It is sad but true that Ugandan leaders, together with their counterparts in Kenya and Tanzania, failed to walk the talk of industrialising their countries when they inexplicably decided to phase out suspended duty on cement just before the reading of the current year's budgets.

Instead of increasing competition and lowering cement prices, as expected, the joint action will lead to the flooding of the market by cheap imports from countries such as China, India and the Middle East including Egypt which enjoy lower production costs and greater economies of scale. In addition, many of these countries' exporters get government subsidies which lower their prices still further.

Reports that Middle Eastern countries are putting up new capacity of 50million tonnes, India 100million tones and Pakistan 10million tones means that the fate of local cement manufacturers will be sealed by their own governments unless they urgently reverse their decisions.

Whereas the regional governments might argue that they acted following public anger over ever-increasing cement prices, a better argument can be advanced that their action was amounted to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Put another way, the leaders used a butcher's knife instead of a surgeon's knife.

A better option would have been to look at the factors behind the cement price increases together with the manufacturers and find ways of mitigating against them.

It is common knowledge, for example, that the key driving force behind the local production costs are the ever-escalating and unreliable power prices. Because each of the three countries is working towards stabilising its electric power supplies and , hopefully, reducing production costs all round, it would have been reasonable to expect that the regional leaders wait until these power projects are completed before phasing out the suspended duty on cement.

Or, if their studies showed that the cement manufacturers were acting as a cartel and increasing prices to reap super-profits inconsistent with other regional manufacturers, then the governments should have re-regulated the industry without further ado.

This would have punished the greedy manufacturers and protected the consumers without putting a whole industry and thousands of jobs into jeopardy. Even though free-marketers would have made noise publicly, in the solitude of their offices and study rooms they would have admitted the concept of free-markets has suffered a severe blow since the global financial markets went into a free fall last month.

The result has been state interventions in those markets and, by extension, to the rest of the economy, in a manner not seen over the previous fifty years particularly in the United States of America and much of Europe.

It would be ironic if these leaders spoke so eloquently of opening up their economies to local and foreign investments, on the one hand, while making decisions that undermine the already existing industries, on the other.