially women leaders, they begin well. But as a matter of time, if you're so strong and you don't build a station below you, that country grows. So we've got to be very mindful about the checks and balances we put in place so that you can have consistent growth. Also having regular elections. These democratic processes that was imposed on us every five years. Maybe it's premature. We are not singing from the same hymn book. You can't have elections every five years and they keep disrupting the country's growth. Now Kenya is about to go into election, but they've been campaigning for the last four years and they've such heated, diverse, polarized the country along tribal lines, along all kinds of lines, but it's unacceptable. Then you wonder is the benefit, does the benefit outweigh the cost of these exercises? You've got to do a cost benefit analysis.

So what are like the specific things young people can do or learn to make sure that we are improving and we're not just perpetuating this terrible cycle? I am really with you on the strong institutions. I think our culture is terrible and I think that's where corruption comes in, because everyone thinks of themselves. As soon as you have any kind of opportunity or job or position of power, it's about how much I can take from me, how many of my relatives can I employ, how can I suck as much out of this for myself. Rather than doing the job you're put to do, rather than thinking of the country as a whole or your organization as a whole, somehow we have to change that mindset because trying to get anything done is too frustrating. And when, when people have that selfish attitude, they don't realize they are closing doors for others as well. If you're put in a position of power, I think you have to be able to open doors for other people to have that position. Don't just think of me myself, because by the time you have the ability to get that job, you can get another one, you can get a better one. You should always be trying to move forward and move upward and pull everyone around you to go with you, not just hiring people because you know them yet they're not doing the job right. You have to think about the bigger picture. And I think that's such a hard ask for our young Ugandans, especially when they're coming from a poverty mindset or background where you've suffered. How do you tell me, starting off someone else's when I have to worry about my tomorrow. But the thing is, once you're in a position of power like that, it's. The risk is not as high as it used to be. But people who have lived with scarcity are always worried about that. So no matter how much money you make, you always feel like it could be gone at any time. So I have to keep taking as much as I can now. And I think that's what happens to our leaders when they stay in power for too long. That's how they start to make these selfish decisions. And yet it's not that their family has no food that day. They're now just doing it because they're used to doing it. And that's what's destroying our institutions. Because once you change that leader or you change the person or you move them somewhere else, you replace them with another person who is just like that, which doesn't help the institution or it falls to pieces because it now has an ethical leader who is not going to go and like lobby for different things or have clout with the right people. Instead of us having people run the system there should be an actual solid system that's fair and that's open and that is moving everyone forward because that's what systems and processes on a country like scale are for.

I hear you but I think investing in human capital is key. Checking corruption is important. Severely checking corruption and military wars and leadership, training good leaders, investing in leadership, that is important. But in our next episode we shall be talking about growth. How do we grow people? Because everybody thinks about my goal is this. My goal is this, especially you, the young people we need to think about, okay, this is my goal but I've got to grow. Growth is an important part that is underplayed in Africa but more about that, thanks.