Importance of Strategic Industries: Nurturing Our National Development and Global Presence

A lot of people have never realised that there are certain strategic industries which, uh, the private sector cannot put up. Hmm. These strategic industries are important to our people. First of all, they train our people. Yeah. Uh, secondly, we, we then join the global business. Hmm. Uh, for example, um, aviation is so versatile that it is not only flying, it’s also you also, it is also your ambassador. Yeah. Now, a lot of people have never realized like Ethiopian Airlines that started the airline in 1960, today is a power to reckon with in aviation internationally. They have so many airplanes. It’s like an American airline. Now, that is 1960. You can now, you know, Uganda’s independence almost, almost, it’s as old as Uganda’s independence. Almost. That’s right. Less by two. Yeah. And it was started by t. W. A, which was an American airline. That’s where I told you task force, which starts, if we had got a good task force to push our airline, an airline would not break even until seven years, even 10 years later, depending on what you want to do. And then another point which is extremely important is that the airline, uh, we are a landlocked country. Sure. And therefore, to have an exit using an airline is extremely important. Like the other day, there was a problem in our neighboring country. You have to use another neighboring country, but you also need to get out of the country. So. You cannot wait to go to our neighbor to fly internationally. You should be able to go from here to London. She got to go from here to the Far East and so on and so forth. So these are extremely important.