Production is earned, not given

Editor, If we East-Africans, and Africans in general, wish to avoid being flooded with secondhand and substandard products, it is urgent we started thinking about our own products, suitable to us and to our peculiar physical and socio-cultural contexts first; and, ultimately, for exports to other regions in the world where they may be needed. As a political economy move, we may indeed decide to concentrate artifacts production in respective areas where it makes more sense in political economical terms: One of the possibly resulting dangers, however, is that we may end up with heaps of raw materials dumped in those respective areas, unprocessed, or badly transformed into useless and non-purchased products. From an industrial designers point of view, raw materials should rather be concentrated only where they can be transformed into useful and useable artifacts. That is, in places where there are suitable infrastructures, both industrial (machinery) and intellectual (engineers and industrial designers), to process those respective raw materials and, in my humble opinion, the initial move shouldnt be neither in hauling raw materials in different places nor in acquiring and installing only bound-to-rust machinery. Rather, we should prioritise training high level thinkers, engineers and industrial designers specialising in processing our local natural resources into products that are safe, useful, and economical to ourselves first. Then, we would thus be trading locally, regionally and internationally, not in mere crude raw materials, rather in finished, value added and value adding (i.e. enriching) products. Francois-Xavier Nziyonsenga, Rwanda Reaction to the letter, “It’s time for EAC to focus on production” (The New Times, June 28)

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Production is earned, not given