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Uganda: Milk Plant to Boost Dairy Sector
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The Monitor (Kampala)
8 May 2008
Posted to the web 8 May 2008
Elias Biryabarema
Kampala
Uganda's dairy sector is expected to pick up considerable momentum from Tuesday's launch of Uganda's first $15 million powdered-milk manufacturing plant by Kenya's Sameer Agriculture and Livestock Limited.
The milk plant is an expansion of Dairy Corporation's existing milk processing capacity and will see Uganda start exporting powdered milk to fairly large markets like Comesa and the Middle East.
Diary Corporation was given by President Museveni to Sameer Agriculture and Live Stock Limited in 2006.
According to the company's management, the plant will be processing 200,000 litres of milk per day and earning Uganda $30 million annually.
Diary Corporation's processing capacity has now been boosted to about 400,000 litres daily which is still far below what is required to handle the country's annual milk production capacity of 1.4 billion litres.
President Museveni who commissioned the plant mocked what he called "confused groups" that scuttled his initial efforts to privatise Diary Corporation. He singled out Daily Monitor and attacked it for "scaring away my Thai investor."
In a major news scoop in 2005, Daily Monitor ran an exposé, alerting the nation to Mr Museveni's intention to gift Diary Corporation to a Thai investor for only $1. Subsequent investigations revealed that same Thai investor was in fact bankrupt.
"I was convinced that this man was going to help me on processing milk but when I brought him here, there was all these confused groups who made noise and wrote stories in papers and the man was scared and run away," Mr Museveni said.
Hinting that the ongoing land bonanza wasn't about to stop, Mr Museveni promised, as the Sameer Agriculture company officials had requested, to find free land on which to station two projects: a model diary farm and a fruit growing and processing enterprise.
He suggested that Mbarara Stock Farm, one of the nation's premier publicly-owned demonstration farms, should be handed over to Sameer.
"Madam Kigozi, you have heard these people want land, I don't want bilango (Luganda slang for stories). Look for that land and we give it to this investor," said Mr Museveni.
Dr Maggie Kigozi is the director of the Uganda Investment Authority.
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Mr Museveni also flagged off the first shipment of powdered milk destined for Syria on Tuesday.
Sameer Group chairman Naushad Merali said since they took over Diary Corporation they had turned it around and particularly improved the scale and speed of milk collection in the country.
Meanwhile, upping the steady drumbeat that has continued to echo from fringe sections of society, livestock farmers from Kiruhura District, where President Museveni's hails, have asked him to cling to power beyond his current term. President Museveni has not stated whether or not he will stand again.
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