A recent video footage projects Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni as a library with tomes of economic information that could turn the fortune of Africa around, if the leaders understand his thrust and have the spunk to wean the peripheral economies of their countries away from the tethers of the metropolitan economies and look inward for appropriate economic solutions.

Anyone who knows the pedigree of President Museveni, from his days as a political science student, student union leader and founder of the University Students’ African Revolutionary Front at Makerere University in Tanzania, would not be surprised at his revolutionary submissions.

He eventually became the leader of a failed Ugandan version of Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement that launched a protracted guerrilla campaign that led to the eventual resignation of Cuba’s President Fulgencio Batista on January 1, 1959.

In 1980, Museveni lost his presidential bid to rule Uganda to incumbent President Milton Obote. He later rallied opposition political parties into the National Resistance Movement that won the Uganda Bush War to become Ugandan President in 1986, after the decisive Battle of Kampala.

Though Museveni is now a dictator and has ruled Uganda since 1986, you cannot dispute his profound insight on how best to turn the economies of African countries around and free them from the grips of Euro-America’s International Monopoly Capital.

First, he explains that “the crisis… in Africa is because of philosophical, ideological (and) strategic mistakes, which we have been talking about since the 1960s”. He worries that agencies like the World Bank are preoccupied with “sustainable development,” which he thinks is a limiting paradigm.

Then he argues, “Africa does not need (what he sarcastically describes as) ‘sustainable underdevelopment,’ (but) needs socio-economic transformation.” He adds, “The main reason why there is no (economic) growth (in Africa) is because the growth sectors are not funded (by the multilateral lending institutions).”

He identifies four areas that African countries must concentrate on to achieve a low cost of production that will enable their economies to grow: These are railway transportation, electricity, low interest rates for the manufacturing sector and integration of the people into what he described as the “money economy”.

He explains that by starting with transportation: “You must have low transport cost… (which) comes from the railway.” He asks, “If you don’t fund the railway, how do you get low transport costs? Where will low-cost transport come from if you don’t have a railway?”

His discussion about electricity, which he describes as the second (low) cost pusher, starts with a query: “If you don’t fund electricity and you talk about sustainable development, what are you talking about?” He insists, “We must have low-cost electricity, not exceeding five cents per kilowatt hour.”

Though he did not explain how cheap electricity tariffs can be achieved, everyone knows that the tariffs of municipal electricity companies are usually cheaper than the cost of running personal electricity generators. Cost accountants and electricity engineers will know how to achieve his low-cost electricity idea.

He makes his case for cheap cost of capital, or low interest rate, for borrowings from development banks, instead of commercial banks, for the manufacturing sector, with the declaration that “The only person who can borrow from a commercial bank and pay back is a trader”.

His final argument is an insight into most African citizens being “outside of (what he calls) the money economy”. He notes that before 2013, more than 68 per cent of Ugandan homes “are in what is called subsistence sector”, and disclosed that from 2013, “61 per cent of the people were in the ‘money sector”.

Of a truth, those at the subsistence level of the economy will only work and eat. If they are farmers, they will only produce food crops and no cash crops that can be exchanged for money in the local and international commodities markets.

Whereas those who operate in the “money economy” will produce on a large scale for trade, even if they will consume a portion of their produce. If they are farmers, they will produce cash crops that will command high returns in the commodities market.

Then he reveals his disdain for African civil servants and policy advisers who seem to have taken the economic principles enunciated by Europhilia Adam Smith to heart. He complains, “Our civil servants talk about import support,” and declares with emphasis, “But I don’t want to import. I want to export!”

One of the major submissions of “The Wealth of Nations”, the seminal book written by Adam Smith, is that peripheral economies, like those of the Third World or the “Economic South,” must be encouraged to accumulate foreign currency to finance their importation of consumer goods from the metropolitan economies.

And, by the way, that neo-colonial device, is the foundation of the mercantilist exchange rate that requires more of the currency of a weaker nation for the stronger currency of a richer nation. An unproductive economy needs the currency of a more productive country.

This process of increased demand for foreign currency automatically raises the value of the currency of the selling nation. Thus, the exporting country trades two commodities, its currency, which must be bought at a premium, and its manufacture or produce that the weaker economy does not produce.

However, this scheme is reversed against Third World countries: If America wants to buy Nigeria’s petroleum, it does not have to first acquire the naira. It simply plunks its dollar onto the laps of Nigeria, almost with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude.

India, whose economy appears to have substantially moved away from the subsistence Third World level, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, appears to have discovered an obvious paradigm that many Third World countries appear not to have discerned, or discovered.

Interestingly, the railway, one of President Museveni’s favourite planks for economic development, leads the pack of physical, social, educational and digital infrastructure that headlines India’s paradigm shift out of poverty.

This is followed by a deliberate policy to remove as many citizens as possible from the clutches of poverty, by using a policy of inclusiveness that uses banking, housing, healthcare and even cooking gas, to migrate citizens to what President Museveni calls the money economy.

By encouraging innovations and manufacturing startups and removing archaic laws that hinder the growth of commerce, to enable the economic ecosystem to deliver more, Prime Minister Modi was able to up the performance of the Indian economy.

It is about the same way Dr Jumoke Oduwole ran the Office of Ease of Doing Business to prime the Nigerian economy to perform more optimally under the watch of former President Muhammadu Buhari. But somehow, the government of Mai Gaskiya did not deliver much on this score.

Anyway, between the praxis or practical application of the insights and theories of President Museveni and Prime Minister Modi, members of Nigeria’s economic management team should be able to tease out Nigeria’s road to economic recovery.

And while they are at it, they might think about the phenomenal Italian “economic risorgimento” that led to Italy’s blitz of economic growth, industrialisation and modernisation that occurred within a magical six years, between 1958 and 1963!

If members of President Tinubu’s economic team can swing this magic, their names may be etched in gold.