Editor,

RE: "Is ‘Caguwa’ bad for our economy?” (The New Times, March 10)

Yes, Africa does grow cotton, and has leather and what not, as raw materials. But have you ever wondered why most companies in the US outsource production to countries like China and India? Here are a few things that affect the cost of production: how many pieces can you make at once, how much material each piece takes and how fast one piece takes to get finished.

Asians being the amazing business men/women they are, will do anything (including overworking and paying below minimum wage to their fellow countrymen and not caring about how much toxic materials they release in the atmosphere) to get the job done.

So even if the real worth of an object would be the sum of those factors plus packaging, shipping, handling, stocking, shelving etc, low labour cost exponentially brings the cost down. Now, to start our own clothing industries in Africa, we first need to understand how and why the system is what it is in other countries.

What resources do we have apart from the basic and what is the long term goal.

Also, with most African countries relying on agriculture, where do we plan to dispose the toxic unwanted remains from those industries? Go to Utexrwa and look at the puddles of blue/purple/red contaminated water in the back of the building.

Which brings me to the topic at hand...how are second hand clothes affecting our economy? One way, they are helping it.

We are indirectly outsourcing. Apart from the fact that they have been used and lost some of the original color (which is good in some cases by the way), the materials are still way above their half life, and the cost has literally dropped to zero because we are not paying for production but for shipping only.

This way we save money, the world and our conscious. Those clothes were going to end up in landfills or on sea shores anyway. By the way, only the few elite do actually wear clothes that are locally made. Who will we be making for again?

Caz

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The thing that most African leaders don’t get is that you just don’t force something on to people. Make better products and these will naturally drive out Chagua. You just don’t decide to stop something that has been supporting people for decades in hope that your textile will make up for it.

You should ask yourselves first why haven’t locally made products been a priority?

We Africans lack innovation skills, and most textiles companies are owned by Indians who make all the money and repatriate it to India after exploiting our labour. They never invest in our countries except when they are expanding their manufacturing facilities.

We give incentives to foreign investors while ignoring our own, in the end they take all the money and leave us poor and waiting for another savior.

James Kagabo 

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Yes, that is right; indeed, we Africans lack innovation skills. But this half true.

On one hand, it is true that through the famous ‘civilizing mission’, more or less of our potent traditional skills have been rendered less or totally inoperable.

As a consequence, we Africans of today, and even more dramatically those of tomorrow, have thus been deprived of capacity to innovate, and have been led to surrender our means of survival in our own ecosystem.

Many of these were even highly sophisticated, having enabled us to survive and endure in our peculiar environment. But...we had to become ‘civilized’!

It is also true, that we have been forced, physically and ideologically, to adopt those alien skills, originally meant to survive in alien environments. But countless evidence shows that we have not been that much successful, and we shall never be, in perfectly adopting those foreign ways.

So, you are right, we indeed lack innovation skills twice!

I tend to believe, however, that this double lack of innovation skills and capacity is not a given, and it is not a curse. Neither, is it due to a congenital continent wide tare or defect. Patent proof of this, just look how we, all of us make do with all those alien, and therefore basically unfit artifacts, either directly imported without suitable and necessary adaptations, or locally modified to suit best our local requirements and needs.

So, like any other living organism, we adapt. It is this indelible capacity of adaptation, and innate innovation skills that enable it that we, Africans, should be more aware of, tap into, and systematically harness for our survival in our own specific context.

Francois X. Nziyonsenga