Uganda as it has always been referred to, is an agricultural country mostly because its soils are its major important resource. Agricultural exports have always been known to be one of the country’s economy boosting arm. Away from the agricultural sector however, Uganda, the pearl of Africa has amounts of mineral resources, mainly copper, cobalt, gold, tin, tungsten, beryllium, iron ore, tantalite, limestone, phosphates, and apatite among which are minerals what are critical for energy transition technology.
It is a matter to note that Uganda’s mining sector generates quite a limited amount of revenue due to its limited large-scale activity. Unlike in the 1950’s when the mining industry recorded a 30% of the country’s export, the sector’s contribution to the GDP later on alarmingly dropped from 6% in 1970’s to 0.5% in 2010 regardless of the fact that Uganda’s North Western Karamoja Regions hosts over 50 different economic minerals.
In 2019/2020, the Industrial sector generally registered a slowdown in growth by 2.3 % as compared to the growth of 10.1% as registered in 2018/2019 according to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics’ report on The Economic Performance of Uganda’s Economy in FY 2019/20.
Besides the country’s industrial sector having been hit with the after effects of the global pandemic, history is seemingly repeating itself in a constantly declining and slowing growth trajectory. Although the slower growth according to UBOS is mainly attributed to poor performance in the manufacturing activities which fell to 1.4 in 2019/20 from 7.8 of the previous year, there is still a gap of empowerment with in the mining sector that needs to be bridged by government.
The Tanzanian government for instance sought an additional USD 45 million through the Sustainable Management of Mineral Resources Project in the bid to strengthen its mineral sector, improve the socioeconomic impact of large-scale and small scale mining and enhance its private local and foreign investments. The scaling up however was projected to addressing difficulty in identifying suitable geographical environments for artisanal miners, inadequate training and demonstration centers for artisanal small-scale miners, lack of knowledge in value addition coupled with marketing and financial access. This stimulus coupled with pragmatic reforms has worked for the better for Tanzania judging from the Data from its National Bureau of Statistics which showed mining to have contributed 15.3% to the Country’s GDP from January to March 2020.
In a similar effort however, It was reported that the Sustainable Management of Mineral Resources Project assisted the Ugandan government in strengthening governance, transparency and capacity in its mineral resource management while improving artisanal mining as a form of community development a move in which reportedly, 50 Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Associations were formed which saw a rise in the ASM licenses from 100 to 952 from 2003 to 2011 since over 1000 miners were reportedly trained on mining related topics. If with such a margin of training, the ASM incomes were estimated to have risen from USD 3 per day to between USD 5-7 per day from 2006 to 2011, how much more would a more income would a radical empowerment into the mining architecture bring to the sector.
Empowerment of the Mining sector however does not imply that efforts should only be centered and focused on only Oil & Gas resource, Gold, Diamond, Vermiculite nor other overly gratified mineral resources. It in this case means looking at other potential minerals too and giving them a chance to play out in the economical eye.
There is a possibility that the government is biased onto investment of its resources into some particular mineral resources than the other. The oil and gas sector for instance, ever since Uganda discovered Oil Reserves estimated at 1.7 billion barrels in 2006 a number of interventions have been deliberately employed to necessitate its flourishment. Depicting more radical reforms towards the sector yet similar efforts and intervention are not employed to some others.
Iron ore for example still stands as one of the neglected important mineral resources yet it could make Uganda a key player in the African Iron Ore Market. In 2014 for instance, while speaking at a two-day South African Trade and Investment Seminar in Kampala, Francis Natukunda, a Senior geologist at the Uganda’s Department of Geological Survey and Mines noted that currently, we have over 200 million tonnes reserves of Haematite Iron Ore in Southwestern Uganda and 60 million tonnes of Magnetite Iron Ore in the Southeastern part of country and still have huge potential of exploration.
This kind of amount of Iron Ore can boost the country’s steel processing industry by far judging the number of processing units that can potentially sprout out of it right from the proceeding stages of its mining to the final processing units that utilize the secondary bi products as raw materials, not to mention the Hardwares that would purchase them and final consumers of the products being the Construction sites. It is time to refine our understanding of the idea of Buy Uganda Build Uganda (BUBU). Now is the time to think about it broadly, from a point of just processing imported raw materials to a point of extracting the naturally occurring resources in our land and using adding value on them to become the raw materials we so badly want to import from elsewhere. The government of Uganda was off to a great start when it banned Iron Ore exports in 2012 but that was only the start, it is time to finish what they started. Empower the mining sector because there’s a great opportunity that it will be for the better.
In the words of Gabriel Ajedra Aridru, Uganda’s geographical gives it access to over 500 million people including COMESA and SADC and that the recent population surge in the countries forming these regional blocks will trigger demand for construction materials from our industries.
Engineering, Technology and Innovation in Uganda 