Recently newspaper articles in the Kenyan press have been warning the country's women that very soon they risk not being able to find men. And where would Kenya's men have gone in order for there to be this alarming shortage?

One article declared that Kenyan men would all be better off making wife-hunting trips to Uganda as more and more of them have been doing in recent years, because our women are "better". And if they were inclined, move further afield to Rwanda or their southern neighbour Tanzania.

Ugandan women, the article said, know how to make men happy, were politer, and "know how to be attractive". Kenyan women, said the disgruntled correspondent were terrible, and had nothing nice to say of their men. They were aggressive, "overly" competitive in trying to make careers, and so forth.

In fact, the writer even claimed that Ugandan women were not into militant feminism. Such views might make for very interesting reading, but they are usually terribly misleading. To begin with, there are no figures to back the claim that Kenyan men have been flocking to Uganda in search of our "better" woman. In fact it's doubtful that if you looked at the numbers for Kenyan-Ugandan marriages, the statistics for 2007 would be higher than for 2005 or 2002.

Also, it's manifestly wrong to claim that Kenyan women are more into feminism than Ugandan women. I don't know any Kenyan woman who has written something close to Sylvia Tamale's When Hens Begin To Crow, and the battle that Kenya women are still fighting to have special seats in parliament, and greater representation in local government, was won by Ugandan women in 1993.

Ugandan women were leading rebel fighting units in the bush with the NRA in the early 1980s, when there was not a single middle ranking Kenyan woman officer in the military.

If that is the case, then we need to examine what people mean when say women - or indeed men - from another country are "better" than their own. Generally, and some like my good friend Frank Katusiime will appreciate this, they are actually talking about the wider issue of the character of national markets - the economic market, the political market, and the social/relationship market, and how differentiation works.

The first matter here is a branding issue. A local man, and indeed woman, no matter how good they might be, is just that- a local man. For him to sell himself to his fellow countrywoman as something above the average male product that the country has to offer, he needs a huge branding effort. Either he has to achieve fame (as a sportsman, actor), or become rich, or gain power as a politician.

A foreigner, on the other hand, arrives with the inbuilt aura of being "exotic" because his mannerism, looks, language, and ordinary stories he tells in conversation, are different. That is a great - but temporary - advantage if it is all one has going for them.

It explains why many a Ugandan man who marries a British woman, will many times end up setting up a Ugandan mistress on the side a few years after returning home. This exemplifies the power and attraction of the familiar to which we are all subject, after our fascination with the exotic has burnt out.

Which brings us to our next point. Ugandan women, and Ugandans in general, you will be told, are "more courteous" than Kenyans. In the same way, you will be told that Japanese are very courteous. That Japanese business people are more courteous than the American who are brash, and their companies are more compassionate than American ones that are ruthless and cutthroat.

If you then took those differences to be defining, you would get it terribly wrong. American companies like Microsoft, Boeing, General Electric, IBM, have dominated global markets - just like Japan's Toyota, SONY, Toshiba, Honda, have. Therefore, despite their differences in style, and corporate culture, in common the American and Japanese companies, win because they have something in common; a single-minded focus on market success, innovation, efficiency, and the adoption of new technology. Because Ugandan, Kenyan, Rwandan, and Tanzanian women adopt varying approaches in their relations with men, doesn't mean they are very different. What these "differences" tell us are the rules women need to adopt to survive in their local markets. Uganda is a far more fertile country, but less urbanised than Kenya.

The women who are more likely to survive in Kenya are the ones who play hard to get ahead in the urban race. This puts them more directly in competition with their men, and engenders a level of "hostility" between the sexes that is largely absent in Uganda.

The competition between men and women in Uganda has been fought mostly in politics. In Kenya, they have battled mostly in the economy. Therefore for my Kenyan brothers hoping to find a meek wife in Uganda, we can only say good luck.