PIBID in Bushenyi: The factory that gave us pride but left our pockets empty
For two decades, Bushenyi’s bananas have fed an industrial dream — but the farmer who grows them still cannot afford the biscuits that bear his district’s name
By Mukama Phillip Kahigiriza
Walk into any homestead in Bushenyi — in the villages of Katonya, Bumbaire, Kiyaga or Nyandozo — and you will find matooke. Not one or two varieties. Thirty-seven cultivars in a single district. For generations, that abundance has been both blessing and curse.
The curse is brutally simple. Matooke rots within three days. You cannot store it, cannot wait for a better price and cannot hold your nerve when everyone harvests at once. In a glut, a bunch fetches 800 shillings. In scarcity, the same bunch commands 4,000. Research has documented the reality with painful honesty: more than half of what Bushenyi grows is consumed at home — not by choice, but because it would rot before reaching any market. Of what does reach the market, the farmer takes home just 44 per cent. The middleman collects the rest.
It was into that reality that the Presidential Initiative on Banana Industrial Development arrived in 2005, and Bushenyi celebrated as though liberation had finally come. For once, someone in authority was saying that matooke was not merely food — it was industry.
They built a real factory in Nyaruzinga. Not a signpost, not a promise — a functioning facility staffed by scientists who turned perishable matooke into flour with a shelf life of months. They created TOOKE. They sent the flour to Germany and France for testing. They baked bread, biscuits, cake and baby food from banana flour. For the first time, a Munyankole farmer could look at his plantation and see more than tomorrow’s lunch. He saw a factory.
That achievement mattered. PIBID proved that matooke industrialisation was possible — not merely in theory, but in practice. Psychologically, that shift was enormous. During a bumper harvest, the farmer no longer felt entirely helpless. Somewhere in Nyaruzinga, there was a machine that could absorb his sweat.
The initiative also seeded what followed. The Presidential Zonal Industrial Skilling Hubs, which now train 12,000 young people annually in bakery, hairdressing, shoemaking and construction, borrowed their logic directly from PIBID’s value-addition model. In August this year, President Yoweri Museveni approved three new hubs, one of them for Bushenyi — 65 acres in Buyanja, Kyeizooba. The reason was telling: the Ankole hub had been straining to serve 17 districts and cities, with some receiving as few as 14 slots per intake. Bushenyi had to advocate loudly for its own facility.
But here is the wound that has not healed in twenty years. PIBID never left the pilot phase.
It was designed as a Technology Business Incubator that would grow into a full Industrial Technology Park — a system capable of absorbing thousands of farmers and entrepreneurs. Instead, it remained one factory in Nyaruzinga. The farmer in Kyeizooba, in Kyabugimbi, in Bumbaire still rises each morning, cuts his matooke and sells it fresh for 1,500 shillings because no meaningful link to that factory was ever built for him.
Visit the farms and the picture sharpens. Farmers still use virtually no irrigation and few agrochemicals. They plant eucalyptus where fertiliser trees belong. They borrow from local savings cooperatives, but only half of those loans reach banana production. The project documented gender disparities in land access and fragile food security with commendable rigour. But documentation is not intervention. The extension bridge between the Nyaruzinga laboratory and the village was never constructed.
Then there is the question of ownership — the most painful dimension of all. Walk into a Kampala supermarket today and you will find TOOKE biscuits, neatly packaged and professionally branded. The farmer who grew those bananas owns no shares in TOOKE. He remains a supplier of cheap raw material. Value addition happened around him, not with him or for him in any meaningful economic sense. That is why his farm-gate price remains low and his income remains stubbornly seasonal.
A new confusion has now taken root in Bushenyi. When residents hear the phrase “Presidential Industrial Hub,” they are no longer certain whether it refers to the old banana factory or the newly approved skilling hub on 70 acres in Kyeizooba. The district council approved that land in an emergency sitting after State House Comptroller Jane Barekye told leaders to expedite the process — and added, pointedly, that if they failed, other options would be sought. The message embedded in that ultimatum says everything about how top-down this model remains. If Bushenyi is not careful, the new hub will train its young people to be builders and hairdressers for towns that have no jobs, while the banana rotting in their fathers’ gardens finds no processor.
So what is PIBID in Bushenyi, honestly assessed? It is a successful experiment that refused to graduate.
Bushenyi values it because it gave the district dignity. For once, a food crop was called industrial. But dignity without income is merely a photo opportunity. A farmer cannot eat pride.
For PIBID to mean anything tangible for the matooke grower, three things must happen. The two hubs must be integrated — the new facility in Kyeizooba should be mandated to train at least half its cohort in banana value addition, including baking with TOOKE flour, juicing, wine production and packaging. The farmer must be given equity — Bushenyi cooperatives must own a stake in TOOKE, otherwise it will remain a Kampala office with a Bushenyi factory indefinitely. And the piloting must end — the industrial parks promised for Ankole in Ruhengyere and Nakivale must be activated and linked to PIBID’s agro-processing research.
Otherwise, twenty years from now, the same story will be written. A factory making biscuits in Bushenyi’s name. And farmers who still cannot afford to buy them.
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