Uganda, April 24 -- In his many chalk-and-blackboard lectures around the country in his early days in power, President Museveni loved to roll off examples of extravagant imports by the Tito Okello and Milton Obote regimes as examples of wealth erosion. Why, he often wondered, did they import furniture when they could buy it at home?

To build an integrated self-sustaining economy - one of the 10 points in the NRM programme - Uganda would have to build or rebuild local manufacturing capacity and stop exporting raw materials, he argued.

This was the correct argument in 1986. Making stuff locally creates jobs and incomes, drives consumption of local inputs, services and products, and generates wealth.

It remains the correct argument today ...