OF BLUE FLIES, THE MAFIA & UGANDA’S POTENTIAL – 2019

Twelve months, is but a blink of the eye viewed against the vast expanse of history. But in Uganda 12 months can seem an eternity. We pack so much drama in a year that it’s easy to forget what happened  this time last year. At least that is how it seems to me.

To wrap the year I looked back on 12 months of this column. There was plenty to laugh about. Plenty to shake your head about. And quite a bit that would bring higher mortals to tears.

In January, this column took a stroll down memory lane to a bleak Christmas for this author, in Wandegeya.  Not for lack of money, in 1994 I had to settle for a meal in the market in Wandgeya, that I thought were left overs form the night before. But is also where I came to appreciate the perfection of the blue, on the blue fly.

The column was prompted by an uncharacteristic attack on foreign investment – MTN was being wrung through the mud at around this time. I was exploring the fact that as a country which had not and until now, has not, effectively mobilized its internal resources, we have had to rely heavily on foreign direct investment to pull us out of the hole we were in thirty years or so ago.

"Thankfully we have been able to attract enough credible entities that have created jobs, provided goods and services and paid taxes. Unfortunately for them, because they represent “foreign” capital, it can be easy to fan sentiments against them for the most spurious reasons, sometimes none of their making....

They are not doing us any favours being here. They are here because there is money to be made. It is a win-win situation. It would do us some good if we didn’t think of our relationship as a zero sum game – either we win or they lose. We can benefit so much more, in jobs, technological transfer, taxes, goods and services, if we can maintain the enabling environment for them to thrive.

Fast forward to September and this column was totally unamused about the shenanigans surrounding UTL. This is the month the investment minister Evelyn Anite warned that the “mafia” had taken over the government owned telecommunications company, intent on stripping it of its assets and whatever else they could pry from the hinges.

This column argued that UTL, which is technically insolvent, because of the hoolah balooh may very well go for a dollar. Its debts far exceed its assets. Not to mention that to bring it up to speed with other industry players would require a massive outlay that no sane investor would put up. Shut it down we said and be done with it...

But it was not all doom and gloom. In that same month NSSF announced an 11% interest on members’ savings a climb down from 2018’s 15%, but a better rate nevertheless than you would get on the market for your long term savings.

This column was practically drooling at the prospects for NSSF, which if a clause in the new law governing the Fund is passed, allowing for voluntary contributions, NSSF will be well set up to mop up a lot of the billion dollars or so, in remittances from abroad. Under the current law that governs NSSF only members in formal employment can contribute. In the new law the benefits of the fund will be open to those in the informal sector and anyone else wanting to sock away money for the future.

There was still more good news. In October this column stumbled (if one can stumble upon a 13,000 acres agricultural operation), Asili Farms in northern Uganda. The farms together with Joseph Initiatives are owned by Agilis Partners, which has set as its target to unlock Uganda’s potential as the continental food basket...

They grow maize, soya bean and sunflower seed. In the space of less than five years, they logged 25,000 tons of grain exports last season. In addition to their own land holdings, they have mobilized 15,000 farmers in the Bunyoro region to supply them with the grain.

They have gone beyond lip service about Uganda’s agricultural potential. And that will be key in coming years. Seven in ten Ugandans derive their livelihood from farming. Rudimentary farming practices, lack of bargaining power in the market and poor access to those same markets means they are doomed to a second class existence where the economy’s continued growth is just a story.

We keeping our fingers crossed for them and like to see how they have done in five -, ten years’ time.

And then we had the laughable circus of the pallets.

For those who were not around in June (It was that long ago), the story broke of how central bank officials connived with our currency note printers to print extra notes. The figure being bandied around was sh87.5b more.

The story grew legs because in our day to day living we do this kind of thing. We are always looking to cut corners, to win a bargain, to beat the system. So because we do it, somebody must be doing it at the central bank.

"Never mind that the printers have reputation of a few hundred years and would not jeopardise that from some small banana republic. Never mind that the scale of the operation to smuggle from under security – both here and abroad, 350 kgs of notes (a conservative estimate) and hence the ease with which the secret would have leaked, not weeks but hours after the cache had touched down in Uganda.

But yes! This is Uganda!

MUSEVENI HAS THE LAST LAUGH ON CORRUPTION?

Marketing gurus Al Ries and Jack Trout spelled it out a long time ago. That when you are the market leader one of the key ways of bolstering your position is always be aware of what the contenders are up to, and then hijack their effort.

The Anti-corruption walk this week that was led by President Yoweri Museveni may one day serve as a test case for that very theory.

Coming up to the 2021 election the strategists must have worked out that the biggest Achilles heel of this government is the growing corruption, or at least the perception that corruption is growing. So how to prevent the opposition from taking it on as their rallying cry? Own the fight against corruption.

"As was pointed out somewhere Museveni was actually demonstrating against his own government....

So where does that leave the opposition? They have to hope that after the fanfare of the walk, government falls back to business as usual. Despite the President’s best intentions, the money is on that being the outcome.

Corruption is not unique to Uganda.

Across the border in Kenya the government is working hard to fill a hole in the budget that was created by officials who cooked the books, projecting higher revenues and underreporting expenditure. In South Africa once proud enterprises like South African Airlines, power company, Eskom and media house, SABC are all but dead, buried under the weight of corruption and mismanagement in the last two decades.

Dealing with corruption there will require unique approaches specific to them as it will here.

But let us walk through this process. So countries that are not corrupt how did they get there?  

In medieval Europe there were kings who had supreme power. They descended from the strongest cavemen, who through physical might imposed their will on their hunter-gatherer communities.

As these communities grew in size they settled down in one place. Power shifted from the muscle bound caveman to the man who by working his fields could command the most surpluses. He became the leader of the now larger tribe.

But he had his cronies who were shoring him up. The resources of the tribe – paid to the crown as tribute, were not enough to go around, so they started wars of conquest and expansion, and shared in the spoils of war and the enlarged resource pool.

But meanwhile the collective surpluses were also used to pay the artists, the thinkers and innovators. Out of innovation came the industrial revolution, which created a new industrial class who became a counter to the absolute power of the realm.

Through protracted negotiations, that were often bloody, the realm ceded some of its power in exchange for retaining its lands and exalted position in society. In some places France and Russia this progression of events went spectacularly wrong for the ruling class.

What the industrialists sued for were more objective rules for the management of society, that did not depend on the whims of one mad ruler or another, which effectively rolled back corruption. 

"Corruption thrives in situations where there are huge discretionary powers allowed the leadership, which can easily degenerate into impunity....

Long story short, if there is no credible counter to governments, corruption will flourish. You cannot shame corrupt governments into good behavior, they have to be compelled. To expect them, out of the goodness of their hearts, if there is any goodness left, to mend their ways, is an exercise in futility.

Meanwhile the corrupt are not asleep and are actively sabotaging the aforementioned evolution. They coopt, wear down or get rid of all together the anti-corruption activists as long as they don’t coalesce into a real threat to the corrupts’ power.

Maybe we can short circuit this process. We can’t wait the hundreds of years it too Europe to organize itself. I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Some people point to other countries where leaders have put the fear of god in their citizens and no one dare steal a shilling. They want that absolute power here but only to fight corruption. But still that is arbitrary power that doesn’t build institutions, shocking as it seems, it’s a regression rather than progression from where Uganda is today.

So we are back to where we started.

SHOOTING OURSELVES IN THE FEET… DO WE STILL HAVE FEET?

I heard the most bizarre story the other day.

A big beverage company wanting to beef up its portfolio of locally made drinks linked up with a local enterprise with a long history of agro-processing.

They struck up a deal that the drinks company would take up all the fruit juice they can produce from their farmer networks.

But first the beverage company laid down the standard of juice they would expect from the company.

The higher demands of the international beverage company meant that the local producer would have to commission a purpose built factory just to service this new client.

The beverage company of course was not in this for charity. Government in the 2017/18 budget had provided incentives, zero excise duty, for manufacturers who used more than 30% local input in making their non-alcoholic drinks.

So in a bid to dot their ‘I’s and cross their ‘t’s the beverage bottler went to our tax man to get any administrative business out of the way.

"The tax man shocked at how much excise duty would be walking out the door refused to allow the beverage company to benefit from the tax incentive...

The processing company, which was about to take delivery of its plant and machinery to fulfill their contract, all $2m (sh7.5b) is in a bind. It’s hundreds of farmers are in a bind, are as their suppliers.

The beverage company in question is Century & Rwenzori Bottling Companies, the local agro-processor is Reko, who have 10,000 farmer under contract from 65
districts around the country.

"This is not the first time an investor has been left holding the bag after government reneges on an agreed position....

Last Nile Breweries had to shut down their Chibuku line because government slapped an 30% excise duty on the drink that the brewer said made the beer uncompetitive.

The drink a mixture of maize and sorghum was to be supplied by thousands of farmers. In addition, the beer, which was to sell for about a thousand shillings a bottle, was likely to make a dent in the unregulated alcohol market.

It boggles the mind.

Calls to the responsible official at Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) went begging.
This story is bizarre because the story of

Uganda’s economic growth over the last three decades is that an urban elite have benefitted disproportionately from it.

Mainly because, the growth in the agricultural sector has not been robust enough to show a comparable improvement in living standards of the seven in ten Ugandans who derive their living from the land.

Our farmers continue to use rudimentary methods of production, lose up to half their crop in post-harvest handling and the little surplus they can get, they are robbed blind by middle men who take advantage of their lack of bargaining power.

This situation has resulted in a widening of income and wealth inequalities, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

"The common sense way to redress this to encourage high productivity in the rural areas and a ready market to take up this new production...

Government is making some attempts to improve production through providing inputs under the Operation Wealth Creation (OWC), beefing up the extension services budget at the agriculture ministry, opening up the roads and pushing for regional integration to improve market access.
It was therefore a master stroke of strategic thinking to provide the incentive to boost investment in agro-processing.

This move recognizes that government does not have the resources to absorb the increased farmer output and secondly, that government – anywhere in the world is not a good businessman.

The Soroti fruit factory is a case in point. A good idea poorly executed, has disappointed the farmers and continued government interest in the project may not be unlike throwing good money after bad.

"By keeping their eye on the strategic objective, which is lifting the incomes of the rural person and by extension their living standards, the incentives sought to coopt the owners of capital into the scheme....

We will give our officials the benefit of doubt and assume they are acting on some misplaced sense of patriotism. That they believe that these industries should be ring fenced for local businessmen and hence their obstructing genuine businessmen. But even this is wrong thinking.

Real patriots, who love their country, would see that the facilitating of industry and hence the production of jobs and therefore the raising of more people’s incomes should be the main driver of their patriotism.

At the back of everybody’s mind is the real challenge this country is faced with, which is the youth bulge – 80% of our population is aged below 35, and the urgency for jobs is a real one. A failure to create jobs as fast as our youth hit the job market threatens instability and worse.

We need to stop shooting ourselves in the feet or we will have no feet to shoot or stand on.

TO DAM OR NOT TO DAM THE MURCHISON FALLS?

When government first mooted the idea of developing Bujagali dam in the 1990s, the opposition to it came from water rafting companies and joined by some environmentalists.

They were successful in stalling its development because they managed to arouse the funders concerns about the environment, including the fate of some frog that may go extinct with the development. It didn’t help too that the developer American energy company AES run into financial trouble, a result of the Argentinian debt crisis of early 2000s.

"The dam got built anyway after loadshedding had us groping in the dark daily and we saw the light...

Fast forward 20 years and we are gearing for another fight this time over the Murchison Falls in northern Uganda.

Last week state tourism minister Godfrey Kiwanda let slip that cabinet had approved a study of the Uhuru Falls that lie upstream from Murschison Falls. The potential promoters of the project estimate they can generate an additional 360 MW from the site.

We got a foretaste of things to come, when in June it was revealed that a South African company had applied for a license to develop the site, a precursor to carrying out studies. This time it was not a lone tour company fighting the development. Statements came fast and thick from everywhere including from the tourism minister Ephrahim Kamuntu who stopped short of swearing there would never be a dam in the park.

So why now the apparent about face by government. When faced with the facts it is no surprise that they would consider the proposition.

Currently only one in five Ugandans are connected to the grid. This figure alone speaks volumes about the state of our development or lack of thereof...

The countries with the lowest access to power are a who’s who of the poorest countries in the world – South Sudan, Burundi, Chad, Malawi, Liberia, Central Africa Republic and Mogadishu. And that is not by mistake.

It’s a straight line correlation no power, no industrilisation. No industrialization, no jobs. No jobs, widespread poverty. Another relationship that can be drawn is that countries with high incidence of poverty are unstable, probably the most unstable in the world.

The naysayers will argue of course that we have too much power at the moment.

With the commissioning of Isimba power dam earlier in the year, we sent our generation capacity beyond a thousand megawatts. The 600 Megawatt Karuma Dam is soon coming online and will further swell our power surplus. Our peak demand currently is about 500 MW.

But that will soon be snapped up with local demand doubling every seven years. And this before you consider growing demands from industry, which is set to increase and as we become more active in extractive industries.

A few years ago Professor Kisamba Mugerwa convinced me that our power needs are so huge that we need to start planning for nuclear energy.

It is currently estimated that the power generation capacity on the River Nile is about 4000 megawatts. The National Planning Authority projects that we will need about 40,000 megawatts by 2040.

Developing nuclear energy is so much more expensive than hydro power by after of at least twice, so we don’t have the capacity currently to develop nuclear plants. Thee economic activity that would come with extra power would be taxed to finance nuclear power in the future.

It is against this background that you can see why government would even consider a power dam in the Murchison Falls National Park.

The proposed site of the dam is one leg of a spilt in the river – the Uhuru Falls, with the other split being the Murchison Falls that we know.

We can’t preempt the study but there is a real possibility that the dam can be built without affecting the Murchison Falls, the spectacular view of the River Nile bursting through a seven-meter gap to fall more than 40 meters below.

The bigger argument against tampering with the site may be that the construction works may threaten the delicate balance of the environment, causing irreparable damage that may see the animals the park is famed for, and are its main attraction, immigrating elsewhere.

"If this was a straight political decision it’s an easy one to make. Animals or tourists do not sustain governments in power....

The politicians would frame the question as dooming four in five Ugandans to second class citizen ship for lack of power and its ripple effect on the economy or preserving the falls for the enjoyment of a few?

The middle road is to recognize that Ugandans urgently need improvements in their living standards but it would be nice to preserve the beauty of our environment. There has to be some give and take.

But decisions have to made now or necessity will force us to make even more unpopular decisions down the line.

FIGHTING DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, WHERE DO WE START?

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when discussions about domestic violence pops up. Everyone in the room is against it. The men would never lift a hand to their better halves. And the women would not stand for such treatment, if he dared lay a hand on them.

The knee jerk reaction is to look closer into your drink because you know, or have heard, how so-and-so is the “heavy weight champion of his home”, the sound of his car makes everyone in his house break into a cold sweat. As for her, she has been married coming to 20 years and her fondest memories are not from her relationship. There is the aberration – because we are a patriarchal society, the man on who violence is meted out by his wife. But to see them in public and the way she dots on him you wouldn’t know his torment.

And what about the violence meted out on the children, justified by the old say “Spare the rod and spoil the child”? Children are living in terror, to be seen and not heard. We bark at them, quick to reach for something to hit them with at the slightest provocation. This is done for the convenience of the parents or the teachers. It is much easier if the kids are “well behaved” than dealing with their unique individualities...

Several things happen to kids brought up like this. Violence is seen as normal recourse to imparting discipline on their own kids, because it was done to them and to their spouses because they saw their parents dishing it out.

Or on the other side of the pendulum the parents who have come out of such violence, determine not to do it to their own kids and go so overboard as to not impart any disciplinary control, apart from violence, on their own kids with detrimental outcomes.

Meting out physical violence doesn’t take much intelligence. On the hierarchy of power, physical violence is at the lowest rung. The perpetrator can ensure compliance, but this is given grudgingly, the victim can often do his thing once the beater looks the other way.

It’s an inefficient way of enforcing ones will. Isn’t it funny – or not, how the victim keeps getting beaten for the same thing over and over again?

I have seen figures which show that at least half of Ugandan women in a relationship have ever experienced domestic violence and about that number live in fear of their current partner or most recent partner. A horrendous statistic but I shudder to think that it may even be understated. As these kind of crimes often go unreported.

It’s hard to say whether domestic violence is on the rise or not.

One way I think, to help reduce domestic violence is to make more widely known the wider definition of it, beyond beating of family members.

We need to acknowledge the domestic violence that is not physical.

He swears he has never touched his wife. And he is true to his word. But the mental torture he puts her through – dismissing her as a person, rubbishing her professional achievements, criticizing her running of the house, putting her down among family and friends, he might as well have been using her as a punching bag. And the other way around.

By publicising the wider definition to include psychological and emotional violence, physical violence, the extreme form of domestic violence may be reduced. And we can get to working on reducing the other forms.

Hopefully the violator would begin to suffer some cognitive speed bumps before he gets to physical abuse and maybe stop before then. But even for the victims, they would recognize the other signs of domestic violence that precede physical abuse and hopefully have a better reaction time to events or walk away altogether. Easier said than done of course.

The #MeToo movement, where women are coming out years after the fact to report powerful men’s patterns of abuse shows why this is important. Ignorance of what constitutes domestic violence today will not redeem one 20-, ten or even five years down the road.

It’s a complex subject. Or is it? If we lived by the golden rule “Do unto others as you would like done to you” would we even be having this discussion?

THE YOUTH BULGE, A CHALLENGE WE CANNOT IGNORE

Outside Johannesburg in the town of Germiston is the Ekurheleni East College (EEC), a modest campus that serves as part of a pilot project to head off South Africa’s looming disaster.

The technical and vocational training institution is the beneficiary of an African Development Bank (AfDB) grant geared at better skilling its students – youth and SMEs for the workplace.

Students at the school learn vocational skills like a metalworking, electrical installation, plumbing and business studies.

"The need is urgent. South African officials estimate that at least six million people – or 30% of the working age population, are unemployed most of whom are youth...

The South African economy, growing at paltry two percent, can’t promise to create enough jobs for its jobless masses. It is hoped that if the pilot one of three, prove successful in getting their graduates employed or open up businesses, they can roll it out across the country and forestall what is widely seen as a ticking time bomb.

Apartheid biased development towards a white minority – South Africa has the widest wealth disparities on the continent, and as a result there are thousands of youth roaming around thinking that they are no better off 25 years after apartheid was dismantled. This frustration has shown itself in the country’s high crime rate and the attacks on foreign workers earlier this year.

A corruption which has almost ground the economy to a halt – they suffer up to 16-hour load shedding on some days, has not helped issues.

It’s the story of the continent – without the apartheid hangover, but in contexts that are no less daunting.

In Uganda more than 80% of the population is under the age of 35. According to 2016/17 Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS), 13.3% of Ugandans between the age of 18 – 30 are unemployed. Other numbers have varied more wildly but don’t stand up to anecdotal evidence.

That being said the economy not creating enough jobs in the formal sector to absorb the thousands turning up in the job market every year. So like South Africa practical and entrepreneurial skills will have to be emphasized going forward.

"Conspiring against efforts to create jobs for all by the year 2040 or whatever the number is now, the increasing automation of processes across sectors. Every industry from manufacturing to banking to retail, even garages are looking to employ fewer and fewer people to gain efficiencies and cut costs....

While manufacturing jobs is what drove the industrial revolution in the 20^th century I am afraid it will not have as significant a role in the 20^th century.

New plant and machinery now need fewer workers to do more work. Unlike the workers of the industrial age these new workers need to be better educated than the automatons of the last century too.

That being said there will always be a need for a carpenter, mechanic, plumber especially as we become more urbanized. But even more importantly there is a need for good entrepreneurs who understand not only how to set up businesses but run them sustainably.

This last point is critical. An engineer who leaves university knows the subject inside out but is unable to start and run a firm, that can not only do construction but also employ more and more people and grow. Is it any wonder that after today we have no major indigenous contractors winning major jobs in this infrastructure development boom?

"The biggest companies were first small companies. And for every big company hundreds even thousands have fallen by the wayside. The ones that have survived the natural selection process have done so often because they have been deliberate and systematic in growing their capacity over time... 

In more advanced economies this has happened over generations, here in Uganda maybe over the last three decades, at least.

In addressing the youth unemployment challenge, government needs to recognize that throwing money at the challenge is at best a stop gap measure at worst will see our youth addicted to handouts. 

What government needs to do is improve the environment for doing business – we are 112 out of 189 in the Ease of Doing business rankings, commit more resources to providing vocational and entrepreneurial skills.

If done systematically then even the government handouts will be better utilized in serving the end of job creation.

At Ekurhuleni they don’t stop at graduating technicians, but work with industry – the surrounding industries actually nominate the students to the college, provide internship slots and often high them eventually.

Those who are not so lucky graduate with a toolkit to help them set themselves up in their own communities.

"South African trade ministry officials know it’s a race against time – at the college they are employing a semester system that allows them to train double the students given the facilities. When fully rolled out in a decade or so they intend to be annually passing out at least ten percent of the unemployed youth annually or 600,000 graduates....

We wish them luck. We will all need it.

FINTECH TAKING OVER, FOR THE BETTER

Activities to commemorate the financial inclusion week culminate this week with The Africa Fintech Festiva,l which starts tomorrow, (5th November) here in Kampala.

The festival’s theme is “The role of fintech in Africa’s digital economy”. The word Fintech has come into everyday use in the last decade or so and is used to describe the use of technology in facilitating banking and financial services.

The financial sector has always been ahead of the curve in the adoption of technology, but its only in recent times that applications have brought these efficiencies to the man on the street.

The speed of innovation and adoption has made us forget how traumatizing it was to deal with banks and financial institutions.

There was a time when banks were only on Kampala road, opened from 9 am to 1 pm, never on weekends and account opening and minimum balances were so prohibitive as to serve as a barrier to entry.

At the time banks would keep hand written ledgers that had to balanced every day, hence the early closure and the reluctance to go for the mass market. As competition increased, banks had to seek new clients forcing them to rack their ties and jackets to mix it up down town. New technologies helped them cope with the increased volumes of transactions and operate longer hours.

The introduction of the mobile phone created a new platform, nearer to most than their local bank branch, which has seen an explosion in accounts.

A few weeks ago the Bank of Uganda reported that mobile money users had grown to 25.8m last year compared to 22.7m in 2017. But while the value of transactions reduced to sh66.9trillion from sh73trillion the previous year the number of transactions nearly doubled to 2.5 billion from 1.3 billion.

These numbers are interesting because commercial bank accounts in Uganda last year were just under eight million, a third of mobile money accounts. This speaks to the fact that people want to and see the benefit of engaging in the formal financial sector, but for most of them it has been difficult to participate. As a result the benefits of credit and other financial products have eluded them and in effect hobbled their prospects of climbing up the social ladder.

And we will only see an acceleration in the innovation and adoption of fintech. On a micro level it will make us more efficient and productive. It has been said that the Ugandan worker is not as productive as his counterparts in the region. While a part of it is our laid back attitude to work, there is also the fact that our processes have not been as capital intensive as our neighbours.

With miniaturisation computers are becoming faster and smaller. Its barely two decades ago when 256MB CPU was adequate for our desk top computer. Now you hold that power many times over in the palm of your hands. You can now spare yourself the ordeal of visiting the banking hall depositing and withdrawing funds, receiving and making payments off your phone or computer.

The potential of an economy can be seen by how fast money moves. The time spent filling forms, standing in line, moving to and from the bank, is everyday being reduced to its bare minimum, which will and is having a ripple effect through the economy.

The beauty of technology is that upgrades are flying off the shelves almost every year, meaning “old” technologies are becoming less costly, guaranteeing that even the poorer members of the society will be hooked up faster than ever.

In Uganda today mobile phone coverage stands at about 76% across the border in Kenya it is at 105%. And it shows. Last year about sh393b daily was transacted across all mobile money platforms in Kenya, the comparable amount here is less than half that at about sh183b.

The relative sizes of the economy aside, Kenyans are well ahead of us in the use of mobile money to not only transfer funds, to provide credit, insurance and facilitate business transactions to the point that a cashless economy is a very near possibility.

One of the major challenges of our economy is that we are not aggregating our resources into meaningful sums be they human resource or land but especially capital. It is not a stretch of imagination to see how fintech will provide a real solution for our inability to aggregate capital.

Believe it or not some people don’t deal with banks out of some deep seated phobia, dealing with their phone not so much.

It’s become so pervasive that we forget that fintech is still in its early days, services are still more costly and there are still a lot of legal gray areas that have to be ironed out before it can reach its full potential.

Fintechs potential to mop all the loose change lying around, fashion products for the lowest of low as well as increase efficiency in the whole financial sector is scary. Scary in a good way if it makes all our lives easier.