President vows Uganda can refine its own oil

Export of raw materials with no value added has confined Africa to the third world bracket. With this in mind, President Yoweri Museveni has vowed to ensure that Ugandans are able to refine the recently-discovered oil resource into diesel and other by-products.
Museveni was responding to President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua's seven-point programme, in which the Nigerian leader hopes to tackle strategic bottlenecks and propel Nigeria from the third to the first world bracket.

The President, who was in Nigeria on a four-day working visit, delivered a lecture at the Nigeria National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies at Kuru in Plateau State in northern Nigeria.
"We are studying how to refine the oil resource and next year [2009] we shall start refining our oil and we are anxious to study refining it into its by-products," the President said.

According to Yar'Adua's seven-point programme, Nigeria's development focus is on power and energy; food security and income security for rural homesteads; industrial development, the transport sector, land reforms, security and education in order to develop the human resource.
Museveni praised Yar'Adua for bringing out the pertinent issues affecting development in his seven-point programme. Museveni observed that human resource is the most important national asset because natural resources cannot turn themselves into goods without the intervention of people. He cited Japan, which he said commands the second most powerful economic position in the world, after the US, because its people are educated and skilled.

Museveni called upon Nigerians to shun tribalism and struggle to run a productive economy as opposed to an extractive one. The productive mode of economy, he explained, opens up opportunities for entrepreneurs to get markets outside their localities, making them nationalists as they look beyond their tribal enclaves.
Stressing that the market is an important stimulus for industrialisation, Museveni reminded his audience that Europeans, who were fighting each other, are now trading together. He added that there is no other way for a modern life to be realised other than through economic integration of Africa.

Museveni said African leaders are currently debating political integration of the continent. He noted that political integration is crucial to guarantee the strategic security and future of the people of Africa, adding that economic integration is also important because it will enhance the prosperity of the people of Africa.
The President, who was accompanied by his wife Janet, stressed the need for development of infrastructure like energy, roads and railways to lower the cost of doing business in Africa.