LEAVING A BITTER TASTE IN THE SUGAR INDUSTRY’S MOUTH

In recent days there has been talk of there being a shortage of sugar in the market that necessitated the importation of sugar tax free to alleviate the shortage and force prices down.

Currently sugar retail prices are hovering at around sh5000 a kg.

The claims first came to light in a dubious press report which claimed government had allowed the importation of the tax free sugar. Trade and industry minister Amelia Kyambadde refuted the claims and the sugar industry came out to deny that they had run out of sugar.

"Word on the grapevine is that the people pushing this story and hoping to force government’s hand have already brought the sugar in and set to start churning it out to the unsuspecting masses ahead of the festive season...

This would be just another story were it not for the fact that the sugar industry is the biggest employer in this economy, sup ports the government not only through paying taxes but also in creating infrastructure and providing social services in the places it operates.

A collapse of this industry, which is what would happen if we allowed the importation of cheap sugar from abroad, would have a ripple effect through the rural economies of eastern and western Uganda.

Is this being alarmist? 

As a recently as a decade or two ago Mumia Sugar in Kenya was crushing 10,000 tons a day, employing thousands directly and indirectly and supporting a supply chain that stretched across the region. However a connected elite, that the Kenyan press resorted to calling the sugar barons, not only helped bring it to its knees but also won themselves concessions to bring in tons of imported sugar hammering the final nail in Kenya’s sugar industry.

Mumias is now down to crushing 1,000 tons a day on account of mismanagement but also a gutting of it’s out grower farmer scheme.

This last point is important because in Uganda we are seeing the same happening and given the Kenyan precedence it’s not a stretch to foresee the collapse of the Uganda sugar industry.

And when that happens the blame will lie squarely with the trade ministry.

For starters they have licensed 23 sugar companies in the last few years, 13 of which are now operational.

In a well regulated industry licensing of sugar companies ensures that they do not feed off each other’s plantations, which mean there should be a minimum distance between operations to ensure this.

As it is now sugar companies are mushrooming in eastern Uganda around the more established Kakira Sugar Works and Sugar Corporation of Uganda Ltd (SCOUL). Their intention is clear, to feed off the two giants out grower networks, without suffering the investment to build their own.

One indicator that this is happening is that for the 13 mills to be sustained today, crushing about 3,000 tons of cane a day the land under sugar cane would have to rise to 214,500 hectares. Currently the land under sugar cane in Uganda is about 120,000 hectares.

The biggest expense in the sugar industry in Uganda is the building and sustaining the nuclear plantation and the out grower networks.

There is a proposed sugar policy that has been seating on the shelf for at least a decade which prescribes that to set up a sugar milling operation one must 500 hectares of plantation and not be within a radius of 25km of an existing operation.

Despite the pleadings of industry players government has been dragging its feet on putting these rules in place.

"As a result of the cannibalism within the sugar industry the older players who were supporting outgrower farmers are scaling back their support which has resulted in production not growing to expected levels with the 13 players not producing as much sugar as the big three were producing last year...

The correct thing to do wold be to operationalize the sugar policy as a basic framework on how to guide the industry.

Mauritius, trailblazers in sugar production worked this out at least a decade ago. IN response to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules that prohibited preferential treatment between nations they have had to rationalise their sugar industry, consolidating from the more than 20 sugar plants in 2006 to the current four.

This has allowed them scale to not only produce more refined sugar but also to produce power, industrial alcohol and additives for the construction industry.

The current confusion in the industry overseen by the trade ministry will lead to the eventual collapse of the sector and the rise of powerful sugar import cartels which will frustrate any revival of the industry.

This is unfortunate too, since the same ministry is spearheading the Buy Uganda, Build Uganda (BUBU) initiative.

NSENENE AND THE PUSH FOR A MIDDLE INCOME

The Nsenene (grasshopper) season is in full flight (forgive the pun).

I read fantastic stories last week of how sacks of the insect are criss crossing the nation. The major supply areas seem to be the central region, where in a given night you may see contraptions made of iron sheets, drums and high intensity light being used to trap grasshoppers.

Friends of mine who have been following the market, say that a few weeks ago as the season was just getting started a tumpeco (half-liter mug) of nsenene was going for sh20,000! And a sack of nsenene was selling for up to sh500,000. She thinks the season has peaked as the same quantities are now going for sh3,000 and sh20,000.

The snacky treat is prepared by stripping it of wings and legs and frying it in its own oils.  I am told one can add tomatoes and even garlic to taste.

There are two nsenene seasons around April and November, the latter being the major season.

So if one got to thinking, what would it take to rare nsenene and therefore ensure a year around supply? Would the market demand fall off because as they say familiarity breeds contempt? Maybe we can export the treat, what would it cost to break into those foreign markets?

That last lesson is key to our quest for transformation of the economy.

It is not a secret but to take our economy to the next level – surpass the $1000 per capita magic number, we need to export stuff, the higher up the value chain they are the better.

"As it is now total world trade is estimated at $24trillion shared between goods and services $18.5trillion and $5trillion respectively. Drilling down further of the goods traded $13trillion were manufactured goods, $3trillion natural resources and $2trillion agricultural products....

The low proportion of the global figure assigned to agriculture explains why the continent accounts for less than $5 in every $100 dollar of world trade and therefore why poverty stalks us.

Beyond doubling or tripling the number of bags of coffee we export a year, in an increasingly competitive market – Vietnam now offloads four times the amount of robusta coffee we do onto the world markets, the attendant increase in land under the crop may be hard to sustain.

Maybe when we attain those volumes we may be able to seriously consider adding value to our coffee and grit our teeth to try and break into the processed coffee market, already in the stranglehold of non-coffee producers from Europe and the US. We will grind our teeth to the gum before we can even cause a dent in that market.

Same maybe said for our tea, cotton and even sugar.

The sensible thing to do would be to squeeze ourselves into the trade in manufactured goods. This may not be as daunting a prospect as it may have been in the last century.

No one makes all the components of all they produce any more. For instance Apple has at least a hundred suppliers mostly in South East Asia but also in Israel, Ireland, Mexico, Austria and the US of course.

The same can be said for Mercedes Benz or Sony or Boeing.

The trick to inserting ourselves in these value chains would be a productive workforce, and most especially cost effective, reliable and efficient infrastructure.

"You can imagine the coordination of a global supply chain needs a high level of efficiency, especially since manufacturers don’t want to spend more than what is absolutely necessary on storage. They have taken Just in Time (JIT) delivery – where suppliers are integrated in the manufacturing process to the point that they only deliver when a component is needed, to another level....

It therefore makes sense for us to be seeking to push our power and transport costs down, necessary if we are to have half a chance of inserting ourselves in these multi-billion dollar networks.

Companies in South East Asia are doing a rip roaring business delivering switches to Apple or seat belts to Nissan or door handles to IKEA or valves to GE.

To illustrate when Apple launched its iPhone 8 it sold about 10 million units in the first week, imagine if each screen costs $10 and one supplier had the whole deal it would have pulled down $100m (sh300b)! in that first week.

It has been true for a long time. To continue to sell raw commodities to the world market is a losing strategy.

"We have no choice but to go up the value chain. However the markets are not open for us to just walk in. We need to prepare for a fight like we have not seen not only for trying to add value to our traditional commodity exports but also to break into the value chains of the world where the real money is being made.

For starters we need to stop working as if we exist in silos. Power generation is not only the business of the energy ministry but of the manufacturers, tourism industry, education and health sectors. As is the Standard Gauge Railway or the oil roads or the valley dams or fishing issues on our lakes.

Back to our nsenene.

While it may serve to provide seasonal income for some nifty grasshopper trappers it is unlikely to help vault the country into middle income status. If the foreign markets are our target a taste for Nsenene is not universal – some even gag at the idea of eating it.

A SHILLING SAVED IS A SHILLING MADE

Several events in recent days have served to remind us of government’s wastefulness and how through rationalisation of its operations we can stretch our tax shilling much further than we currently do or think possible.

The incidents in no particular order, started with the strike of the medical workers that was suspended a week or so ago. The doctors argued that they were working under terrible conditions and being paid less than they deserve, given the important role the play in the country against the millions being thrown at non-core staff in other government agencies.

The doctors laid down their stethoscopes for about three weeks saying they would not go back to work if their pay was not increased, in some cases by a factor of ten. The public gritted their teeth through the strike. We all think they should get a better deal.

Related to that, state health minster Sarah Opendi told parliament this week that the doctors will be catered for in an impending comprehensive review of public service workers terms of service in which one trillion shillings has been earmarked for pay enhancement.

She didn’t go into the details but if split equally among all 300,000-odd public servants this comes to about sh3.2m improvement in annual pay.

And then on Wednesday, the same day that the minister was at parliament, the Internal Security Organisation (ISO) released their report in which they had done a survey of government expenditures. A report commissioned by the president to look into the waste and duplicity of activities by government and its agencies.

"The ISO report highlighted several things key among which was the way public servants have enhanced their pay through allowances, consultancies to government and allowances of every nature...

Reading between the lines the report highlighted the need for a restructuring of government. The last such restructuring happened in 1992.

The restructuring is bound to find that public servants are all not lifting their weight, some should have long retired or many are misplaced and hence are inefficient and ineffective in their current position.

US billionaire investor Warren Buffet says if you find yourself in a sinking boat energy would be better spent changing boats than trying to bail out water from the doomed craft.

There really is no reason given the exponential growth in our revenues over the last three decades that public servants are not paid better so that we can bury for good the  idea that as long as government pretends to pay they too shall pretend to work.

We are not even talking about matching public sector salary scales.

Of course government will argue about that they are investing on major infrastructure projects, which no one doubts are critical to our development ambitions, but one can also argue that public servants cannot be held hostage to government’s planning inadequacies. Somebody should have foreseen that down the road there was going to be a fallout and worked towards mitigating it.

Of course we are always wiser in hindsight but that public service pay was a ticking time bomb has been common knowledge for years.

"I think what galls the most for the public servants is how they do the brunt of the heavy lifting only to see less deserving people – rent seekers, praise singers and the corrupt, skimming off the cream...

From the events above it is clear – if we needed reminding, that public servants need to be paid better, two, that a rationalisation of the public service would go some way to finding the extra money needed to cause improvement and three, that we have waited too long to get on with it.

There will be pain no doubt up and down the line but if done properly it will be for the greater good of society.

As if we needed to emphasise it more all the strategies, the Vision 2020, 2040, 3000 …. and operational manuals will count for nothing if the right people are not in place to implement them. This is important because the public service is a key driver of any plans or development we may be dreaming of.

If they don’t work or can’t work or won’t work our best laid plans will be pipe dreams at best and delusional gymnastics at worst.

TAKING A LEAF FROM MAURITIUS

Tucked off the east coast of Madagascar is the sunny little island nation of Mauritius.

Insulated from the continent’s chaos by a 4 hour flight from Johannesburg, Mauritius has achieved the transformation of their economy that African nations can only dream about starting with much less natural endowment than most countries on the continent.

From a standing start in 1968 the country has managed to not only grow its economy almost 20-fold to its current $12.2b in 2016 according to the World Bank. In 1976 – the earliest year for which the World Bank has numbers, the country’s economy was listed at about $700m.

This may be half of Uganda’s economy but it caters for a population of 1.3m or about 30 times smaller than our own. This is why the per capita GDP of the island nation is at $9,627. In 1976 Mauritius per capita GDP stood at $779 about where we are currently at $779.

During a recent study tour sponsored by UNDP, to investigate how Mauritius has made it work. 

Following meetings with officials at government agencies and the private sector this mission came with a few ideas about how they have achieved this under-reported miracle. Below are few but n ot all the findings.

1.      The independence constitution is not a copy and paste of the Westminster model.

Mauritius was colonised by first the Dutch and then the French and eventually the British. At the time of Independence while the island population was divided mainly between the landowners and the labourers, they negotiated a constitution over 23 years which took into account the country’s unique immigrant population and a desire to equitably share the future spoils of development.

"As a result while they retained the parliamentary system with an executive prime minister and titular head of state and have provisions for coalition governments they also included seats for underrepresented minorities who are nominated through A Best Loser System. They have also retained clear separation of powers between the executive and the arms of government...

The net result of this is while they have had 11 elections and seven changes of governments since 1968 they have not suffered the upheavals that characterised mainland Africa’s population over the last half century.

2.     There is strong partnership between the public and private sectors

But Mauritius development could not have been underpinned by the good nature of its key players over the years. Pragmatism and real politick are more to blame.

The economy is dominated by handful of families who have lived on the island for decades. These however are the minority, mostly of French origin. The majority population are those of Indian descent who then drive the politics. They have a symbiotic relationship with each providing a counterweight to the other’s power.

"As a result the diversification and transformation of the economy from initially a mono-crop economy, where sugar accounted for easily 70 percent of the GDP to the current situation where they have diversified into textiles, light industry, tourism and financial services, and where sugar now accounts for less than one percent of GDP...

The development has been driven through negotiation between the private and the public sector, the public sector’s interest being to create jobs for its people and the business community’s desire to continue to remain viable.

This partnership was important because with a population that has remained steady around a million, a population that cannot support huge industry, support was needed to break into foreign markets and attract investment to the island.

More investment meant more jobs for the islanders – officials claimed there was virtually full employment in Mauritius today, but just as important the revenues from increased economic activity could be used to finance an ambitious welfare system like no other on the continent. Education and health services are free, and in addition the state provides a host of social benefits that range from basic pension, unemployment benefits and benefits for single parents.

3.     

  The welfare state is sacrosanct

Despite the huge cost the country’s welfare system places on government revenues, it is now recognised as a right so much so that when Mauritius needed to undergo some World Bank/IMF sponsored structural adjustment in the 1980s the continuation of the system was non-negotiable.

"The island’s elite recognise the system is necessary to help smooth inequalities in income that may exist and also to forestall social instability that may result from these. Of course the welfare system is also a way for government to support industry by ensuring continuous demand for their products...

It is clear that the partnership between business and public sectors is critical. If your bureaucrats look on the private sector with suspicion or worse as a source of bribes. And if the private sector just the technocrats as leeches and out of step with times and a happy middle ground is not found, its near impossible for development to happen, even if a country shows improving growth every year.

And it is this continuous give and take between the business and government and politicians that can lead to improved welfare for the general population.

However if the power relationship is lopsided as it is in most Africa, with the government lording it over the business community and they in turn looking to subvert government initiatives at every turn then the result is the chaos, stagnation and even regression of the African continent over the last half century.

THE FDC EXPERIENCE AS PART OF UGANDA'S DEMOCRATIC EVOLUTION

In what came as a shock to outsiders former parliamentarian Patrick Amuriat beat General Mugisha Muntu in last week’s poll, to become the new head of the opposition Forum for Democratic Change (FDC).

Muntu’s concession speech suggested that all was not well in the party. During a heated campaign accusations and counter accusations were flying in the air like confetti the net effect being the ejection of the general.

"Thankfully Muntu did not play to the sulkers and announce his departure from the party in a much anticipated press conference on Wednesday....

While insisting that there were “significant undeniable issues and differences” that exist in the party he recommitted himself to continued mobilisation for the party in its ambition to one day run this country.

The challenge in politics – as in any human endeavour, is that while people might come together for a common agenda, there not only are there differences of opinion about how the collective goal can be achieved but there are also personal ambitions that maybe as divergent as the number of people in the group.

So subsequent to the Namboole poll commentators have talked about the divide between “The defiance” wing, whose most prominent face is former FDC boss DR Kizza Besigye and “the compliance” which Muntu is supposed to represent.

"The former tendency seeks to mobilise the disenchantment with the government felt by the largely unemployed youth and the latter tendency are seeking to build party structures, not hope for a spontaneous mass uprising,  but use the established institutions – parliament and the judiciary to effect change...

One can see the attraction of the defiance struggle, it seduces with the promise of a quick and dramatic change, its proponents too impatient to go through the processes needed to build institutions and processes that will outlive them.

The victory and defeat for either tendency last week is but only a moment in the democratic evolution of this country.

We forget but democracy took centuries to evolve in Europe. Of course with the benefit of better technologies we can expect that, if democracy is the natural end, it will take us a shorter time to get there.

For democracy to happen in Europe they first had to break away from the grip of the church. Once they had done that they then had to expand the right to determine how society was run away  from the royal houses of Europe, a process that was often violent, messy and seemed like a regression into lawlessness. And then in a process that is still going on, they have been working on expanding individual freedoms.

But often in this journey, to those who were in the middle of it, it often looked like an exercise in futility.

Imagine the intelligentsia who took advantage of the peasants’ grievances and directed the French revolution, only for them to be executed themselves after the French nobility had all been guillotined. It must have looked like democracy had failed before it had even started.

"Similar seeming reversals happened across Europe. While the cost was high they all informed the patchwork of democracy that Europe is today, with no two countries having a mirror image of another’s democracy...

The event’s in FDC today will make for a sentence in the history books. They will serve as the building block of our future democracy. A block in a wall is easily dismissed but its removal may render the whole wall useless.

FDC seems to have chosen the path of “least resistance” and they may be validated by one day ascending to power, however boring as it seems there is a place for those who want to build the party and its institutions.

Time will tell. But for now the hardliners took the day, we shall judge their effectiveness in coming years.

LESSONS FROM ZIMBABWE

On Tuesday President Robert Mugabe threw in the towel and resigned as Zimbabwe’s leader, forced in to this decision by a military takeover that was not a military takeover.

Last week the military put the aging president under house arrest following an unprecedented warning just hours before, that the army would not allow the purging of the Independence veterans to go on unabated. The latest victim was former vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa whose dismissal at the beginning of the month, it was suspected,  paved the way for first lady Grace Mugabe to take over and be first in line in the event that Mugabe stepped down or worse.

Grace, who is at least 40 years younger than her husband, is not popular with the “comrades” and they saw her as a real threat to their cozy living if ever she assumed power.

"It doesn’t help too, that Grace's  conspicuous consumption and ostentatious living has continued in recent years, despite the collapse of the economy and the widespread suffering of Zimbabweans...

The seeds of Mugabe’s downfall were planted in colonial times.

The takeover of more than half the arable land of Zimbabwe by the colonial government and the settlers, relegated millions of Zimbabweans to marginal land that they struggled to eke a living from.

In hindsight on attainment of black majority rule in 1980, a robust land distribution process which walked a tight rope between getting more farmland to the blacks and maintaining the productivity of the agricultural sector should have been embarked on with a sense of urgency.

What happened of course, is that Mugabe and his cronies parcelled out the land from initial land redistribution efforts to themselves, leaving a lot of his countrymen feeling shortchanged and disenchanted.

This disillusionment was leveraged by his opponents and in an effort to hang on to power Mugabe   forcefully redistribituted land starting in 2000 whose net effect has been to collapse the productivity of the agricultural sector.

"While he hang on to power, barely, the ripple effect from this political expediency has affected industry, services, the general economy to the point that the once food basket of South Africa cannot feed itself, they now use the US dollar as their currency because the Zimbabwe dollar was decimated by hyperinflation and for all intents and purposes Zimbabwe is teetering on the edge of economic ruin....

The official figures show that the real incomes of the average Zimbabwean are now down to the levels they were at around the end of the Second World War, a fifth of Zimbabweans now live outside the country and the billions of dollars are going to be required to resuscitate the economy.

There are numerous lessons but the one that sticks out for me is that governments should collaborate rather treat with suspicion the productive sectors of the economy, to ensure long term stability of their nations but also, from purely selfish perspective, to ensure their continued stay in power.

The productive sectors, agriculture, manufacturing and services as opposed to the rent seekers and corrupt, are what create jobs, pay the taxes and drive innovation.

While governments main reason for existence, couched in populist justification, is to hang on to power this should not be at the expense of the private sector.

"Once a government treats the private sector with suspicion and even actively undermines it, you know the end is near...

Wherever you look around the world, a country’s viability is determined by the robustness of its private sector and this can only come through the active collaboration between the private and public sectors.

So while one can sympathise with Mugabe for inheriting a poisoned chalice in 1980, his putting his political survival ahead of the welfare of the private sector is what has brought him to his current sorry situation.

The catch of course is that, if as a leader you prop up the private sector, it becomes a counterweight to your government and disagreements can end up being resolved politically to your detriment.

PICKING UP THE PIECES OF THE ASIAN EXPULSION

On Saturday last week marked 45 years since President Idi Amin’s deadline for the expulsion of the Asians in 1972.

Amin claimed he had dream in which he was directed to expel the Asians. The President, who had run out of ideas of how to reinvigorate support for his presidency barely a year after he took power, lurched onto the envy of his henchmen as a way to give his popularity a boost.

Like in any another war, his “Economic War” registered the truth as the first casualty. The charge that the economy was floundering was because of the Asian businessmen who dominated retail trade was a convenient lie used to cover his motives that some say were driven by much baser instincts.

"And like war the damage was indiscriminate and we have never really recovered from it. The Asian expulsion accelerated the downward decline of the economy, gutted the civil, health and education services and while it led to a short period of affluence by those who benefited from the spoils, it never delivered on its promise...

Some people using some arm chair logic argue that if the Asians had remained the country would have been overran by them and the economy would be fully in their control. But that is to ignore or to be ignorant of the fact that by 1972 there were 180,000 Asians in Kenya as opposed to 50,000 that were in Uganda then. We don’t get a sense that the Asians have overran Kenya. They are key players in the economy, yes but that is not their fault. Blame it on their thrift and diligence. Values the Kenyan businessman has been quick to learn.

It is no wonder that Kenyan businessmen are more accomplished than our own. They have benefitted from the mentorship of the Asian businessman and it shows.

We are one of them most entrepreneurial countries in the world. Who can blame us. In the chaotic 1970s and 1980s when the economy collapsed relying on one job was not an option. Business was not for soe special class of people who knew the workings of money but everybody was in it.

Of course our businesses were and still continue to be predominantly about subsistence. As a result we also have a high attrition rate, with less than one in ten businesses making it to their tenth birthday.

We don’t know the meaning of once beaten twice shy, because no sooner have we buried one endeavour than we are off to start another. Which is how it should be.

The mentorship the Kenyan businessman has benefitted from is an understanding of how to separate capital from everyday expenses, how to utilise credit, the value of trust and customer care. And it shows on our supermarket shelves.

"So the Economic war laid waste not only to hundreds of millions of shillings – hundreds of billions of shillings today, commercial value but also obliterated decades of business intelligence about how to operate in the Ugandan economy...

The “lucky” few who inherited the illicit booty are nowhere to be seen today and have nothing to show for the manna that fell from Amin’s palms.

But the even bigger scandal is that the Asian community have trickled back and after two decades of putting their nose to the grinding stone now account for almost half of our tax collections!

It’s an old Indian trick Sudhir Ruparelia once told the Financial Times, you make ten shillings, eat one and plough the remaining nine back into the business. Repeat until rich.

Of course we have our excuses for why the Asians have prospered – again, and we are still spectators on the side-lines – they have cheap capital, they pay their workers peanuts, they cheat, we rarely acknowledge their work ethic or their financial prudence. They must have an unfair advantage that we don’t know about. What we are really saying is that we don’t want to do the work needed to get where they are, so we have blocked our minds to finding out how they do it and when we care to speculate about the tricks that bring in quick money.

As a result on last count there have been next to no successful transition of business from founder to the next generation by an indigenous owned business. This is telling because for a business to grow sustainably it does so over years even decades – except of course is you are a cyber entrepreneur.

 As a result we have no indigenous business that has a presence across the east African community or even one with a national presence from Kisoro to Kabong and fro Arua to Kalangala.

A country is only as viable as its private sector. The private sector creates jobs, pays taxes, fosters innovation and brings in the hard currency.

"By nipping the growth of the business community in the bud Amin in fact, doomed our country to donor dependency and economic servitude...

Talk about unintended consequences!

MEDICS’ STRIKE; DAMNED IF YOU DO, DAMNED IF YOU DON’T

This week doctors went on strike for better pay and working conditions.

Unlike a strike of taxi drivers or shopkeepers or even cooks, the doctor’s strike has reverberated through the population, especially those who cannot afford private care.

And unlike other strikes the doctors can keep it up for longer than most, because while they will not be seen in demonstrations, they can sustain themselves by working in the private sector.

"A lot of industrial action has fallen short in this country because other strikers cannot support themselves outside their public sector jobs...

How did we get to this?

We have to go back to the 1970s and 1980s when, not only was no new infrastructure built in the sector but also the rate of graduation of medical professionals did not keep up with population growth.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) there were 11.7 doctors for every 100,000 doctors in 2010 compared to nine doctors for the same number of Ugandans in 1965 shortly after independence. Most of the gain in these numbers came in the since 2002 when the number was 4.7 physicians per 100,000.

Up to 2010 our population had grown more than four fold since independence.

Kenya in 2010 had  19.9 doctors per 100,000 people. But the real measure in the region is Mauritius which in 2010 boasted 107 doctors per 100,000.

To show the enormity of the task ahead, to equal  Mauritius 2010 numbers we would have to increase the number of doctors twenty fold from the about 2,000 doctors we had in 2010.

This deficit is also reflected in all other medical professionals and in the sector’s infrastructure.

"In trying to redress this imbalance in the last three decades we have tried to shore up health care by investing in health care centers, to decentralise the services, we have more than just Makerere graduating health professionals and more recently we have given our referral hospitals a complete overhaul.
But it seems as if the faster we run the further behind we fall....

This context is important because a country’s health sector is only as good as its public health services.

Everywhere in the world investors in the sector will just do just enough to be better than the public health system to be competitive.

If in the health system there are no doctors, drugs or beds then the private sector will just ensure it has a few more doctors, a slightly better stocked pharmacy and few more beds to make it worthwhile for the public to pay for the service.

It is no wonder in Uganda that we still travel abroad for treatment 50 years after independence. Our private health care is not that much better than the one you get from the crumbling health system.

The doctors are within their rights to sue for better pay. For the lifesaving work they do it’s hard to argue that they are paid adequately.

The government says a pay readjustment is coming shortly.

One can see government’s dilemma.

In pulling Uganda up by the bootstraps over the last three decades they have faced numerous sequential challenges. So what do you do first – security, the roads, schools, hospitals, power generation etc? And when you decide on the order to invest do your priorities remain static? But most importantly how much do you have to commit to any or all of these sectors?

It is not helped that there was a universal decline in all sectors in a situation of few or no resources. 

So one suspects the decision was often that because there was not enough to go around some sectors will suffer as we beef up the ones ahead in the queue of priorities. And even within the individual sectors there prioritisation challenges.

And despite all this is did not help that some agencies were created with salary structure way beyond public sector pay grades and continued unabated.

"One can sympathise with government’s numerous challenges, but not as much as with the doctor’s plight...

That being said it would be useful if the doctors found another way of engaging government other than depriving the greater public of their lifesaving services.

There must be a way for them to keep working as they negotiate with government for better, if for nothing else than that they are no ordinary workers. Which again strengthens the case for their improved pay.

HAPPINESS, THE ULTIMATE AIM OF DEVELOPMENT

Last week while in Dubai President Yoweri Museveni met up with state minister for happiness Ohood Al Roumi. My knee jerk reaction was to laugh. What does a ministry of happiness do, I wondered.

But it speaks to the ongoing discussion about how to convert wealth creation – GDP growth into general well-being.

"That it’s possible for a country to grow consistently for years even decades and the majority of its people do not enjoy the benefits of the progress...

There many reasons why this may happen but two leap to mind.

It is possible that the drivers of that growth do not affect the majority of the population. So for instance in Uganda’s case growth in the past came from services – financial, retail and telecommunications, construction and industry. Agriculture which provides a living for at least seven in every ten Ugandans has been suffering less than double digit growth forever.

So the gains were concentrated in the urban areas mostly, with the rural areas feeding off the crumbs.

The second reason maybe and related to the first, is that the people may not be equipped to take advantage of this growth when it happens. This may be due to the fact that they may not be connected to the centers of power and therefore growth, as happens in oil producers Angola and Equatorial Guinea passes them by or that they may not be educated and healthy enough to tap into the manna.

So take two men who while they share the same physical space, their economic fortunes can be as different as night and day.

Jackson is a graduate of Makerere University, has ACCA accreditation and whose grounding in finance has seen him climb the ladder in the banking industry over the last 20 years of employment. 

His salary broken down to an hourly rate, assuming he works eight hours a day, five days a week and 11 months in a year comes down to about sh250,000 – this is without his annual bonuses.

His gate man, Mujuni dropped out after his O-level. He has some basic proficiency with a rifle and close contact combat. While he has been employed for as long as Jackson, he earns the relative pittance of sh1,875 an hour. Apart from the lower wages, he works double the number of hours that his boss does.

The difference in fortunes when you provide for luck, old boy networks and differing intelligence, really comes down to the fact that Mujuni’s schooling was cut short. When you add it up Mujuni has barely seen half as many blackboards as Jackson.

It is also true that while guarding his master’s pad, Mujuni is more prone to malaria – at least thrice annually, than Jackson – who can’t recall his last attack.

Money and time spent treating malaria are additional drawbacks to his earning power – he gets paid per day not per month.

Meanwhile just like Jackson, Mujuni resides in Kololo – in a matter of speaking. Just like Jackson he works in Kampala, which accounts for more than half the country’s economic activity. And yet amidst all this abundance Mujuni struggles, no, fails dismally to reach out and snatch a share of all this wealth whizzing around him.

So redressing inequalities, which happen when economic growth is not equitably shared, starts with ensuring the activities in which the majority operate are supported to grow and at an individual level, you do this by providing education, health and other services which will give everybody a fair shake at the game of life.

Sounds too simplistic? 

Think about the generation that started life in the rural areas – their first classes conducted under trees, with their first alphabet scrawled in the dust using a sharp stick, who only broke free from the village because they stuck to school longer than their siblings and friends who stayed back in the village.

"It therefore follows that to determine a country’s prospects at widespread wellbeing for its people look at it education and health systems....

It is unrealistic to expect equality in society, but a minimum standard of living for everyone where some people and their future generations are not condemned to sub-human existence is not much to ask, or is it?

But back to Dubai’s ministry of happiness. While material well being does not guarantee happiness, improved material well being where one is free from disease and can look to the future with hope, is a good starting place for happiness.

And if we set happiness – an intangible, as a national goal we may be better able to line up the tangible steps we need to take to attain this far off goal. And we are not talking about the momentary burst of happiness that come with being with this or that person or come with a joke, but a sustained level of joy for everybody, every day, year after year.

So I am not laughing at the Dubai state minister of happiness anymore. She and Dubai are onto a good thing.

VENEZUELA SHOULD SERVE AS A CAUTIONARY TALE

Events across the border have captured our collective imaginations in recent weeks. US President Donald Trump never disappoints from day to day with his faux pas. Now everybody in show business is running scared for fear of the next set of revelations on sexual harassment. And meanwhile British prime minister Theresa May is scrambling to negotiate a soft Brexit that has left her isolated at home and abroad.

These and many other stories are a big deal.

But in South America Venezuelans are fighting an existential battle with disease, hunger and poverty and we are not just talking about the bottom of the pyramid people. Increasingly now everyone in Venezuela is living below the poverty line.

"It wouldn’t be a big deal. We would have brushed it off just another Godforsaken third world country excelling only at doing things wrong at every turn. But Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world. And as if that is not enough, is a stone’s throw away from energy hungry USA...

Things are so bad in Venezuela that inflation has sky rocketed to the point that people are throwing money away– the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects it go beyond 2,000 percent next year from this year’s 650 percent.

Things are so bad that murder and kidnapping are the only serious growth industry.

Things are so bad that malaria which was eradicated in 1961 – before the US, is back with a vengeance, so are measles and there are no HIV or hyptertension drugs.

Things are so bad that people are dying of starvation in the streets, because the government would rather meet its international debt obligations than import food. If they did not meet their debt obligations, debts which were incurred during the oil boom days when a barrel peaked at $114.

The official figures paint a rosy picture of an upper middle income country with a GDP of $440b – almost 20 times our economy’s size and per capita incomes of about $8,000.

How did it come to this?

As so often happens it was a case of expedient politics being applied to remedy economic shortfalls. 

Former president Hugo Chavez in an attempt to endear himself to the Venezuelans after being overthrown once before, used oil to massively expand social programs, nationalised companies and looked the other way when his cronies were gouging themselves at the trough of state resources.

As long as oil revenues stayed high some of the worst ills could be paperd over.

Oil, which was discovered in 1935, has so dominated the economy that it accounts for a third of the Latin America’s economy, 80 percent of export earnings and more than half the tax revenues.

So when prices started falling to current levels of about $50 a barrel the emperor’s nakedness was exposed. As if that was not enough during the good days Caracas borrowed voraciously against future oil earnings. As it is now it receives almost no money from oil exports but still ships off massive amounts to Russia and China as debt payments.

"While we scout the globe for best practice in how to deal with our oil sector, we should not lose sight of how not to run an oil economy – and Venezuela, better than Nigeria and Angola can serve as a powerful cautionary tale...

Thankfully we are at least making the right noises.

The government is committed to using revenues to boost our infrastructure, which is important to ensure that other parts of the economy can continue to grow alongside the oil industry.

We are also talking about a sovereign fund, financed by oil revenues  and housed abroad. This is important because if all oil revenues gush back into the economy it can cause a massive appreciation of the shillings and make our other exports uncompetitive.

The argument that we should bring the money all back and not keep it offshore developing other economies is a populist one but not based on the facts. If the sh7trillion NSSF is struggling to find bankable projects in Uganda what of the estimated trillions of shillings in revenue we are expecting annually when production kicks off?

Beyond infrastructure it would do us a world of good if we could shore up our education and health services. This would enable upward mobility of larger parts of the population. A healthier and better educated population is a more productive one.

The temptation to start a flurry of state enterprises will always be there but we should resist the urge. 

State enterprises are not only inefficient, because their main role is not to deliver service or show a return but to pay off constituencies, they also distort markets, frustrating private sector players through preferential treatment, while giving suppliers and clients a raw deal.

We lack the discipline to run or even oversee the good running of good state enterprises, unlike Dubai. We would be better served if, along with improving our infrastructure – soft and hard, we developed industry wide incentives for investors – foreign and local, to come and set up the companies that can ensure an alternative economy to oil exists. These industries’ output would eventually eclipse oil.

"As we all know in our personal lives, there is no money that is too much to finish. Oil is a finite resource and we should behave with this in mind, unlike Venezuela which was seduced into thinking the good times would always roll...

And now after decades of betting solely on oil the irony is everything else doesn’t work, the oil industry inclusive and yet they still have billions of oil barrels underfoot!

AGGREGATING RESOURCES: THE CHALLENGE FOR AFRICA, UGANDA

On Wednesday Uganda Christian University launched a think tank, the African Policy Center, which will conduct research meant to inform public policy, biased towards a Christian world view.

Dr James Magara presented on the think tank’s role in the Africa of the 21^st century. The problems of Africa Magara said, come down to the fact that we have been doing a lot of doing, unaccompanied by much thinking.

Adopted from Second World War America, think tanks are often independent organisations which set themselves the task to research and disseminate knowledge often with the aim of influencing the powers of the day.

"This attempt speaks to the wider challenge of Africa and more specifically Uganda. We are poor, backward and even hopeless, because we have not aggregated our resources, be it our labour, our markets, our political activism, our finances or in this case our thinking...

We see it all around us.

Look at the classical factors of production.

Barley a quarter of all land in Uganda is titled. This is a disturbing statistic because without recognisable property rights for the majority of Ugandan households it is difficult to unlock the full value of the land we live on. One way to unlock this land is to aggregate these holdings into bigger holdings either through acquisition or cooperation. It is economies of scale such as these that see the US with only three million farmers, down from 30 million after the Second World War, can be the world’s largest exporter of food.

The labour movement is thin on the ground in Uganda. While serving as a useful counter to capital, labour movements have had the unintended consequence of leading to greater efficiencies in the work place through innovation and automation.

And finally capital. Our lending rates are too high, we have too little capital to finance our own projects and our financial markets are shallow, restricted to a handful of products, leaving out the majority of consumers, because we have not brought together our monies in meaningful ways. We save less than 15 percent of our GDP in the formal banking system, while the east Asian countries at least double that figure. Aggregating capital in this way not only makes it easily accessible and cheaper but attracts even greater pools as well.

In the more developed western economies they have taken this a step further, with the creation of capital markerts, which supply patient money to their businessmen. All the capital markets on the continent do not have market capitalisation – the value of all the shares listed on an exchange, equivalent to that of the Brussels Stock Exchange (about $3.7trillion).

But they have gone a step further, and despite some recent hiccups, have been pushing aggressively to consolidate their politics. See the United States and the European Union. This allows them to not only consolidate their markets but to project their unified will allowing them to have more influence on world affairs disproportionate to the populations of their countries.

The disaggregation of our resources is by design and by accident.

 "And why have we failed to aggregate our resources? A lack of leadership or more specifically a dearth of leadership, which sees uplifting the wellbeing of their respective people as their raison d’etre...

Since independence through design or accident of history, our leaders have not been the sharpest knives in the draw. As a result they have found little use for knowledge or gone out to promote research and its resulting knowledge used to inform decision making.

In fact they have been willing consumers of other people’s thinking, the Bretton Woods institutions or Brussles or even Moscow, knowledge we cannot have been generated for altruistic purposes least of all for our benefit.

The African Policy Center has a noble mission, it will run itno a lot of roadblocks –opposition from established players or inertia from the intended recepients stuck in their old ways. But no one imagines the road ahead will be smooth.

WHO WOULD WANT TO INVEST IN UGANDA?

Last week the finance ministry announced the cancellation of the Rift Valley Railways (RVR) concession and took back the management and operations of the railway services.

The governments of Kenya and Uganda had privatised the running of the railway line from Mombasa to Kampala more than a decade ago, as a way to increase its efficiency and move more cargo onto rail and off the roads.

In correspondence The New Vision has seen between government and the concessionaire last year,  government alleged nine breaches of the concession contract among which were default on concession fees, failure to meet volume targets, failure to rehabilitate and operate the Pakwach line and failure to rehabilitate rolling stock.

In addition investment minster Evelyn Anite said the country had lost $700m (sh2.5trillion) in the course of the deal without elaborating further.

RVR responded to the claims showing proof of how they had met the requirements, which letter was summarily rejected and met with a letter announcing the cancellation of the concession in April this year.

A letter from RVR’s lawyers MMAKS advocates pointing out that the attorney general had issues an interim order prohibiting the termination of the concession until today, 16^th October 2017 was clearly ignored by the finance ministry. The interim order was to allow for an arbitration to proceed as stipulated in the contract.

Uganda’s action comes not very long after Kenya decided to cancel the concession on their side under similarly unclear circumstances.

"Understandably the whole affair has left a bad taste in the mouth of Qalaa Holdings. The Egyptian investment group was the main partner in the concession, which they salvaged from the previous operator South African Sheltham Rail Corporation....

Karim Sadek, Qalaa Holdings’ managing director of their Transportation Division says his company has invested $320m in the whole concession since 2010, he maintains that they have lived up to their side of the agreement and still thinks the Uganda side of the concession can still be salvaged.

“We have reputation and good working relations with the partners on this investment, which we would not like to see lost,” Sadek told the Business Vision.

Sadek says the concession was frustrated at every turn by the Kenyan bureaucracy, which made no effort to hold up their end of the Public Private Partnership (PPP) agreement, taxed them to support the road infrastructure and made financial demands on the operators that made the concession unviable.

“Uganda has been very helpful on many fronts we think going to arbitration can help us iron out any outstanding issues, paving way for the continuation of the partnership in Uganda,” he said.

He believes that an arrangement where they operate the Uganda leg, with right of passage to operate between Mombasa and Malaba would ensure that the efficiency gains that have been made so far would not be lost.

In hindsight Sadek now sees that the environment would have made it hard to operate under the best of circumstances.

“On the Kenyan side there has been great hostility from the management and total indifference from the policy makers, no attempt at all to make this deal work. We were aware that there were challenges in making the concession work but we had bought into the narrative that it was Sheltham’s lack of capacity that had failed the earlier attempt. We didn’t see the ecosystem failing us the way it did.”

He says despite the circumstances they managed to reduce transit times for good to Kampala from Nairobi to 15 days from the prior 21 days, while offloading wagons had been reduced to three hours from 21 days.

However government officials with intimate details of the process warn that government is taking too much for granted and could stand to lose not only money but international good will.

“The biggest issue was that we did not put in place an independent regulator who would independently monitor the concession and two, someone to who either party Qalaa or government, could refer any disagreements. The works ministry undertook to do this but they never got around to it.”

As a result Uganda Railways Corporation became the de facto regulator, which constituted a conflict of interest as they were also owners of the assets and there was always a sense that the old URC wanted to take back the service.

That being said he advised that, “Government needs to allow for prearranged mechanisms to dissolve the deal to take their course. The lenders for instance, we don’t hear anything from them and yet they have a first right to take over and even find another operator.”

"It is déjà vu all over again. We have seen this inability to work harmoniously with investment partners before...

We make the mistake of seeing investors as individual entities who we can mishandle as we please. But we forget – because we must know, that there is a whole ecosystem behind the size of investors we are looking for to bridge our infrastructure deficits or build factories or open service industries.

To begin with they come with partners, as a way to share risk, and then these often have financiers behind them and all these often have the backing of governments. So when an investment goes wrong for other reasons than that the project was not viable one is stepping on more toes than they see.

This is a very real challenge because as it is if we take back the railway we will still have to go back to the same lenders to get funding for our plans.

Something has to give.

"We cannot continue running rough shod over genuine businessmen and then wonder, why we keep attracting crooks or why we are not getting enough investments coming in or why we can not create the jobs we so badly need...

KENYA, THE TEETHING PAINS OF DEMOCRACY

Recent events in Kenyan have elevated the political scene of our eastern neighbour to the point of high drama.

With barely days to go to the October 26^th repeat poll opposition leader Raila Odinga announced he was withdrawing from the presidential race. Legally that would have forced the country’s electoral commission, IEBC to cancel the current process and call for new nominations.

The election that was concluded on August 8^th and which saw President Uhuru Kenyatta retain his seat, was thrown out by the Supreme Court in September and a fresh poll between the leading contenders ordered.

But within hours of Odinga’s announcement, the high court in Kenya allowed for other candidates who were in the initial race to get back on the ballot.

And while we were still trying to wrap our heads around what this all meant, a senior elections official Roselyn Akombe, threw in the towel on Wednesday, saying that there was no way a credible election could be delivered under the circumstances.

As if to back her up the  IEBC chief Wafula Chebukati said that while his team was ready to oversee the elections next week, he cast doubt on whether a free and fair election could be held given the pressure from both sides of the political divide.

And all this was happening under a cloud of violent demonstrations, where several people have been killed in the capital, Nairobi and in Kisumu, Odinga’s western Kenya stronghold.

"The Kenyan experience is the saddest thing to watch unfold. Especially as barely a decade ago they descended into a post-election bloodletting that accounted for more than 1,000 lives and saw tens of thousands more displaced from their homes....

Analysts think there may be more casualties if violence erupts again this time. In the last decade despite the massive infrastructure projects and the economic growth the country has enjoyed, the inequalities in the country have only widened. An immediate outcome of this is that there is an army of unemployed youth roaming around with nothing to lose and are easily incited to widespread, indiscriminate and senseless violence.

It is plain for anyone to see that Kenya is going through a painful transition from the big man politics of founding father Jomo Kenyatta and his successor Daniel arap Moi’s time to a more democratic society where power has been devolved away from the center and people are no longer cowed from expressing their views and choosing their allegiances.

The four decade long rivalry between the Kenyatta and Uhuru family’s only serves as useful backdrop for the changing realities in Kenya.

Long standing tribal fissures are coming under strain as a more educated and connected youth take their place in running the affairs of the country. Historical economic contradictions are being challenged as old money based on land and industry, is being challenged by new fortunes being made in services. The old political class is giving way to the new, in a more than messy progression that while it is unlikely to see the country impode on itself, will leave Kenya badly scarred by the time the dust settles.

And a constant thread running through all these changes, and even accelerating them, is the increasing exposure of the everyday Kenyan through internet connectivity to the outside world, raising their expectations of their aspirations, leaders and country.

The history of the world is peppered with examples of the violent conflict between those seeking to maintain the status quo and those looking to overturn it, in response to new realities.

With the benefit of hindsight we wonder why the key players of the time did not see the oncoming upheavals, whose signs were there for everyone to see, and maybe avert disaster?

Easier said than done.

"When you are in the thick of things, multiple variables and actors at play and fighting for survival, the big picture, the long view, even legacy are abstract concepts....

Kenya is staring into the abyss. For theirs and all our sakes we hope level headed minds prevail to pull them back from the edge.

SPORT AS AN INDICATOR OF PROGRESS

Last week the Rugby Cranes qualified for the 2018 Seven-a-side World Cup, winning all their matches against teams from Tunisia, Morrocco, Ghana, Zambia in a dominant display that was able to overcome a hiccup against Zimbabwe at Legends Rugby club in Naguru.

A few meters away at the Lugogo Indoor Stadium City Oilers defended their title as FIBA Zone V Club Champions to book a place in the African Club Championships in December.

While the Uganda Cranes fell short of keeping their hopes alive for a first ever berth in the Soccer World Cup in Russia next year by drawing against Ghana, they showed enough presence to keep the promise that it’s only a matter of time before they appear on the world’s greatest sporting stage.

"In recent years our sportsmen have been enjoying a rich vein of form. Arguably we are on the cusp of regaining our past reputation as a sporting nation....

For a country to be a sporting nation two ingredients must be in place – a deep pool of talent and the organisation to channel that talent into glory.

Our country’s rich ethnic mix ensures that we have a deep talent pool, we don’t have to import our talent. The playgrounds of schools and neighbourhoods are bursting with talent.

A nationwide public school system and network of public sporting facilities was the foundation on which the early successes of the 1960s and 1970s were built. However these fell into disrepair starting in the Idi Amin era and have continued downhill ever since.

This meant that the early promise of pioneers like boxers Eridadi Mukwanga, Leo Rwabogo and John Mugabi and hurdler John Akii Bua, saw no follow through with no younger athletes coming in the wake of their pioneering steps.

It is possible that just like Kenya, whose middle distance athletes burst on the scene around the same time, that now we might have been a power houses in one discipline or another.

Almost four decades after the glory days, we are seeing a resurgence in sports that in some way is hard to reconcile with the facts on the ground.

Our public schools no longer serve as a pool for sporting talent and sporting facilities from Arua to Soroti from Gulu to Kabale have fallen into such disrepair as to be almost irredeemable or worse still have been disposed of to the highest bidder and only remain as blurry memories in the minds of old men and women.

In addition sports has not enjoyed a big budget from the state in the last four decades as more pressing priorities of infrastructure reconstruction and the resuscitation of social services took precedence over supporting the “luxury” of sport.

What is happening now that is different is that we have come to the realisation, like the rest of the world, that sport has great value as a vehicle for commercial interests.

So our sports men have dusted up the remnants of our sporting infrastructure, brought them up to a reasonable standard and started practicing again. Some benefactors have supported these budding sportsmen, not always in a very structured way and the results are beginning to show.

Which bring us to the second condition for sporting success – organisation.

"Given the above scenario it is clear that recent success has come inspite of many shortfalls that still remain in the sports ecosystem. To sustain or build on this success our sports administration have to become more organised. As it is now our sports are run by volunteers at best and self-seekers at worst who on one hand are in the job for the “love” of the sport or looking to make some quick killings – per diems and sport equipment grants they can then flog on the open market for a few shillings...

This organisational capacity is important. We have it backwards when we think that we are disorganised for lack of money, while actually we lack money because we are disorganised.

It comes as no surprise then, that our best funded sporting associations or events are the more organised ones, but even in those the funding taps would have opened even more had they been even more organised.

A winning sportsman cannot be created in isolation of his surroundings that’s why the countries of the Eastern bloc are floundering today  despite their history of great sports achievement.

WHAT IF UGANDA HAD DONE THINGS DIFFERENTLY AT INDEPENDENCE

Fifty years ago at independence the economic challenges of the founding fathers were clear – to accelerate and sustain economic growth and spread the benefits around equitably.

At current prices the GDP per capita of Uganda was $62 and the total economic output was $449m, according to World Bank figures. The economy was biased towards agriculture with just over half of all GDP coming from agriculture with services accounting for 36.18 percent, industry 12.61 percent and manufacturing 7.56 percent.

The structure of the economy has changed since. In 2016 services assumed pole position accounting for 55.8 percent of GDP, agriculture’s share plummeted to 24.4 percent, industry is up to 19.7 percent and manufacturing saw some growth to 8.8 percent.

During the same period the economy has grown to $25b from $449m in 1962. The population too has grown more than fivefold to 41.5 million from 7.2 million at Independence.

"Clearly one goal has been met with economy growing about 55-fold during the period or at about 7.7 percent growth per year on average. The argument can be made that the economy would have grown even faster were it not for the chaos of the 1970s and 1980s....

Kenya which has been relatively stable during the same period saw its economy grow more than 80-fold to $70.5b in 2016 from $868m in 1962. This makes for an average annual growth of about 8.4 percent.

A 0.7 percentage point difference between the growth averages may look insignificant but when you stretch over half a century it’s the difference between the size of the Kenyan economy doubling six times while ours only doubled five times.

So we not only started from a lower base but also because seeing as our economy fell below 1970 levels by 1986, new growth was only seen around the late 1990s, when the economy recovered to its previous heights.

The economic prescriptions in 1962 would still obtain today – increase agricultural production to not only raise rural household incomes but also to serve as a base from which to launch industrialisation; boost school enrollments to prepare the future workforce for industry; expand the infrastructure to support these ambitions among other things.

Even if Idi Amin had not upset the apple cart with his coup in 1971, we were already toying with centralising the economy – a disincentive for private initiative, and like other sub-saharan African countries would have taken us till the 1980s to liberalise the economy and attract private capital.

The motivation was purely political and not based on hard economics. The idea that the government should control the commanding heights of the economy in order to foster development for Ugandans rather than continue to feed the “imperialists” insatiable appetite for profit.

What ended up happening was mismanagement and corruption as government used state enterprises as avenue for patronage and looked the other way as their allies gutted them for personal gain.

Using the same method we put a halt to productivity gains in the agricultural sector to the point that the proportion of agriculture to GDP suggests not only that we are not producing very much more than we were per capita at independence but also indicates that we have failed to launch a credible agro-industry sector.

Kenya probably shows what would have happened to us had our momentum not been interrupted by the messy 1970s and 1980s.

But even better is the island nation of Mauritius, which had a smaller economy than either Uganda or Kenya at $213m. With no natural endowments except the weather and the soils, it has grown its economy to $12.2b in 2016. The World Bank’s figures for Mauritius GDP start in 1976 at $706m, so it safe to say that 14 years prior their economy may have been around the size of Uganda’s at Independence.

Given the figures the Mauritian economy grew by a factor of 17 in 40 years from 1976 to date, representing an annual average growth rate of 7.38 percent.

But while the size of their economy is nothing to write home about the per capita GDP of $9,627 – their population has grown to 1.2 million from 700,000 in 1962, set them apart from most on the continent.

How did they do it?

"The graduated from a monoculture economy that grew only sugar, went into textile manufacture —importing cotton from Madagascar and further afield, following the same principle became a hub from small industry by exploiting Export Promotion Zones, promoted themselves as a premium tourist destination – they have more than a 300 five-star hotels, and have set themselves up as an offshore financial hub – they have more deposits in the banks than the GDP of the country....

Maybe it helped that they were an island nation isolated from the madness of the continent, but clearly there was a clearness of purpose by its founding leaders in 1968, which allowed even encouraged  private industry and a democratic traditional that has ensured the sustainability of their economic model.

UNDERSTANDING A MAD SEPTEMBER

It might not be the wisest thing to try and analyse the events that occurred in parliament this week, seeing as emotions are still raw, but when is it ever a good time to have hard conversations?

This week we saw unprecedented scenes of rowdiness and outright violence in parliament, surrounding the proposed amendment of the constitution to lift the age limit, beyond which any one can contest for the highest office in the land.

First on Tuesday, when triggered by suspicion that junior minister Ronald Kibule had entered the house with a gun, a full blown fist fight broke out, the likes we have only seen on TV in Asian and Eastern European parliaments.

A black out on live coverage of the house should have warned us that worse was to come on Wednesday.

Security agents flooded the house to eject MPs who had been suspended from proceedings by speaker Rebecca Kadaga for their role in the previous day’s fracas. When the footage finally came through revolting MPs were seen trying to fend off security with microphone stands from atop tables and chairs.

"The theatrics were sad to watch easily understandable, but not justifiable, when seen against the political reality of our time...

In their seminal book “Marketing warfare”, Al Ries and Jack Trout likened marketing strategy to warfare.

But first they pointed out that the real battle in marketing was not about beautiful marketing campaigns or even selling more goods, than the competition but about dominating or at least carving a niche for oneself in the perception of the target market.

This is important because for people being creatures of emotion, when perception comes up against fact, perception wins. This has a lot to do with the way we make decisions, forever tempted by shortcut a tendency, which has its roots in our evolutionary struggles.

Back to Ries and Trout. The authors argue in the market’s perception there are four distinct positions to hold.

At the top of the pile is the market leader, whose main preoccupation is to fend off all comers using all the resources at their disposal --- capital and talent. Then come the challengers, whose obsession should be only to dislodge the market leader. Then there are those who don’t have the resources to challenge for the top, their mission is to occupy uncontested ground with the hope they can grow strong enough to launch a challenge on the summit too. And finally there are the guerrillas who carve out niches for themselves that neither of the aforementioned are really interested in and seek to dominate these niches.

These positions are not set in stone. A misstep from the leader can see him tumbling down the ranks or a sudden interest in an occupied niche may see a leader dislodge a guerrilla.

Seen in this context to understand this week we have to set aside moral judgements and see it as yet another step in the fight for the perception, hearts if you like, of the watching public.

On the one side is the ruling NRM, confident in its strength in numbers and ability to deploy the force of the state, has shown itself ready, and willing, to fend off any attacks on its dominant position. The ruling NRM cannot afford to show weakness but at the same time has to restrain itself. No one likes a bully.

"On the other hand are the opposition weak in number and organisational ability, have sought to project the perception that despite their disadvantages, they can threaten the status quo and that the fight they are in is worth throwing the rule book out of the window for. Their hope is to evoke public sympathy for themselves, force the government into disproportionate violence  and  eventually trigger a popular uprising a la the Arab spring....

I would like to think that the fighting in the house was not planned, especially on Tuesday, but as former heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth”.

It is too soon to say whether there has been a shift in public perception away or to either party – it’s not one way traffic, but one can safely say that the repercussion of this one mad week in September, will reverberate through time. For better or for worse.