It will 25 years next year on 1st April since Greenland Bank was shut down.
The news announced in the last few weeks of Turkish contractor Suuma taking over Lugogo sports complex to redevelop it, more like under develop it, brought back memories of Greenland Bank.
Greenland Bank opened its doors for business in 1990. By 1994 they had a swanky new headquarters building on Kampala road, opposite the central bank.
But its biggest contribution to the industry was its abandoning of the strict banking hours other high street banks kept.
In those days banks would open for business at 9 am and were done by 2 pm. And did not open on weekends. There were no ATMs so if you had not got your money by Friday lunch time, you were in for a long weekend.
Greenland bank not only remained open until 7 pm, it also opened on weekends. And they did not have the onerous opening and minimum account balances that other banks demanded.
"It did a better job of being the people’s bank than the government owned Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB) or its cousin The Cooperative Bank....
The quicker adoption of computers must have helped. It helped too that one of the main promoters of the bank was former Bank of Uganda governor Dr Suleiman Kigundu.
During much of the 1990s UCB was being readied for privatisation, and had suffered several failed attempts, among other things, government’s insistence that who ever was to take UCB off its hands should commit to maintaining the full branch network, which by that had been scaled back to 85 from a historic high of just under 200 branches.
International banks including South African bank Nedbank.
Eventually little known Westmont Bank from Malaysia, stepped up, agreed to all government conditions, took control of the bank but suddenly struggled to raise the money.
It was then revealed that Greenland Bank had tried to buy UCB through the back door, the central bank took control of UCB and soon after sold it to Standard Bank of South Africa and it then became Stanbic Bank.
Meanwhile, Greenland’s over ambitious expansion regionally, into hotels and grain trading soon caught up with it. Its bad loan portfolio ballooned putting depositor’s money at risk and the Bank of Uganda moved in to shut it down.
Greenland Bank’s promoters have always complained their shut down was politically motivated and that they were still a viable bank by the time of shut down.
In 2019 parliament instituted a probe into the closure of several banks between 1993 and 2016, among which was Greenland Bank.
They say if the rat lives long enough it may eat the skin of the cat.
During their testimony before the Committee on Statutory Authorities & State Enterprises (CASASE) the former Greenland Bank directors listed as one of their assets the Westmont Land (Bhd) Asia of Malaysia.
And suddenly, at least for me, it all begun to come together. Greenland bank had created a front company in Malaysia to come and bid for UCB. When the fraud was unearthed, not least of all because Greenland bank was infiltrated, than the Government pulled the rag from under Greenland bank’s feet....
In hindsight Greenland’s problems must have been a result of trying to chew more than they could swallow, causing a liquidity crunch and leading to it falling foul of banking regulations. Never mind too, that they committed the ultimate folly of banking, committing short term liabilities – people’s deposits, to invest in long term projects --- real estate development.
Because of the underhand method that had been used to control UCB, Greenland could therefore not openly get back what it had poured into UCB bank and that was that. Not to mention they never got around to raising the balance of the price they had pledged to pay for the bank.
So when Lugogo sports complex was handed over to the a foreign contractor to develop, I couldn’t help remembering the UCB saga.
According to artistic images supposedly issued by the new developers, the cricket oval and the tennis courts are not part of the development plan. Instead of these there will be a huge indoor arena and a small hotel .
"More recently the Naguru Estate was taken over by some Irish-led developers, OpecPrime properties, whose artistic impression of a satellite city on the site has remained a pipe dream...
Meanwhile hundreds of residents were evicted and promised they would have first call on the residences that would emerge from the plan. They are still waiting, if they are alive. The land is now overgrown and some local people have been stealthily apportioning themselves plots from it.
I am hanging on to the copy of the Lugogo complex’s artist impression to compare it with the final product.
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