A TALK WITH THE ROLLEX MAN

I had to stop and look again when the neighbourhood rollex guy took delivery of four trays of eggs on a wet and cold morning.

Just in case you missed it four trays of eggs contain 120 eggs. I could not believe he could sell in a day all that rollex, the popular street food which is basically an omelette rolled up in a chapatti. I had to hurry off to a meeting but made a mental note to talk to him about his business on my return.

An hour later he was down to three trays.

The rollex guy, let’s call him Musa, for sh2000, the cost of a rollex, agreed to field some questions to the extent that he could.

From his work station, a small box with a tin roof, he told me he sold at least 50 rollex a day and that all the eggs went into the omelets none in the chapatis. So assuming at least two eggs an omelet he had projected he would sell 60 rollex that day for gross sales of sh120,000 every week day...

After all expenses – wheat flour, cooking oil, charcoal, he reckons and what sounded like protection money, he pockets about sh30,000 to sh50,000 a day. He wasn’t quite sure.

He has been at the same spot for at least three years, he said. The Covid-19 pandemic has however dented sales. Before the lockdown he says he was selling much more.

A hundred rollex? I asked. He was not sure but it is possible, he thought.

I had slowed down his chapatti making so I had to move along.

Maybe he was content with his lot but as a thought experiment I wondered what for starters he would need to do to attract investors to his business.

An investor is defined for our purposes as one who is looking to commit money where there is promise of return.

"There are the four Ms the investor is looking for, which should jump out at him when assessing a business, before he can reach for his wallet...

Does the business have meaning for him, beyond that it will make him money. Food is a very emotive subject and the investor who understands, enjoys, appreciates food would be a good place to start. He might even understand the vagaries as the industry and will not cut his losses at the first down turn.

Does the business have a Moat. In medieval Europe the castles were surrounded by a ditch filled with water, with access restricted to a draw bridge. The ditch is called a moat and kept the enemies or competition in our case away. Essentially does my man Musa have a competitive advantage that we can exploit to sell more rollex or increase the price.

The third M is management. Is the investor confident in the manager’s ability to show a return. In serious companies this may be reflected not only buy consistently good returns on investment annually but also a steady increase in equity, the share of the company that belongs to its owners.

And when all is said and done is there a good margin of safety between the value of the business as calculated by taking its projected revenues and the price at which it is being offered. Essentially can he buy the company at a discount to its actual value.

So back to my man Musa the key questions to answer will be the last three, I am going to assume anyone wanting to invest in a rollex stand enjoys food, or at least rollex.

Musa may struggle to show his competitive advantage. I looked up and down the road and at interval of at least 100 meters there was another similar stall doing the same thing. And I am willing to bet the taste of rollex stand do not differ significantly. It also seems to me that startup costs don’t seem to be enough of a deterrent to other players getting into the market.

But maybe a competitive advantage can be developed. One of the impediments to selling even more rollex Musa said is that some people are wary of buying food off the street. An investment in some white paint, to whitewash his shed, a white apron and chef’s hat may improve the perception of cleanliness around Musa’s stall. A source of running water too, besides the grimy jerry can he now has.

A menu in full view may help too in not only attracting clients but further differentiating himself from the competition.

Make sure he is current with all municipal dues and is the worst came to the worst, organize for the competition to get a friendly visit from local authorities, harass them off the street.

Musa’s ability to show he is a good manager would be helped by him organising his books. No serious investor will bet good money on Musa’s flowery tales of how his revenues are increasing without some intelligible records. Does Musa have a bank account? I didn’t ask, but that would would be a good place to determine the businesses cashflows. Maybe he has a SACCO or mobile money account.

Ralatedely, the investor cannot determine the value of Musa’s business and therefore how much he can commit to the venture. If Musa can demonstrate that he actually makes sh50,000 and show that this happens over a longer period—six months say, the investor may be able to get a rough value of the business.

The point is that Musa will struggle to find investors to take him to the next level in his current state, what he might get is charity, the kind where the giver has no interest in his business and its future progress.

Musa is not unusual.

UGANDA AIRLINES, FLOGGING A DEAD HORSE

This week news came out that the board and the top management of Uganda National Airlines Corporation had taken accumulated leave, been suspended or been sacked, depending on who you speak to.

This came hot on the heels of an Auditor General report that questioned the assumptions made in the business plan that set up the airline, especially since they had failed to meet revenue targets they had overshot their cost budget.

The evidence shows that even in the best of times it takes years for a new airline to break even. RwandaAir was set up in 2001 and todate has not reported a profit, with the government shoveling millions of dollars into the carrier annually. That Uganda Airline was going to make a loss in its first year was not a surprise, except to the people who drew up the airlines’ business plan...

In the business plan they projected that Uganda Airlines would be profitable from their first year in operation. This may have come to bite them in the backside, because the Auditor General commented that it was hard to judge them against their business plan whose, ”timelines with in which certain activities were to be accomplished had not been specified.”

Industry players were highly critical of the initial business plan, smelling a rat when it was based on the assumption of profitability in the first year.

For obvious reasons business plans cannot work to the letter. The people who draw them up are not prophets.

That being said, the quality of a business plan depends on the assumptions made for and against the success of the business and a reliable assessment of whether it will work or not. The business plan is an indicator of how much thought has been put into thinking about the business, speaks to the quality of the promoters and whether it would make sense to back them.

Against this background you can see how the judgement can be made that government has a lot of money lying around. It is amazing that on the strength of this business plan, government committed to release at least $400m -- $330m to buy six planes, startup costs of $20m and $70m for contingency money.

Would we be wrong to assume that the promoters of this project sugar coated the figures so that the “ignorant” people in charge of the treasury can release the money?

This story is sad, even tragic on many levels.

Businessmen with more bankable projects with more immediate impact on the wider society,  are crying daily about the difficulty of accessing patient capital, capital which the owners are willing to wait years for a return or never.

This money being flushed down the toilet represents real opportunity cost.

The sh1.4trillion would have made a real difference in a child’s life whose education would have been enhanced by an extra blackboard or roof over his classroom; it would have meant life or better health for a child born in a rural health center III; at a million dollars a kilometer these monies would have opened up opportunities for a rural community previously unserved by a tarmac road.

Going by past estimates this money would have been good for at least 50,000 primary school classrooms or treating at least a million in patients at Mulago hospital. This is before you factor in the losses the airline is expected to make for years.

Believe it or not I have no problem with a national airline, a state owned one at that. My argument has always been that for what we want to achieve – greater tourism numbers never mind building “national pride”, there must be more efficient, more cost effective ways of doing this....

First of all people do not come to your country because you have an airline, they come because you have something that they want. So for starters can we inform/market  the country better abroad? For a fraction of a fraction of the cost, we can add a few thousand visitors from abroad through a deliberate, systematic and consistent marketing campaign.

For a fraction of the cost we can beef up our civilian policing to ensure the country is safer for visitors. For a fraction of the cost we can set up a hospitality school to improve our waiters and waitresses capacity to ensure our visitors are comfortable.

Once we have these and a few other basics under control, we can then go to the airlines which fly into Entebbe and work at lowering the costs of flying into Uganda, if that is a major impediment to visitors coming here. And I haven’t even begun to eat into the $400m.

But that is all water under the bridge. The challenge for government is how do we make the best of a bad situation.

The smart thing maybe to cut our losses at this point, liquidate the airline and hope we recoup some of our money and pride in the process. That seems unlikely to happen.

The next best thing, maybe to go back to the drawing board – rewrite the business plan, reconstitute the board, hire new management … start all over again.

The third option may be to just flog it off as a going concern – a badly going concern, preferably to another airline who can integrate it into its existing network and make it work. And even in this last scenario, there are no guarantees the thing will not continue to bleed the treasury for years into the future.

In the greater scheme of things Uganda Airlines has hit a speed bump, but given that its set up was so shambolic, it has made it all the more difficult to get up from this mishap...

 

THE UGANDA PARISH MODEL AND THE TRICKLE DOWN EFFECT

Last week the finance ministry were biting their tongues in parliament to justify the near sh500b they had provided in the budget for the parish model.

The parish model of development, a pledge in the NRM manifesto, is as the title suggests the intention to have the parish - the LC II, as the unit of delivering development to the people. The NRM has decided that in their drive to shift the population, mainly the rural population, away from subsistence to commercial production, they need to oversee the process from closer than the sub-county level.

According to the NRM proposal this will be driven by the Parish Development Committee (PDC) which will be led by the parish chief and peopled by the LCI and II chairpersons, a member from the local cooperative society, elders, religious and cultural leaders.

Initially they will be charged with removing production and productivity constraints by helping manage logistics, dissemination of research findings, providing high yielding inputs and helping with pest control.

"The devil is in the detail, but one can see an attempt to transmit more determinedly the macroeconomic growth that the country has enjoyed over the last three decades to the rural areas. This is long overdue, but one wonders whether there aren’t analogous structures in the government that can do the same? We leave that for another day.

When the NRM came to power in 1986 the GDP – the sum total of economic activity, stood at $4b. On the ground the reality was worse than the number indicated, nothing worked – there were more potholes than tarmac on our roads, electricity was an urban myth and lining up for sugar, paraffin and bar soap was an improvement on commodity shortages; the formal economy was in terminal decline and more than 50 percent of our export receipts and tax revenues came from the export of coffee.

Today the economy stands at $35b, not much to write home about given per capita income is less than $1,000 but shows that the economy has grown more than eight fold or about three percent compounded annually over the period.

Unfortunately, this growth has only been concentrated in the urban areas. By some estimations Kampala account for 22.5 percent of GDP with only five percent of the national population, that means the per capita GDP of our capital city is about $3,500. And what is the capita GDP of Uganda? About $800.

And why should we be surprised, the concentration of infrastructure and services in Kampala by geographical area or per person is so much higher than any other place in the country. Hence the economic disparities we see in our country.

One can blame Uganda’s fast population growth rate – the number of Ugandans has tripled since 1986, but more importantly if there are economic inequalities are widening it’s an indictment on the government. The government has either failed to facilitate economic growth, which is far from true in Uganda or if the economy has been growing the government has failed to facilitate the equitable distribution of this growth...

Equitable distribution does not mean we will all equally benefit, but everyone will have a fair chance at improving their living standards and be able to take advantage of available opportunities to do so.

However, without government intervention to create market access, educate and keep the population healthy, ensure peace and security, the economic growth will be concentrated in a few hands.

Government does this by fast creating an enabling environment for business to thrive, tax these economic actors and then by providing security, infrastructure and social services enable the rest of the population to become productive and hopefully wealthy citizens.

Enter the parish model of development as proposed by the government. In principle this is an attempt – not the first and most definitely not the last, by government to facilitate the trickle-down effect. That if we teach our small producers to fish rather than give them the fish, the country will be better from the effort and the billions will have been put to good use.

Since seven in ten Ugandans derive their livelihoods from agriculture, which has not grown as much as construction, services or industry, this is a laudable initiative.

Especially as part of increasing productivity it will facilitate agricultural extension and irrigation, the two interventions with the highest rates of return in agriculture...

If executed well, this can be a real game changer. It is a scandal even criminal that the agriculture sector has the lowest rates of growth over the years and yet the majority of Ugandans derive a living from it. By increasing production and productivity of our farms, not only will the economy grow even faster but the good growth numbers we keep drooling over, will make sense for more and more people.

 

UGANDA SHOULD WORRY ABOUT THE NATIONAL DEBT, BUT FOR DIFFERENT REASONS

Last week we learnt that our national debt has risen to sh66trillion and inching dangerously towards 50 percent of GDP.

Fifty percent of GDP has become a psychological barrier beyond which we should not cross to maintain debt sustainability.

What caused jaws to drop was that 40 percent of this debt or about sh19trillion was contracted in the last year, a lot of it as Covid-19 relief. But we also continue to invest heavily in our infrastructure development mainly roads and in the electricity sector.

More fuel was thrown on the fire when it was reported that finance minister Matia Kasaija is considering going to the lenders to ask for a suspension of servicing, presumably until we get over the Covid-19 hump.

American billionaire Warren Buffett put it best when he said, you shall know who is swimming naked when the tide goes out. In good times everyone looks good but when a crisis comes along we will be able to see which people have more style than substance.

Uganda’s growth record has been good by any standard over the last three decades during which time the size of the economy has seen a near nine-fold growth to $35b to day from about $4b in 1986.

In the country’s rehabilitation effort we only managed to attain 1970 levels in terms of per capita GDP in about 2000 and so for the last 20 years we have been adding extra capacity. Put another way we are now where we should have been in 1991 if it wasn’t for the instability of the 1970s and 1980s, which just goes to show how much work there is to do.

But while there has been growth this has not been equitably spread around the population, which should not come as a surprise for two reasons.

The way GDP – the sum total of a country’s economic activity in a year, is measured, the main drivers of the economy have been in services, construction and manufacturing. The main beneficiaries of these have been in the urban areas where most of the schooled population lives.

The explosion in school enrollments since 1997 when UPE was introduced means that more people than ever before are coming into the workspace and competing for jobs in those same sectors. Unfortunately, we are not creating near enough formal jobs to absorb the half a million Ugandans joining the workforce every year.

This calls for more investment by government especially in creating a business friendly environment. It is business that will create jobs not government.

To the extent that we are behind schedule is the extent that we need to accelerate investment...

As an example the average middle income country has a road coverage of about 88 km per square km while us in Uganda with our 5000km of paved road our figure is about 16km. That means to catch up we would have to increase our investment to bring us to 25,000 km of paved road. The additional 20,000km of road would cost – at about a million dollars a km, about $20b or about sh72trillion or about one and half time our entire budget today. Even if we spread this outlay over 10 years it would cost us sh7.2trillion annually at today’s prices.

And this is only roads, there are just as big or bigger deficits to be bridged in electricity coverage or number of doctors, engineers or teachers we need to move to the next level of development.

Given that we are only collecting about sh20trillion in domestic revenue explains why we have to borrow.

Maybe we should slow down on infrastructure development until we can afford it? A real chicken and egg situation.

It would be bad politics and economics to try and develop using only our domestic revenue collections. Bad politics because population growth is not going to wait and bad economics because as shown above, we are already way behind schedule....

So the real question is not why is our debt ballooning but why we are not shouldering more of our own cost of development.

As it is now domestic revenues are coming in at about 14 percent of GDP as compared to a sub-saharan average of just under 20 percent. We are struggling to increase our revenues because it is much easier to negotiate loans than it is to rope in more people to pay taxes.

The truth is the donors will not always be around but Ugandans will always be around. Common sense would suggest that we get more people paying taxes, if only as a guard against the day when the donors withhold their money for one reason or another.

We have anecdotal proof of this. Over the last decade a shift of the budget towards infrastructure development and away from consumption is what has kept the growth figures ticking up in difficult circumstances. The shift was not necessarily popular with everyone but it will pay dividends well into the future.

"Improved infrastructure improves the business environment which increase the revenue collections which in turn makes our debt management much easier....

We have done well raising our domestic revenues over the last three decades – sh5b to the current sh20trillion, but it is not time to rest on our laurels.

SHOULD WE BE CONCERNED ABOUT UGANDA’S GROWING DEBT?

Consider this wealth creation 101.

How rich you are depends on how much you own, not how much you earn. How much you keep of how much you earn is what makes you rich.

This is an important distinction because you can earn millions but you are up to your eye balls in debt, meaning most of your income goes towards repaying debt.

Hence the intuitive fear of debt.

In an ideal world all you earn you would keep.

In my second year at university I got my self a double deck cassette player (who remembers what that is?) with detachable speakers. It cost me the princely sum of sh199,000. It took all of that month’s pay but one thousand shillings to acquire the player.

I could do this because the university housed and fed me for free (who remembers that?). An ideal world.

Unfortunately for the rest of us – even university students today, there is no free lunch.

"With all the living expenses, only the most frugal of us is able to save significant amounts. We keep less of what we earn....

In these circumstances and if wealth creation is the goal, we should go over our expenses with a magnifying glass, retain only those we can not do without and save the rest. Actually we should set ourselves a savings target, when the salary comes in remove the savings and make do with whatever is left. The latter method is more effective.

But there is only so much of your expenses you can cut.

Another thing to do is to earn more, either you get a better paying job or sell more of the good or service you are hawking.

That is the sustainable way of wealth creation, earn a lot of money, save some and fit your budget to fit what is left.

But often times we really want to speed things along, which is actually where trouble starts, so we borrow.

You set the goal that by 30 you should be living in your own house. But your sh200,000 a month or sh2.4 million a year savings are not going to help you achieve your goal. But if you borrowed, which is essentially getting your savings up front, you could hasten the process. It could also very well mean putting more strain on your lifestyle if you stick to your commitment to save sh200,000 a month as well as repay your debt.

If your discipline is iron clad, at the end of the repaying the loan you will not only have a house  but also the accumulated savings.

So instead of exchanging your savings, cash, for a house, essentially exchanging one asset for another, you borrowed acquired another asset and still have your cash. You are richer than you would be if you exchanged an asset for an asset.

That ends the wealth creation 101 lecture.

To extrapolate this to the issues of national budgets, you can see why a country needs to borrow.

According to the budget the finance minister has proposed to the house, we shall have a budget of sh41.2trillion which will be financed by sh20.8trillion of our own revenue collections and the rest – sh20.4trillion from grants and debt.

While people are alarmed that our debt to GDP is inching ever closer to 50 percent – 46 percent, it is now about $18b against GDP of about $35b, the real question of sustainability should be how much of our revenues are going to service our debt.

On a personal level think of it as how much of your salary are you paying the bank to service your loan.

In Uganda’s case in next year’s budget we will plan to spend on interest and amortisation sh6.76trillion or about three in every ten shillings we collect in tax revenues will be used to meet our debt obligations.

This in and of itself is not a number that will make you sound the alarm bells, however every shilling used to pay off our debt would have gone to improving the infrastructure, education or health services, which is why we should be concerned.

In addition if the monies were used for their intended purpose they may not have been too much hoolah balooh. Everyday however the theft of billions of shillings provide fodder for headline writers and have the rest of us shaking our heads in wonderment...

If the money is spent on creating a better business environment – infrastructure, beefing up law and order and other ways of lowering the cost of doing business in Uganda, the sh6trillion we are using on debt servicing today will look like chicken feed in 10 years time.

Ten years ago we were spending about sh3trillion on debt servicing and even then there were t hose who were warning the roof was about to come down on our heads. We were collecting ab out sh13trillion in revenues then.

  We are right to be concerned about our growing debt levels, but as number in and of themselves they mean little.

"We should focus on whether we can repay our obligations, without unduly hurting our development ambitions and two, whether we are borrowing for the right reasons, development projects and not consumptive flights of fancy...

In the first instance I think we still have some wiggle room and in the second instance, on the whole we have our heart in the right place but corruption will be our doom.

EMYOOGA GOVERNMENT SHOULD NOT LET A GOOD THING DIE

Last week what was known anecdotally was confirmed when the coordinator of Operation wealth Creation (OWC) General Salim Saleh wrote to the microfinance minister calling for an audit of the Emyooga programme.

The Emyooga program was launched last year as a way to get seed money to artisans and Small & Medium Enterprise (SME). The way the program was designed was that funds would be availed to organized groups and SACCOs for onward lending to their members. The idea as I understood it, was to create a revolving fund, that the monies government had given would be used over and over again by members well into the future, if well managed.

No surprise to many of us, corruption set in and now enough people are crying foul as to put the whole program into jeopardy.

A few years ago government tried another such program and attempted to channel the money through the banks. This initiative run into trouble too because the banks insisted on certain criteria, which locked out many of the potential beneficiaries. Anyone who knows anything about the banking knew this was bound to happen. Commercial banks, which all our banks are, are not set up for startup capital financing making them the worst conveyors of this money.

So then government passed it through the gender ministry and while they claimed to be good at disbursing money the default rate on the loans was more than 30 percent.

Emyooga is the most recent iteration of this effort to help our small businessmen.

Clearly the intention is good but the execution is horrible...

In a text book economy, the means of financing business go from friends, fools and families to angel investors to business support organisations to venture capitalists to commercial banks and then the capital markets come somewhere near or at the end

In Uganda we have friends, fools and family and then a gap all the way to commercial banks. That’s a problem because from angel investors to venture capitalists, these forms of finance are often willing to share the risk with the business and provide vital hand holding along the way, helping the entrepreneur to grow along the journey.

This mentoring is critical for any business. Unlike all that the inspiration books tell you, you need more than persistence and determination to survive and thrive in business, you need the help of people who have already done the journey or with expert skills in finance, marketing, sales, human resource management among others to help you along.

The Chinese say if you want to climb a mountain, study all the routes to the top and then ask someone who has already been there.

Because our commercial class was gutted in the 1970s, by Amin’s ill-advised expulsion of the Asians, the local businessman cannot sustain his business beyond its fifth birthday. The discipline of doing business is best taught by example than from the text books...

So the Emyooga funds are a good opportunity to provide patient or at least inexpensive capital for our budding business people. But also it can be extended to train and mentor them as well.

The truth is the biggest problem of our businessmen is not a lack of capital, but a lack of organisation in their businesses, hence their inability to meet the earlier banking requirements to access funds. When you are organized the funds will come. So who will help our businesses get organized?

That is where governments come in. I believe strongly that government should not be in business, it should stick to ensuring the environment is conducive for business. However, governments have been useful in opening new markets and once developed leaving it to the private sector to get on with.

We have our own examples here but the one which pops to mind is the fish industry. In the 1980s government financed the setup of a fish factory in Masese in Jinja. While – as expected it collapsed spectacularly, it had the effect of showing the private sector the potential of the sector and now fish exports are one of our biggest forex earners.

While government will always stumble and stutter in its effort to get financing to small businesses, the outcome of their clumsiness – hopefully, would be that the private sector will see an opportunity there and rush in to fill.

But before the private sector does that government would have to get over itself, recognise it cannot do it – despite its best intentions and call in the people who can, offer the appropriate incentives, step aside and watch as the sector is transformed...

The hiccups the project is experiencing were expected, that will take the government a long time to recognize the error of its ways too is expected, but the day of reckoning is fast approaching and government’s hand will be forced to do the right thing.

 

DON’T LAUGH AT KENYA WE COULD BE NEXT

 Last week it was reported that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had approved a $2.3b facility for neighbouring Kenya.

The loan was necessary because the Covid-19 related down turn in the economy has seen tax revenues fall and caused. As a result Kenya’s high debt servicing obligations are threatening to choke off the budget.

As it is now about two thirds of revenues go to debt servicing.

We are all in this Covid mess together, the difference though is that Kenya has a lot of non-concessional loans – loans taken at market rates, and in a financial crisis as they face now these become an onerous burden.

In the last few years Kenya has seen their budget explode due to increased infrastructure investment and a jump in public adminstration bill.

It was reported last week that Kenya's debt stands at Ksh7.2trillion (about sh240trillion) of which about 80 percent of it or Ksh5.8trillion was contracted over the last nine years.

"Critics of Uhuru Kenyatta's government complain that not only has the government contracted odious debt but a lot of it has found itself into the pockets of regime cronies...

But the big story real is that Kenya have now fallen back into the dreaded Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), the favourite punching bag of arm chair revolutionaries up and down the continent.

In the 1980s and 1990s the SAPs came with conditionalities like growing tax revenues, cutting back on government spending and allowing the currency to float freely among other things.

The idea behind these conditionalities was to bring greater efficiency to the economy so that the distressed nations do not only get their economies back on their feet but are able to repay their debts.

The conditionalities were often unpopular because they entailed cutting or remobving altogether subsidies, laying off public servants and selling off government companies among other austerity measures.

Imagine someone comes to you in distress, debts are chocking him to the point that he is struggling to feed, house and cloth his family. Beyond your sympathy you want to make your loan to him is repaid. So as condition of lending him the money you will insist he rents a cheaper place, gets his kids out of their posh schools  and put an end to weekend drinkouts with the boys. If he doesn’t commit to the conditions he wont get your money.

"The truth is that often the conditionalities were used to save countries from themselves or more precisely from their extravagant governments...

It reminds me of the saying that, you are broke because you are spending on things that don’t make you money.

Kenyans took to social media streets last week to urge the IMF not to disburse the loan, which was essentially being contracted to pay for other loans.

It is a measure of how far we have come that we no longer criticise the IMF for doing their job, but are now turning the guns on our governments. Which is as it should be.

When things are good or even when they are not unaccountable governments begin to spend as if it is going out of fashion, building white elephants, indulging in questionable, unsustainable but populaist projects. In  so doing they stretch revenues and live their  respective countries exposed when a disaster like the covid-19 pandemic happens.

If you look around the hardest hit countries  have themselves to blame for their suffering.

To illustrate last year deep into the pandemic Singapore announced it would set aside $60b from its own reserves to the economy back on its feet. Some people will argue they are rich and can afford it but this did not come by accident. The small island nation – not as big as the Kampala metropolitan area, with a population of less than five million people has been very prudent with its budget and as a results have the reserves to tide them over the pandemic. They may still need to borrow but they will be a safer bet for the lenders than Kenya or some of us.

That is why as Ugandans we need to question when, new districts are formed, government indulges in flights of fancy like manufacturing cars, when we don’t have an agro-processing industry to talk of or giving tax holidays to con artists and charlatans when the productive sectors of the economy are going begging.

Currently we are spending three in ten shillings we collect on debt servicing. This will change as half of our budget is now financed by debt and debt servicing obligations will go up.

"Debt is not bad in itself but what we use it for. If we don’t spending it on things which will help the economy grow, like infrastructure it will soon become a lodestone around our necks dragging us down into poverty...

Already the IMF has made some recommendations around raising tax revenues, controlling government spending and addressing weaknesses in state owned enterprises, which will most likely include layoffs and privatisations.

For starters they are wondering (requiring?) whether the government can not double the VAT on fuel.