My dear president Yoweri Kaguta Museveni,
What a pair our two countries make. Our people are so poor. Our nations are among the poorest in the world. Uganda, desperate for exports, looks to Juba. Shoring up the current regime has, in fact, added to your exports, making South Sudan your most significant market, but what a pathetic market it is. What do we send your way? More despairing refugees than any valuable products. We give you a place to send your troops—at your expense, a reason to defend your border—at your expense but little to help your people to live better. And those products you sell to us at the cost of what little petroleum money we receive, what do they accomplish for our people? Little except for being dumped in the endless quagmire that Juba has become. The vast numbers of South Sudanese see no benefit.
The saddest part of this picture is what could be. Between us, we control over a third of the flow of one of the world’s greatest rivers. We have water, sunshine, and land—land that can be used to feed the world.
Were our countries to work together—especially in cooperation with our other neighbors such as Congo and Kenya—we could create an agricultural/aquacultural juggernaut. By growing water-intensive products and processing them, our economies could earn great wealth. Instead of piddling sales and low per-capita incomes, we could create one integrated economic powerhouse.
To accomplish that, we need to work together not to glorify any politician or to maintain anyone in power but to help our respective economies.
The starting place for this new direction would be creating an international investment bank for the Nile region. That bank could enter into agreements with producers and consumers in other countries: the producers to assist us in developing the relevant products and the consumers obviously to purchase our finished products.
Let me give one example. Fish farming is a great way to produce the protein the world needs. Once raised, the fish must be processed, packaged, and shipped. Currently, a major fish-farming nation is Vietnam. However, environmental issues exist because the farms are too close to the delta. Were we to use part of the swamps of South Sudan for farming, the waste, instead of being an environmental issue, would be recoverable to use as fertilizer for either land farming or hydroponics. Such integrated thinking and agricultural engineering is the way forward for us all.
With this example, I beg you to consider an alternative approach to working with South Sudan and growing Uganda’s economy. Let us make our water buoy our futures.
By Deng Mayik Atem
Publisher of Ramciel Magazine and Author of Jumping Over the Ram
