As Kiira Motors Corporation today holds a Prayer Thanks-Giving co celebrate how far the company has come since the first electric car produced in Africa, and by Makerere University Students in Kampala, it should also be said one of the first electric vehicles in the world, it is also important to reflect on the challenges, opportunities and strategy forward in order to be able to succeed in the Future.
Today’s Competitiveness in Manufacturing requires manufacturing efficiently at scale and with extra ordinary speed, Kiira Motors Corporation which produced its first electric vehicle in 2011 just 3 years after Tesla’s Roadster in 2008, has not mass commercialized its vehicles for some reason, on the other hand NIO, a vehicle company which started production in 2018, 7 years after Kiira’s first car has produced over 300,000 vehicles.
This speaks to a huge discrepancy in appreciation of manufacturing in the 21st century. Today, having Technology alone is not enough as we have seen with the struggles of Volkswagen and other legacy automobile companies which are falling behind the aggressive Chinese manufacturers, and certainly capital is not enough. Speed has become of the essence in addition to Capital and Technology, a huge internal market & unwavering state subsidies and support.
The question to Ask is. How are our companies like Kiira Motors Corporation, Innoson Vehicles, Kantanka Automobile Company going to catch up if they spend more than 5 years building a single factory, yet Tesla built its Shanghai Giga-Factory in 6 to 9 months, or can we say that we are not competing with the rest of the world? which I don’t buy. We are competing with the rest of the World whether we like it or not.
Aside just producing, I would like to see African Automobile brands have their strategy integrated with the Countries’ foreign policies to manufacture and export to African countries, this also means fighting to block off foreign companies from importing certain brands into Africa and also Ministries of trade and foreign policy moving all about within Africa to convince sister African Countries to buy African vehicles; whether buses, vans and other brands like pickups, especially vehicles that are going to increase productivity aside luxury but not limited to them.
Finance; it would be good at the same time for the manufacturing African countries to encourage fellow African Governments to invest in these manufacturing facilities, again this is part of foreign policy, this would lock them in since they would see these companies as their own. This would help African Automobile companies to compete with the massively over capitalized western and Asian Automobile companies whose access to money is almost unlimited.
Speed is of the essence. all the rest without speed in 21st century manufacturing is costing the Western Legacy Automobile manufacturers huge, and it should not be the case for African Automobile Companies.
We have to Compete with the World as Africans. The old order of doing things slowly is not applicable anymore in the 21st Century and so is the rhetoric of foreign direct investment of bringing foreign companies like Volkswagen, Toyota etc. to assemble parts that have been manufactured somewhere else hence killing off indigenous companies Kantanka Automobile Company in Ghana and Innoson Vehicles in Nigeria.
