Editor,

RE: "The questions we should ask about ‘cagua’” (The New Times, June 26). Most Ugandan households in the 1960s and 1970s could count on NYTIL, Jinja, to provide them affordable textile and garments for their clothing and linen products.

By the 1980s, this local production of textiles in a cotton-producing country had collapsed. By the 2000s, efforts to revive the industry through new textile startups such as Ryuichi Kashiwada’s Phoenix (Kashiwada was a long-time Japanese general manager of NYTIL, which had major Japanese investors, notably Marubeni Corporation) had collapsed under assault from dumped hazardous cagua of all sorts.

Wait until we begin drowning under the weight of toxic e-waste imported as hand-me-down computer products.

This is but an example – using the country I grew up in – of how Africans have allowed our promising infant industries to be strangled by unfair competition.

Mwene Kalinda