Minister Musasizi,
I write to you not as a secretariat, but as a colleague — one of fifty-four ministers who signs the same painful cheque every year. Africa buys USD 709 bn of goods annually, and USD 620 bn of it leaves this continent. Some of that money is yours, some of it is mine, and almost none of it needs to go where it goes.
What is fixed — and what is yours to change
Two kinds of statement sit in this document, and they carry different weight. The continental spine is fixed: USD 709 bn of total imports; USD 620 bn sourced off-continent; approximately USD 89 bn traded within Africa; USD 136.75 bn of measured government procurement inside an estimated USD 207 bn that our governments influence. Those figures are measured, reconciled and not on the table. Everything else — the product bundle proposed for Uganda — is Draft 1: a first pass drawn from your country’s productive-capacity audit, printed precisely so that you can correct it.
Why Uganda is in this room
Uganda's strongest and most defensible position is coffee. In the twelve months to October 2025 it exported 8.4 million 60-kg bags worth US$2.4 billion, overtaking Ethiopia to become Africa's leading coffee exporter and the continent's largest Robusta producer, on a base of more than 1.8 million smallholder households, two annual harvests and a coherent National Coffee Policy. The honest constraint is twofold and must be stated plainly: only around 5 per cent of that coffee is processed domestically, so the country exports green beans and forgoes the roasting and soluble value; and Uganda is landlocked, dependent on Mombasa with road transit of roughly fourteen days, more than 90 per cent of corridor freight on road, and a Standard Gauge Railway contracted but not yet at financial close. Capability here is genuine and present-tense; the value captured from it is not yet.
The instrument — two layers, both required
Pre-allocation. The African Union pre-allocates 25-year supply rights per product category to designated African producers. That is the fairness layer — the reason every member state, including those still rebuilding, holds a bundle at all.
Match-or-Release. When any of our governments procures, the designated continental supplier is shown the open-market quote and must match it on price, quality, warranty and service in a single window — or release the buyer instantly, no penalty, no delay. I have called it the Cell Phone Test: nobody in this room is asked to buy a worse phone. This is a right to match, never a right to exclude. Your procurement autonomy is untouched, and there is no pooled purchasing, no central buyer, no buyers’ club.
What I ask of you
One hour, and your pen. Mark what is wrong: the lines that do not belong to Uganda, the capability this draft understates, the buyer it misreads. The response instrument at the end of this document takes a minute to complete, and Draft 2 will show, line by line, which member state asked for each change. Your correction is not an objection to the method — it is the method.