ALLEN KAGINA AND THE RISE OF THE UGANDAN EXECUTIVE

Last week Allen Kagina formally took over the reins at the Uganda National Road Authority (UNRA). She fired her first shots across the bows of the administration there, by pledging to sort out the bottle necks preventing full utilisation of road funds and banish the authority’s reputation as the paragon of corruption.

Both are tall orders. But unlike her elevation to the helm of the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA), a decade ago, the scepticism surrounding her ability to perform is decidedly less.

During a press conference, she announced her plans going forward, which would include a re-evaluation of the staff component and an assessment of the authority’s processes. Like at URA, KCCA and National Water & Sewerage Corporation (NWSC) before them, a rebranding of the place – a symbolic break with its shady past, would come in handy.

The majority wish her well in her latest assignment especially since if executed well it can have a transformative effect on the entire economy and therefore a direct impact on all our lives.

"But beyond her potential impact at UNRA and her well-worn record at URA, Kagina is a front runner in a new crop of parastatal manager that is debunking the notion that we lack effective managers among our number to run our most prized assets...

During the privatisation drive of the 1990s one of the reasons put forward for selling off our public enterprises was that we did not have the managerial capacity to make them work profitably. Of course, the care taker managers did not take kindly to this description. In their defence the political situation was such that they were unable to work effectively with incessant interference from politicians.

The interference continues, what has changed though is that there are fewer public enterprises around.

While we now have a healthy crop of managers coming through the ranks in the private sector, a much leaner public sector has not been left behind. 

This is a numbers game.

For every Kagina or Dr William Muhairwe there are a few dozen managers who have fallen by the wayside for incompetence or outright theft. The trick is to generate a big enough number of potential managers to provide for the inevitable attrition.

You can have all the resources in the world, but without proper management or leadership those same resources can go begging. Good managers are not born or educated in the classroom, but need good mentoring and praiseworthy predecessors to look up to and learn from. If you don’t have them at home you import them and allow them to be understudied. Kagina is part of that front runner group.  

Also with a trend that begun with Muhairwe at NWSC and continued with Kagina at URA, it has been shown that a manager need not be a water engineer or a tax expert to manage their respective organisations. Charles Chapman, who was not an electrical engineer, at Umeme cemented the trend.

In fact it’s the specialists who have sunk these very organisations.

Not to discount the specialised knowledge that comes with being familiar with the core activities of an organisation, what is really needed at the top is the ability to manipulate the human and capital resources available to achieve the organisation’s goals.

The specialists have recognised this, with many of them going out to earn MBAs to back up their technical credentials.

"And finally Kagina’s recognition as a top manager but just as importantly, as a woman manager, signals the acceptance of women as managers capable of taking on the “tough” assignments society had decided belonged to men...

Previously women were confined to administration and personnel management, the supposed softer parts of organisations. Now there are hundreds of women waiting in the wings, straining at their reins to take over in finance, operations, legal and engineering departments all over the country.

It starts with society recognising (however grudgingly), that women can contribute effectively beyond the home. This coupled with prioritising girl education means it is only a matter of time that women are not only given the “tough” assignments but that they are actually in place to be considered on pure merit.

In Uganda it started with politics and now it is moving into the board rooms.

The girl child of today and tomorrow will have role models other than their mothers,  to look up to in aspiring to greatness. And that is as it should be.

American billionaire Warren Buffett once said, “When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.”

We have our fingers crossed that Kagina can debunk yet another male created truism.

KAMPALA “LAND GRABS” A SYMPTOM OF POOR PLANNING

This week city businessman Sudhir Ruparelia appeared before a parliamentary committee probing the loss of land belonging to public schools to public developers.

Ruparelia was answering allegations that he had grabbed the playing fields of Kololo SS. He argued that he had got a lease for the said land to develop it in to a better sport facility for the benefit of everybody not only for his Kampala Parents School.

There have been other instances of public lands beig taken over,  not only from schools but from police stations, hospitals and stadiums.

To begin with if anyone is to acquire public lands this should be done in a transparent and legal way with all the right permits signed off and fees paid.

That being said, it makes sense that land wherever it is should be used optimally, that is to its full potential for the economic and social gain of the society...

This clamour for land by developers is actually a response to the growing needs of the city for office, residential and even manufacturing space. The city’s plans and zoning laws have clearly not kept up with developments.

For instance the major police stations marked the outer boundaries of the city before independence. 

So Jinja road police station marked the eastern boundary, Wandegeya Police station the northern boundary, Katwe Police station on the southern boundary and Natete Police station on the western side .

However the city has overrun these boundaries. Not a problem in itself, but it means that these police stations are occupying valuable real estate and while not discounting the importance of security, this real estate can be better utilised by the private sector for economic gain.

The same can be said for many other public institutions, which have vast expanses of land in and around the city center.

A rezoning of the city land use and insistence that land is used or surrendered, would do a lot to minimise or even stop the instances of land grabbing.

And it is not that there are no private land owners that developers can go to for their needs.

Private land owners their appetites whetted by the jump in property prices a few years ago, but unable to muster the resources to develop their properties are keeping their lands idle or underutilised, holding out for a better price.

This is not only a waste of finite resources, a distortion of the market dynamics, but is also unfair to the general society, which is deprived of the economic activity that may come with developing the land.

It is clear what the leaders of Kampala need to do. Rezone the city. Provide for the relocation of schools, police stations and other public utilities further outside the city....

So for example if someone wanted Kololo SS lands for development of office space or residential apartments they should be able to approach the ministry or school pledge to relocate the school at their cost and take over the land. Of course there would be clearly defined rules for how this is done so that no one is short changed.

Of course, there are sentimental reasons why Kololo SS or even Kampala Parents Primary School should remain where they are, but from an economic point of view, it’s probably better that they move to more marginal land so that the full value of the underlying land is extracted.

Besides it would not be the healthiest environment for young people to spend three quarters of their year amidst the urban pollution from rising traffic and industrial fumes.

MAYWEATHER’S FINANCIAL TRANSITION A USEFUL LESSON

By the time you read this it will have been decided who is the greatest boxer of his generation, Floyd Mayweather or Manny Pacquiao.

The two boxers faced off yesterday morning in the most lucrative fight in boxing history. With Mayweather, win or lose, set to walk away with $120m (sh360b) and make him the world’s highest paid athlete for the second year in a row. Last year he took home at least $100m from a single fight.

Mayweather at 38, is making more money in one night than previous big money draws like Mike Tyson made in their entire careers.

How he does this is a story of understanding one’s own value and believing in it. In the process he might have changed the way boxing is organised especially with the best fighters.

But is particularly interesting when viewed against the changing role of labour globally. Labour is on the back foot. With changes in the global trading system and increased automation in the workplace the situation is not improving for workers anywhere in the world...

Back to Mayweather. Generally professional boxers are employees, their promoters set up fights, organise their schedules, negotiate endorsement, licensing and image rights. After a fight they pay off everyone – including the boxer and keep the profit – many times over what they paid the boxer, to themselves.

In 2006 Mayweather went out to change this. He forwent a $8m fight, bought out his contract for $750,000 and went off on his own to manage his own career.

By this time he was the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world but he was forgoing a guaranteed pay out up front for an uncertain income from the fights he fought, a risk previously born by his promoters. The reason more fighters have not gone the same route.

It has turned out very well for him. He has made about $400m in his career with most of it coming after 2006.

"In 2006 Mayweather stopped being a worker, leasing his labour to the highest bidder and became an owner of his own value. That is a bigger transition than we give him credit for...

No employer will pay you your true value however much you earn. It would not make sense. The businessman needs to make a profit – earn more than he spends, so why would he pay you your true value?

This is an important question for all workers because in the changing global environment, it is becoming increasingly clear that we have to stop thinking about jobs.

With tariff barriers around the world falling it is cheaper to move goods around, so a lot of manufacturing capacity has moved to China and Asia, where anything can be made cheaper than anywhere else in the world.

The west has suffered the brunt of this move with hollowing out of US industry as a prime example. But the developing world has not avoided it since their own attempts at industrialisation have stalled or collapsed altogether because no one can compete with China.

Economic history shows that industrialisation is what drove high employment in the western economies, so it’s worrying when we cannot jumpstart our own industrialisation.

Beyond that the speed of innovation means that more work process are becoming automated. This means on one hand, that the worker is becoming more productive than his predecessors but by logical extension also means fewer workers are needed to do a similar job.

Faced with this reality being able to leverage your own talents and skills, create a system around them and sell them, essentially become self-employed while evolving into a feasible company, is becoming the “workers” reality. This will become the default mode just as “looking for job” has been during our life time.

It’s inevitable.

"The trick is to ask yourself what is that you do that makes money for your company and look to monetise it for yourself. Worst case scenario a better appreciation of yourself will highlight what you need to improve in yourself and best case scenario will allow you crystallise a business model that you can exploit in the future.....

For Mayweather it was his skill as a fighter, that he has been honing since he was two, as the best fighter in his division he was not making a shabby living but by going out on his own he has unlocked more of his value for himself.

It’s hard to begrudge a man honest pay for honest work.

BURUNDI’S TURN FOR THIRD TERM ACTION

Last week Burundi took off where South Africa left off with street protests against plans by incumbent President Pierre Nkurunziza to run for another term in office.

The protestors insist his running would a breach of the constitution, which provides for a two-term presidential limit. But Nkurunziza’s supporters say the constitution was enacted during his first term, he has run for one general election since and is therefore entitled to run at least one more time.

The opposition know this.

"They in effect, are trying to deprive Nkurunziza the element of surprise if he is to attempt to amend the constitution to allow for a third term, they are trying to create a public momentum against such plans and make it a campaign issue for Nkurunziza to pronounce on during the campaigns. The presidential elections are for June 26.

Why all this hoolah balooh about term limits?

Presidential term limits as we know them have their origins in the US. In writing their constitution in the 18^th century the issue came up and the advocates for term limits argued that the notion of a republic would not stand if the president’s term limits were not predetermined.

However they did not write it into the constitution immediately, but an informal two term limit was established when the first US president George Washington stepped down after he had served two terms.

Term limits were finally written into the constitution in 1951 after Franklin D Roosevelt became the longest serving incumbent, dying during in his fourth term.

In Africa our motives for writing the presidential term limits, beyond wanting to ape the US, comes from our post-colonial history, which shows that once a leader was in place you would have to throw everything including the kitchen sink to dislodge him.

"Caught up in the dynamic of hanging on to power, governments tend to forsake a long term national vision for short term pragmatism aimed at holding on to power, which really shouldn’t come as a surprise...

Politics is about vying for power and once obtained, it’s a bout retaining power. Power, the ability to influence things, starts out not as an end in itself but as an instrument in the service of the people. Somewhere along the way the seduction of power is too much and it becomes an end in itself.

This is not unique to the African situation.

In 1972 agents broke into the Watergate office complex in Washington. This was the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Various sources have it that proof of a deal made by Richard Nixon to stall the Vietnam negotiations, which if successful would have seen Lyndon Johnson back in the White House were supposed to be in that building.

Nixon or his cronies scared the Democrats would hold this over their heads through his first term and also at the next election were keen to get their hands on the nefarious dossier.

But they went too far and the exposure of the plot and the Nixon’s denial it was involved in the break in eventually cost him his presidency.

"Term limits are a mechanical solution to the threat of a return to monarchies...

What Africa really needs is institutions that can hold everybody to accountable, unfortunately for us impatient Africans these cannot reach full maturity in a day or a decade or even a century.

The question is how do you go about building such institutions?

Writing them into law is useful but not sufficient to make them credible and effective. For us who are always lamenting Gavumenti etuyambe. I am sorry to say it starts with us.

My fellow columnist Simon Kaheru last week reported that he went to a place where lining up happens. But beyond the physical presence of a line there is the intuitive, habitual even spiritual sense that there is a line --- even if it is not physically visible.

The institutions we yearn from start at the spiritual level, at the level of our individual consciousness. How can we demand that our leaders be held accountable for their public behaviour, for monies going missing under the watch and for the careless utterances they make that make us reduce our estimation as a nation in the eyes of the world when we in pour personal fiefdoms – be they at home or in the office, behave as if we are above the law?

So back to Burundi. Nkurunzinza should stand despite misplaced call for him to disqualify himself. 

He should stand if only to ingrain the tradition of voting into the people’s psyches. People who say in the context of our countries it is useless to vote because our leaders are prone to steal the polls anyway, are the real enemies of democracy.

In fact if the anti-Nkurunzinza people are convinced he is overstepping his mandate, sue him! Exercise the judiciary!

MUKULU ‘S CAPTURE SIGN OF THE CHANGING TIMES

The capture of Jamil Mukulu signals the demise of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebels, currently holed up somewhere in eastern Congo and hopefully brings to a close a sad chapter in our country’s history.

When President Yoweri Museveni came to power in 1986 at the head of the rebel National Resistance Army (NRA) neighbouring states were understandably jittery.

"Regional leaders warned that the NRA would export its peculiar brand of revolution --- it was up to that point the only rebel army that had taken power on the continent through a protracted struggle...

In hindsight their fears seem to have come true with rebel movements in Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan taking power. But the unintended consequence was also that the NRA came up against its own rebellions arguably spurred by their own success.

People in the NRA would take exception to these rebel movements – LRA and ADF being seen as their proteges, arguing that they have no popular ideology and have resorted to terror.

The LRA and ADF at their best have been hired guns, fighting proxy wars for Uganda’s enemies and at worst have been terror machines that have no attempt to win the people’s favour and cause disaffection towards government. This has lead people to dismiss their claims to be fighting Kampala.

Sympathisers of these two groups argue that they each have political programs, but it is hard to imagine that these can have been missed by the general public.

The LRA and ADF are an offshoot of the end of the cold war, when east-west ideological difference have given way to religious fundamentalism and the outright commercialisation of war.

For both parties 9/11 meant the world changed for them with terror being identified as a global phenomenon and triggering an international response against it.

"The greater international cooperation in intelligence, data collection and processing, as well as new legislation that has given governments all around the world greater leeway to pry into the private lives of their citizens  and the massive investments in the defence industry means such freelance movements would find their operations increasingly constricted....

The ultimate prize would be Jospeh Kony but Mukulu’s arrest in Tanzania, is a sign of how the world is changing for outlaws, especially those who do not provide any geo-political advantage to major players.

No longer will they be able to oppose one government while seek succour with another, their movement in and out of their theatre of operation, unfettered and unhampered.

With a joint UN force – including Tanzanian troops, siding with Uganda and ganging up against the ADF in eastern Congo it was only a matter of time before Mukulu was isolated, exposed and arrested.

With this increasing attention the only hope for the leaders of these outfits is surrender or fall off the radar and wait out the decade-long war on terror. Mukulu run out of time.

It is likely that others will rise to take over from Mukulu, but one can expect that their tenures will be short lived and end very badly.

However Mukulu’s capture and the imminent collapse of the group he has led for two decades does not take away from the underlying grievances that were used to justify and recruit for the ADF.

Youth unemployment and general poverty are the breeding ground for much civil unrest – see South Africa and Burundi. These disgruntled youth are easy to mobilise – even if they do not believe in the cause, with promises of wealth.

After more than a decade of the war against terror we are learning that it is all very well to depose the leaders we do not like and dismantle their apparatus of tyranny, but it is another thing to then generate economic growth for the benefit of the “liberated” people.

Failure here means we may continue in a perpetual vicious cycle of violence.

MANDELA MUST HAVE SEEN THIS COMING

The latest episode of xenophobic attacks seems to be dying down in South Africa.

A few weeks ago some South Africans in protest over their having to forfeit economic opportunities to African immigrants, went on a bloody rampage that accounted for at least seven people and dozens of injuries.

Pictures and footage of the bloodied victims with deep gashes to all parts of their bodies or writhing in agony as flames consumed them or literally being stalked and stabbed to death by their persecutors, raised an international uproar.

Understandably the roots of this flare up are driven by the deep economic fissures in South African society, a legacy of almost half a century of apartheid policies, which denied Africans access to land, suppressed their wages to make mining and industry more  profitable and allowed them less than basic social services.

"The net effect of these policies continue to reverberate through society two decades after majority rule was adopted....

In negotiating this new dispensation, former President Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) were well aware of the economic divide. A divide particularly galling for the black South Africans because it was a situation that did not come about by mistake but by design.

In fact the enormity of the task to even up society must have been at the back of Mandela’s mind when he said, “After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.”

As it is after 20 years in power the ANC has barely dented the huge inequality they inherited from the white minority government.

According to Statistics South Africa, the unemployment rate stands at 24.3 percent with blacks bearing the brunt of these woeful statistics with nearly three in ten blacks between 15 and 64 years jobless.

In addition white capital controls 70 percent of all land in the country, a figure largely unchanged from 1994 when Pretoria embarked on a distribution policy that despite the great demand has stuttered badly missing all targets.

The idea to maintain the status quo after 1994 albeit with an official determination to redress the inequalities, was a good one but the execution has fallen way short of expectation.

The idea was, instead of dismantling the white grip on the economy, let the most developed private sector in Africa continue doing what it was doing – creating wealth, and through official and moral intervention begin a process of redistribution while not upsetting the apple cart will ensure the resources needed to finance education and other social services and develop infrastructure into the marginalised rural areas.

However the execution of this project run into two major shortfalls.

One, that the philosophy that grew this immense wealth did not go away with the ascendance to power of the ANC. Through a combination of inertia and deliberate subversion --- including co-opting a new politically connected black elite, the redistribution was slowed or even halted.

Secondly, the growing corruption among the black elite means that resources are once again being concentrated in a few hands rather than being spread out to the majority.

Education, health and infrastructure necessary to improve opportunities for the majority blacks are qualitatively poor even for newly developed projects as public officials have corrupted the procurement process and paid little heed to value for money.

The combination of a legacy of inequality, being perpetuated by an increasingly corrupt bureaucracy whose members are not averse to flouting their new found wealth around their poorer cousins was always going to be a recipe for disaster.

They say revolution or upheaval does not come from poor conditions but more from unmet expectations, the bloodletting --- while unjustifiable, is an expression of this disappointment and sense of betrayal.

"Stranger things have happened but South Africa going the way of Zimbabwe is, after the recent spate of bloodletting, not too farfetched a prospect....

The forceful redistribution of land was a last gasp effort by a growingly unpopular government to stave off the pressure of opposition. Cloaked as an economic solution by gutting Zimbabwe’s industrial class Robert Mugabe brought the economy to its knees, suffering the ignominy of abandoning the hyperinflated, local currency for the US dollar in effect surrendering his country’s monetary policy.

They say nationalism is the last resort of the scoundrel. It is not unthinkable that with its waning popularity and its back against the wall the ANC may resort to such underhand methods to hang on to power.

Now that would be one more thing for Mandela to turn over his grave about.

SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF TO CURB CRIME

New York City used to be the homicide capital of the world. The incidents of murder peaked at 2245 cases in 1990 before beginning a precipitous fall to a third that number within a decade and further down to 328 recorded cases last year.

Starting in 1991 the New York Police Department (NYPD) started a crackdown on even the smallest of infringements in line with the broken windows theory. The NYPD went after petty thieves, graffiti painters, fare dodgers on the subway and other smaller crimes aggressively drawing criticism about how they were wasting valuable resources on lesser crimes when major crimes were running out of control.

General crime, not only murder begun to fall as illustrated above, though the correlation between the two events has been questioned by other observers.

The theory got its name from an article published in 1982 by Americans James Wilson and George Kelling in which they used the analogy of the building with one broken window, which if not attended to will encourage the breaking of more windows and may escalate into occupation of the building by squatters.

"The broken window theory supposedly works on the basis that smaller crimes lay the basis for larger crimes...

The critics not withstanding it would be interesting to see what would happen if they theory was applied here.

The recent murders of Muslim clerics, the deputy public prosecutor Joan Kagezi and any number of major crimes it can be argued are a result of the general disregard for rules in our society.

Not to flog the point too much but the way boda boda riders (motorcycle taxis) flaunt traffic rules – jumping traffic lights, driving on the wrong side of the road and overloading in plain sight encourages onlookers to push the boundaries, to break the law after all the bodas can get away with it.

So it then comes as no surprise that in the recent spate of murders the common denominator was the presence of a boda boda rider to enable the speedy getaway of the criminals.

Its common sense actually – they say a stitch in time saves nine, and Ugandans who lived through the harrowing 70s and 80s can attest to this . Lawlessness feeds on itself, coopting even the most upright of citizens into its vortex and before you know it what was wrong soon becomes normal behaviour, entrenches itself in our psyches and resist the best intentions to revert to the proper way of doing things.

And even the nature of boda boda crime bears this out. First they were snatching purses and other valuables from the unsuspecting public. Then they started kidnapping and raping women. Then they started killing people. They too were not spared as few dozen boda boda riders have been waylaid  by their “passengers” and robbed of life and property.

"Granted, it’s as not sexy running after boda boda riders and taxi drivers. That won’t get you much airtime in the media, but in order to contain major crimes we cannot have lawlessness run rampant on a “smaller” level and expect to make any headway with the bigger crimes...

Let us use boda bodas as a test case. Proper registration of all of them. No jumping lights or breaking any other traffic rules. Stop working after 11 pm and enforce all the other regulations they are supposed to keep.

If for nothing else our roads will be safer place to be on and the best case scenario we will have created an environment where we revert to the old normal of observing the law.