Sam Setter's 'Pills': For readers who need some wry medicinal humour

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Hilarious

The industrial promotion section of the Rwandan Ministry of Trade and Industry has announced that the country intends to develop a tannery park in the Bugesera special economic zone near the border with Burundi. When one talks about a tannery park, one imagines a minimum of a dozen tanneries, and another dozen shoe and leather goods factories. This seems a little bit optimistic in a country that produces about 100 000 cattle hides, 200 000 sheepskins and 800 000 goatskins per year, as these quantities together hardly cover the annual production of a medium sized modern tannery. Before and after the genocide period, up to 2004, the country exported most of its excellent quality raw hides and skins in wet salted and airdried conditions. A small quantity was exported in wet blue, produced in the well-equipped tannery along the Route National n.3 on the outskirts of Kigali. The tannery was closed a few years later as it had no effluent treatment plant, hence was not environmentally compliant, and with the city expanding, the area was more valuable for houses and malls than to produce leather.

Later, investors from Kenya opened a small wet blue tannery south-west of Kigali, but were constantly subjected to fines and closures for insufficient effluent treatment. This tannery closed too.

Rwanda then changed the rules, again allowing the export of raw hides and skins, which then took place mainly via Ugandan and Kenyan tanners and traders.
Hence first the Government ruined a functioning hide and skin and wet blue leather trade, now it wants to revive it again, after a failed attempt by UNIDO to develop the leather industry in Rwanda in 2020. This is happening at the same time as tanneries in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania are closing, and tannery park projects are proposed but not materialising.
I sincerely hope that the world is not putting money in this new project!
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