So Rosa Whitaker has been at Munyonyo, where African finance ministers have been spending a lot of taxpayers' money on the pretext of looking for solutions to Africa's trade-related economic problems.

Ugandans should have a special interest in Ms Rosa Whitaker; not only because she was the assistant United States trade representative to Africa when AGOA sounded like a sub-county in heaven, but also because through her company, the Whitaker Group, she was later to be employed by the Uganda government as the country's AGOA consultant, some kind of USA-based market scout for Ugandan goods, with a thinly veiled role as spinner for Museveni's politics.

Americans are generally so ignorant about African affairs that the public relations hype probably attracts little resistance, but the markets must be a tough nut.

In this column, March 23, last year, I wrote what was in effect a review of a very simple American-made non-electric shaving tool, the thoughtfully conceived and superbly constructed Gillette "Match 3".

The article, "AGOA propaganda and the goods", sought to highlight the gap between the dream of selling huge quantities of manufactured goods to America and the quality expectations of American consumers.

On January 9, 2003, the New Vision had published Whitaker's "Stand up if you are a patriotic Ugandan", in which she extolled Museveni's commitment to his country and to the continent.

For the country, he was fighting Joseph Kony's LRA terrorists by literally camping where the guns were blazing. And for the continent, he had heroically - almost single-handedly - bent the stiffness in the American establishment to get the AGOA act in place, all the other Sub-Saharan African governments following this one man!

But if the leader's eye for possible rewards was sharp, the ways of reaching the harvest were largely hidden to him. At the time, Whitaker reported that AGOA had over US$ 9 billion in trade and investments in the sub-Saharan region. She did not say what Uganda's share of that cake was.

Regarding the heavily politicised textile sector specifically, very mean analysts give Uganda's net earnings to this day as nil. The most generous puts those earnings at a few tens of million dollars.

NRM power brokers and their cohorts in the parastatals made sure that they stripped all the government-owned and government-controlled industries before they were privatised. In some cases, they were first stripped, and then crudely rehabilitated at the prices of thieves, before being sold for a song.

Mr. Kashiwada of Phenix Logistics (the former UGIL) - that wonderfully modest man who seems incapable of raising his voice beyond the level of gentle conversation - has struggled to resurrect a factory that had been completely dead for years. Talking to him a couple of years ago, I got the impression that he had a very clear idea about the difficulties his company and other Ugandan manufacturers had to overcome before setting a firm foothold in the American market. Although everybody in officialdom was singing about the dollars to come from America - and they wanted the money now - Kashiwada in fact believed that it was very important to get our own people to wear locally made clothes.

The quality of those clothes would improve as customers became more critical and factory workers got more experience and acquired better tools. Gradually, the gap between our producers and American consumers would close. First the horse, and then the cart.

Kashiwada also noted that some people were not looking beyond the short-term concessions of AGOA. The long-term clauses were pegged to the making of yarn itself and cloth, using local cotton. Then, finally, AGOA might not even be there at all.

I have a feeling that people like Kashiwada have quietly done their good work, away from newspaper headlines, and if all the taxpayers' money and freebies that have been pumped into Tri-star Apparels had gone to Phenix, Uganda might have had a happier AGOA story to tell.

And yet, as I predicted in my March 23/2003 article, Ms Rosa Whitaker is one of the winners. In an environment where Africa's share of world trade dropped from 6.3 percent in 1980 to 2.5 percent in 2000, and where Whitaker herself now warns us that the key provisions of the AGOA treaty may not be renewed beyond September 30, the lady has three goals in her bag.

First goal: she successfully pushed for AGOA from a quite high profile and definitely well remunerated desk under Bill Clinton.

On the scoreboard, President Museveni also has a brilliant goal in the name of the AGOA treaty. So, the score is one-one. Then Whitaker scored again when Uganda gave her that consultancy contract, her former position in the corridors of power being an obvious asset. Considering Uganda's beggarly circumstances, her rumoured initial US$ 300,000 pay packet wasn't bad at all.

Goal number three: she scored again at Munyonyo last week when she in effect woke up those of her African cousins who were still dreaming.

In Orla Ryan's May 25 article, Whitaker is quoted as having said: "As important as market access is, it is not Africa's greatest development challenge...

"More effort needs to be made in building the capacity of the private sector. Market access means nothing if your private sector cannot produce products the world wants to buy."

That way, she has answered President Museveni's unending song of "Give us the access and we will eventually overcome the supply side constraints." Your Excellency; the horse, then the cart.

In other words, Ms. Whitaker has washed her hands clean of our frustrations with AGOA. The score: three-one. By a rather kind coincidence, she also comes to Uganda when the country's horrendous waste has become an institution, and when the executive-conducted racket for unlimited presidential tenancy is in full chorus, with all the discordant notes from the president's rough men ringing.

So, if the political aspect of her PR effort eventually stops delivering American approval, attracting the threat of a Ugandan penalty against her, she should have a good basis to argue that she could only sell what was left of the NRM regime on a very dark night.

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