THE ECONOMY: WE HAVE REACHED A CROSS ROADS

The government’s latest budget proposals show that the country has come to another cross roads in its economic journey.

Government has announced a raft of tax measures, most unpopular (are taxes anything else), many punitive ad some just outright regressive and bad ideas. You can feel in the boxes depending on where you stand.

"The net import of this large swathe of new taxes, arguably the most extensive since they introduced Valued Added Tax (VAT) in 1996, is that it signals a new urgency for revenue, which while long overdue threatens to put the speed bump on much needed economic growth...

The new taxes do not indicate a widening of the tax base, which is what observers have been urging for years, but lays a larger burden on existing tax payers.

It was incredible when a government official argued that Uganda’s tax to GDP is low and so the additional taxes are not overburdening the population.

There is reason why collecting more taxes was not an issue a decade or so ago.  Then we were content to just let the economy’s momentum increase taxes year on year without being innovative or looking beyond existing tax payers. Then too we still had a very cozy relationship with western donors who were falling over themselves to fund our poverty eradication plans.

With the sudden realisation that we need to rump up our investments in infrastructure significantly, the same western donors reluctant to help and counselling that not only can’t we afford those plans but that we don’t need all that electricity or kilometers of paved road, we have had to turn to China, whose money doesn’t come cheap.

So the new debt, not on concessional terms, has saddled us with new obligations and hence the need for more taxes.

The problem was that while our bureaucrats were lulled to sleep with poverty eradication money, we forgot to enable the productive sectors of the economy – agriculture and industry, whose increased economic activity we would tax to support our development ambitions.

So now the need is on us and we have nowhere to look than the less than a million actors who have, and continue, to support the budget.

In our desperation we are going to tax mobile money transfers, reinstate corporate tax on SACCOS, add sh100 on every litre of fuel and tax social media users. All these are taxes on enablers of economic activity, likely to slow the activities – even incentivise under the table behaviour.

In a related development we want to prevent land developers from charging rent in dollars and put a cap on how much they can increase their rents on an annual basis. Again a classic case of killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

Granted, tenants are often treated shabbily by their landlords. The landlords get away with it because the tenants are not aware of their rights and how to enforce them and because there is still a deficit of quality rental space, meaning despite the progress in the last few years it is still largely a sellers’ market.

And this is the cross roads we find ourselves at.

"Government has to make a decision either to stop throttling the enablers of economic activity by piling more taxes on them. By restraining itself these avenues will generate more economic activity that it can then tax using the plethora of taxes it has its disposal...

Or government can maintain its current course of grabbing at everything, the eggs, the chics and the chicken, regardless of the long term ramifications of this action.

If government really wanted to collect more taxes very quickly they should follow India’s route. Demobilise all notes above sh10,000 and when the usual suspects turn up with their unaccounted for billions slap income tax on them, if they  can’t justify that income.

That should be good for a few hundreds of billions of shillings. Pap!

HOW THE MOMENTUM FOR UGANDA'S PENSION LIBERALISATION STALLED

A few weeks ago the cabinet set aside plans to fully liberalise the pensions sector and opted for amendments to the National Social Security Fund(NSSF) Act 1985.

The development has stalled a determined effort by private sector players to wrestle away mandatory savings from NSSF, which has grown into a sh7trillion behemoth over the last decade or so.

The cabinet decision while not final, parliament has to debate before it becomes law, means the promoters of a full liberalisation of Uganda’s pension sector have to retreat and regroup.

The initial drive for the sector’s liberalisation was initially helped by the general drive towards opening up of the Ugandan economy and the perennial mismanagement of NSSF.

Pension sector liberalisation proponents argued that NSSF constituted a monopoly and carried with it the inefficiencies that come with that status, namely lower returns to members, ineffectiveness in expanding coverage and that this same monopoly has led to a lack of vibrancy in capital markets.

"They argue that by allowing other players access to these mandatory savings, would not only widen the choice that members have, but also drive up returns for members, increase savings mobilisation and generally bring greater efficiency to the industry...

However supporters of the cabinet position argue that the liberalisers have no empirical evidence to back their claims and argue that full liberalisation, where it has happened, has actually reduced coverage, put people’s savings at risk and as a result there is strong momentum to rollback pension liberalisation following these failures.

First, of all cabinet supporters, argue that fully liberalising the sector loses sight of the principal goal of providing social security, which is to ensure a decent retirement for the citizens in old age and would therefore be an abrogation of government’s obligation.

In line with that they argue that giving a competitive return, building the capital markets and other reasons for liberalisation are all subsidiary to the principle of giving an adequate social safety net for workers.

However, while recognising the important role of dynamic capital markets, they argue too that in more developed markets – USA, Canada, UK and Australia, mandatory savings are invested largely in the safer government paper or securities. Never the less those capital markets have thrived and in fact the voluntary contributions, double the mandatory ones in the US, have driven market activity very well.

In these countries long term savings often have a state backed pensions fund, over which is layered a state or company provident fund and then voluntary individual savings. They argue that it is these last two categories that often find their way into the equities market and which then may create the much desired dynamism in the capital markets.

As all market players are aware shares can go up or down. And in the shelved pension liberalisation law this was provided for – meaning that if your choice of fund had a bad year in the markets it would be reflected in your statement.

However, the NSSF act provides for a minimum of a 2.5 percent return on members savings per year regardless of the portfolio performance. In effect guaranteeing a return on member savings regardless.

The risk of loss of member savings is a real one.

In the 2008 financial crisis, funds exposed to the equity markets lost 37 percent of their value while those in the state funds showed remarkable resilience throughout the crisis.

"That being said the NSSF Act, defenders point out, actually guarantees more than a 2.5 percent return at its lowest.  Under the current legislation, which will remain unchanged in the new act, members contribute five percent with their employers adding an additional 10 percent of the workers’ gross pay locking in 200 percent return from the word go...

As if that is not enough in the last five years NSSF has paid an interest on savings  -- between ten and 13 percent,  higher than the ten year moving average of  inflation, which was as high as 8.5 percent five years ago.

As it is now of the 15 million strong workforce only two million are covered by NSSF, so not only are there enough people to go around, but under the new amendment it has been proposed that social security contributions will now be tax free, meaning even the two million may very well be able to save with other schemes too.

The need for long term affordable funds cannot be overemphasised. The need for a credible robust pensions sector too cannot be overstated.

On a macro level the question of the future mobilisation and deployment of long term funds for deployment in the economy.

At stake in this contest is not only NSSF’s trillions but billions more still sloshing around looking for safe haven, not to mention many business plans that have been premised on a full liberalisation of the sector.

Cabinet does not have the last word. The battle lines will now shift to parliament where the amendments to the NSSF Act are due for debate soon.

RENT RESTRICTIONS ARE A BAD IDEA

A few weeks ago the cabinet Okayed the Landlord-Tenant Bill to bring greater equity in the tenant-landlord relationship.

The proposed law is intended to replace and broaden the Rent & Restriction Act that was passed in 1949 and is currently in place.

Judging by the way the current bill was drafted, it is safe to say that it came from the pressure applied by tenants, especially those renting business premises. It is no wonder then that the Kampala City Traders Association (KACITA) is at the forefront of the lobby to see it passed into law as is.

Tenants in the down town malls have long complained of exploitation by their landlords, who raise rents arbitrarily, charge in hard currency and often do not provide the basic amenities like parking, washrooms and utilities to their tenants.

Hence the most nefarious clauses of the bill, which seek to discourage the charging of rent in dollars, restrict annual rent increments to 10 percent and prevent the arbitrary eviction of tenants at the landlords’ whim.

The landlords on the other hand argue that all these eventualities were covered in the old law, which when accompanied with a tenancy agreement, would more than cater for their tenants’ rights.

Like many other things that go wrong around us or to us, we often don’t think of seeking legal redress. I can bet few readers, even of this column, have an updated tenancy agreement for the occupancy of their homes or places of business.

"That being said the law in its current state, where it restricts landlords to charging in shillings, not asking for more than three months in advance, prevents rent increments of more than 10 percent annually and within intervals of less than 12 months while popular with tenants will actually create the situations that government is trying to avoid...

In crudely trying to control rents they will frustrate investment in the sector, reduce supply rentable properties and force prices up anyway.

Of course the supporters of the law will say these are just scare tactics, but history has born this out.

To begin with this issue of rent controls has come up in the last three decades and was thankfully shelved promptly.

In the early days of this administration some socialist leaning people in government were pushing for rent caps in Kampala and a banning of dollar rents. They used the usual socialist rhetoric of these being anti-people, retrogressive blah, blah blah. Thankfully the argument was nipped in the bud.

With this one decision private investment in the sector ballooned and while we have no yet bridged the housing deficit we have fewer if any middle class families crammed into garages or one room hovels.

One of the reasons the deficit has not been bridged is the lack of long term funding for real estate developers and the high mortgage rates. As a way to get around it investors have borrowed in hard currency where mortgage rates are in single digits. As a way to mitigate their foreign exchange risk they pass the risk to the tenant.

The fact that this goes on is a sign that the shortage persists. In an environment of adequate housing the competition would force the foreign exchange risk on the landlord rather than the tenant.  It has happened before.

"Many years ago mobile operator Celtel used to charge for airtime in dollars. They argued the same that their investment was funded with foreign money and therefore consumers should be charged likewise. Another foreign firm MTN came along and started charging in shillings – even though their financing was sourced abroad, and that was the end of dollar phone bills...

While there is more discomfort for tenants when the currency goes against them, as more and more people invest in the sector that will soon be taken care of.

And finally restricting the duration of tenancy to less than three months is similarly unnecessary.

In the hard days landlords would ask for twelve months in advance and you could take it or leave. 

With the increasing stocks of houses this requirement has come do to even a month. The reduction did not come out of the goodness of the landlords’ hearts but a direct response to increased housing supply, market forces.

While such a bill may give government some short term political gains, they need to show leadership and legislate for the long term good of the economy rather than for political expediency.

In the mean time tenants need to exercise their rights as stipulated in current law and local governments need to ensure all building meet their respective building codes.

WHY FINANCIAL INCLUSION IS IMPORTANT

During a recent discussion on transforming the economy through industrialisation the speakers did the traditional thing of bashing the “Washington Consensus” for Uganda’s growth, which has come without jobs and with widening income inequalities.

The Washington Consensus refers to an economic model prescribed for developing nations that had as its pillars macroeconomic stability and liberalisation of markets.

Speakers argued to various degrees during the occasion sponsored the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung foundation, that this laissez affaire approach to the economy with the government taking a back seat to the private sector and abrogating its responsibility to direct the economy, was what has brought us to our current economic situation.

Of course they referred to the east Asian tigers and even further back to post-colonial America, to show how  other economies have defied the conventional wisdom to jump out of poverty  into modernisation.

I think they used their facts selectively, not least of all the ignoring or omitting the context in which 18^th century America or east Asian tigers operated to be able to do the things they did, some of which it would be relatively harder to do now.

My argument has always been it is neither neo-liberalism or central planning that is important but delivering an improved standard of living for the people. Whether one does it with markets or with government intervention is immaterial. After all, those same distinctions are political ones that neither the west nor the east follow to the letter...

But in all the neo liberalism bashing and the yearning for a return to state control, neither of the  speakers paid much or any attention to local resource mobilisation. Most especially mobilisation of financial resources.

This is important because history has shown that no country has transformed to a modern one with the use of foreign aid, suggesting that all developed countries became so largely on their own steam.

And it is at this point that the issue of financial inclusion becomes important, even critical.

Financial inclusion presupposes an ever increasing proportion of the population having access to and using the financial sector to carry out financial transactions, to save or use other financial instruments.

Interestingly according to the World Bank our gross domestic savings in 2016 stood at about 15 percent, woefully lower than those countries we want emulate – China 46 percent, South Korea 36.5 percent.

But according to a the most recent FinScope survey carried out in 2013, financial inclusion in Uganda rose to 85 percent in 2013 from 70 percent in 2009.

They make the point that the increase in financial inclusion came with the explosion in mobile money but at the time they also noted that most of the mobile money data represented transactions. This will definitely change when the new survey is out, as people are now actively saving on their mobile phones and accessing credit too.

The challenge of mobilising savings is made all the more difficult when there are no convenient channels to mop up our excess cash.

The expansion of deposit taking institutions, Savings & Credit Cooperatives and now mobile money means it is actually easier than 10 or 20 years ago to mobilise savings.

In more developed economies only about 80 percent of their currency in circulation is in the financial sector while in Uganda it’s the exact opposite. This has far reaching implication for our development ambitions.

If we can get more and more of this money into the financial sector it will grow lending to businessmen if for no other reason that lending rates will become cheaper. The mobilised resources would be put to use by those who need it rather than serving as dead capital under your mattress or in the hole in the ground in the banana plantation.

The issuse of who regulates the telecommunications growing pool of monies will be an ongoing challenge, which needs to be addressed quickly to increase confidence in the sector and grow savings.

"In under a decade the mobile money user accounts have grown to about eight million more than 7.5 million bank accounts. In 2016 it was reported that sh44trillion passed through all mobile money platforms in Uganda. This figure was more than the sh28trillion national budget in that year. And this figure keeps growing....

If you look into the not so distant future, you can see that there could be a real transformation in as far as how much money still remains outside the formal financial sector and what the net effect has been of this giant mopping up of cash has had on the economy.

Clearly it is in our best interest to keep this growth going, seeing as banks are scaling back their operations.

To begin with the government has to maintain macroeconomic stability so that people have the confidence to save but also to attract more investment into the sector. With the proliferation of mobile telephones there still may remain a skewing of financial inclusion towards the urban areas so there has to be more productive policies to ensure rural communities jump on the band wagon – taxes on phones may not be the best long term strategy in view of this.

To push the agenda forward government needs to look harder at the issue of mobilising long term savings. Thankfully it will not be very long and a private sector solution will emerge. A sit is now to have a fixed deposit account for instance banks only have a threshold amount, below which they would not be interested in your money – a few millions.

Imagine if a bank set up a product and sold it as a fixed deposit where people can save any amount for a given period of time through their mobile phones. So if I feel I have an extra one thousand shillings today I can put it on my fixed account, tomorrow sh2,000 the following day sh500 and so on so forth what a revolution it would be?

With modern technology the issue of administration is not a problem and you would be shocked how many people would be able to commit money for a year or upwards if only they had a convenient avenue to do so. A collaboration between government and other stakeholders would be needed to make this possible.

And then of course there has to be a deliberate, systematic and widespread campaign to improve financial literacy. This cannot be understated because often times we are poor or financially distressed for lack of knowledge of what to do with our money.

THE SHE CRANES DO IT AGAIN

Our national netball team, the She Cranes , finished their group matches at the Commonwealth Games,Wednesday on a high beating Scotland 57-37. This was a day after the She Cranes wiped the floor with the Wales team, in a match where our captain Peace Proscovia scored more goals than the entire Welsh team.

Peace accounted for 56 of Uganda’s 76 goals, while Wales managed 50 goals. The lesser heralded Rachel Nanyonga, whose scoring efficiency was better than Peace’s throughout the tournament, accounted for the remaining 20 goals.

While they tied with New Zealand and Malawi for second they failed to qualify for the semi-finals on account of New Zealand’s superior goal difference.

The She Cranes who went to the Commonwealth Games ranked 7^th in the world, will now play South Africa for fifth place. Regardless of the result they may very well become sixth in the world when the rankings are released. (Ed. The South Africa beat the She Cranes who then finished 6th in the Commonwealth Games)

It’s amazing what a few years can do.

Four years ago they qualified for the netball World Cup after making the more than a thousand mile road trip to Botswana. At that event they were so underfunded that they played matches without drinking water.

They almost did not make the world Cup as officials in the sports ministry dragged their feet in meeting pre-tournament requirements. They went anyway and gave a good account of themselves.

Last year at the African Championships they put all comers to the sword, winning the event without losing a match.

By the time the Commonwealth came around, everybody had long taken notice of our girls. They went ahead -- better kitted and facilitated this time around, to acquit themselves with distinction.

While netball maybe a peripheral sport, there are a few reasons why the She Cranes’ showing at the Gold Coast is significant.

"To start with, netball being mainly a sport played among former subjects of the British Empire, unlike other sports the commonwealth games brings together the best netballers in the world, so the She Cranes’ result is hard to fault...

Without taking away from our success in athletics, one would have to wonder what would have happened if the Ethiopians and Eritreans were running. Or in boxing where the Cubans, Americans and Europeans were not.

What this means is the She Cranes are the only sports team we have had in the history of independent Uganda to participate at the highest level of its sport. In effect they are the only world class sports people we have around.

What is even more startling is that they have done this while being treated as the orphan of Uganda’s sports portfolio. The travails the She Cranes have endured in their march to the pinnacle of their sport-- a few of which were mentioned above, are the stuff of legend.

And finally the discipline of the She Cranes on and off the court is hard to fathom, especially when we have known sportsmen of lesser achievement lord it over all of us with boorish behaviour and nauseating entitlement...

In their final match, Scotland adopted cynical tactics to keep goal scoring machine Peace off her game. While the Scots wilted under Uganda’s relentless pressure and eventually allowing Peace to drain 32 goals, what was even more remarkable was how the She Cranes kept their cool, did not respond in kind and went on to win the match handily.

There is a lesson for all of us Ugandans – netballers and non-netballers alike.

"That to achieve anything of enduring value you have to earn it. Life does no one any favours. There will be times when the odds are stacked against you, that the world seems unfair. There will be people, even trusted friends and relatives intent on keeping you from the promised land. And there is no guarantee that even after you put in the work that you will achieve your goal....

But you work anyway. Keep your head down, nose to the grinding stone and hope. And when you make it you remain humble because you know there is yet another mountain to scale.

Thank you She Cranes for showing yet again what it takes and means to be a true hero!

THE ECONOMY: THE CHICKEN ARE COMING HOME TO ROOST

By the time the NRM took over government the economy was on its knees and a shell of its glory days two decades prior.

The economy had been so gutted that most of it had reverted to subsistence and in our desperation to collect revenue, we were taxing coffee exports, which accounted for nearly 80 percent of export receipts and revenues to the treasury.

Faced with this reality NRM had very little room for manoeuvre.

More than half a century prior, Europe was also coming out of the Second World War. Their productive capacity was either all geared towards production for the military or was destroyed totally.

In both instances there was little alternative than to go pan handling abroad to find the resources to jump start their respective economies.

And there the parallels diverge.

"While in Europe the aid was used to rehabilitate a previously strong industrial base, in Uganda the aid money was used mostly to rehabilitate infrastructure and revive social services under poverty eradication programs...

It can be argued that the needs in Uganda were so dire that the alleviation of social distress was critical but the same can be said for Europe.

While in Europe some resources were channelled to jump start social services, more resources were targeted at reigniting the continent’s industrial capacity. The resultant economic activity was then taxed to finance improved social services and the welfare state

What if Uganda had gone the same route, what would have happened?

For starters we kicked off at a decided disadvantage. Our entrepreneurial class, the Asians had been expelled 14 years prior, so there was no real capitalist class aside from the trading locals, who specialised in importing and speculation.

While capital is important in helping businesses grow, what is even more important even beyond the entrepreneurial spirit, is the ability to run and grow business.

If an entrepreneur can’t grow his business, the enterprise would be a black hole in which pumping more and more money would be an exercise in futility.

But we see it all around us. How many local businessmen have benefited from state largesse and where are they now?

Secondly our aid was channelled through do gooders, who even at the end of the last century determined that our debt levels were unsustainable and wiped out a sizeable portion of our obligation.

These same aid agencies found it easier to mobilise resources for poor Uganda to build classrooms, kit health centers and provide tap water, than to support local entrepreneurs develop capacity.

"The net effect of the coincidence of these two factors is an economy whose productive sectors – agriculture and industry are still crawling or dominated by foreign concerns...

The first is a challenge because we are running out of rope in our bid to nail a tax on anything that moves and the second, because there is an annual haemorrhage of resources which if they had remained here and reinvested would help move the development needle much.

Some people have come up with the solution that government needs to get back into business. They have derived this conclusion from the faulty analysis that its only government that has the resources to support major concerns of the types we need to create jobs, generate revenue and trigger a ripple effect of economic activity.

Faulty because they think that the major challenge of Ugandan business is a lack of capital.

So what to do?

We first need to vastly improve the business environment by lowering the cost of doing business and follow a national strategy that goes beyond the knee jerk reaction of throwing money at the problem or taxing existing players to death.

That strategy should include a robust, nationwide program of training our entrepreneurs to understand and do business; deepening the financial industry, because as it is there are no products tailored to support start-ups, small & medium enterprises and government support in the way of supporting research and development.

In the meantime we can help the existing players – foreign and local with incentives to produce for export rather than import substitution. This is important because export led industries will produce the much needed jobs we need in the economy.

And as a quick win, government need to lean more heavily on our biggest companies to list on the exchange, in a way that ensures the local middle class get first bite at the cherry. This important because not only would it help develop a shareholding class – important for local resource mobilisation, but also we can help retain some of those repatriated profits.

"Foreign controlled companies left to their own devices will not list. For one their capital requirements can be met easily by their head offices and secondly, opening up the company to new shareholders could adversely affect their growth plans as they may not be able to retain as much profit as they need to grow organically...

There are no shortcuts.

To move this economy to the next level we need to focus on growing an indigenous capital class, but not through cronyism, and then manage the fine balance between incentivising the productive sectors and ensuring they leave more crumbs on the table.

BOOK REVIEW: INSPIRED BY BITATURE

BOOK: INSPIRED BY BITATURE

AUTHOR: ROBERT BAKE TUMUHAISE

PRICE: sh60,000

Available in major bookshops around Kampala

Patrick Bitature is a local businessman who has been involved in everything from nightclubs to retail trade to telecommunications to power generation to hotels and real estate. With the breadth of his experience, a book about him should be a good read.

“Inspired by Bitature” is a first stub at chronicling Bitature’s life and times. It is not a biography in the traditional sense, more and exploration of the man’s thoughts through the adoring eyes of his mentee the author Robert Bake Tumuhaise.

Speeches given by Bitature throughout the years are interspersed with Tumuhaise’s narration of his experience with Bitature and commentary of what he has learned at the feet of the master.

The speeches alone, which date back a decade are worth more than the value of the book. Made to audiences ranging from young entrepreneurs to graduation classes, here and abroad, they help distil the essence of the man.

"Born into relative wealth, his childhood was cut short when his father, Paul Bitature, was murdered during the Idi Amin era. His epiphany came soon after when his mother, still grieving from the loss, around the dining table declared they would have to get used to tea without sugar....

The young Bitature without consultation jumped on a bus to Nairobi, Kenya, and came back with 15kg of sugar, sold some to the neighbours and made a profit many times over what he had paid for the schoolboy suitcase full of sugar.

He has been involved in looking after his family ever since.

Through the speeches you discern a sincere desire to distill the lessons he has learnt, a veritable “What they do not teach you in business school” handbook, for other people going into business. It is a constant theme through his speeches that our society is training too many employees and no job creators. His hope is that prospective entrepreneurs can learn from his triumphs and failures and hopefully travel a much smoother journey.

 He says he determined from a young age that he would make $100,000, otherwise he wold not get married but he sees no reason why any able bodied Uganda does not aim at a million dollars. Bitature says a goal like that would give purpose to our lives and set the mind thinking.

He counsels that success cannot be faked, with a side jab to some of our fake tycoons, and he says real success can only come with determination and persistence.

The conventional wisdom is that rich men’s top priority is money, the making, keeping and growing of, but he says that money comes a distant fifth as a priority in his life behind his family, business, God and friends, urging the reader to “Desire to have money but don’t be ruled by money.”

He has some timely thoughts on how to raise capital in our economy, explores why businesses fail, ruminates on the habits that create achievers and puts serious thought to how to change the world.

As earlier said the real value of the book is in the display of Bitature’s thought processes. It is evident very quickly that he does not think like your everyday man. His outlook on family, achievement and even politics is shaped by his business experience.

This is important because for the rest of us mere mortals we don’t realise that from the intangible – thoughts, values and beliefs come the tangible – money, property and even fame. A reorientation of our thinking is where we need to start in trying to climb to a new level.

"The book is also important because through Bitature, born and bred here, we can see the possibilities.  Many of the accounts of successful people around are of foreign businessmen, operating in a different context from ourselves...

Which brings us to an important point. Many of our successful people have died before thy have made an account of their lives. Most because they underestimate the value of their example to future generations. As a result we have lost invaluable resource with the passing of the titans of our society.

I know it is said that if you want to hide things from the black man put in a book. But while that may true for today’s black man these stories will be recorded for posterity and for a different kind of black man.

The author needs to be commended for recognising the value of Bitature’s journey to a wider audience and bringing it to life. But one cannot help feeling that Bitature owes another book.

*The book is being launched on April14th at The Protea Hotel, Kololo. Entrance fee sh100,000

#STAYINYOURLANE A TEST OF PEOPLE POWER

My cheeky friend James while fuming in traffic lurched upon an interesting way to shame rogue road users. He would take photographs off his phone of those drivers who think they are more in a hurry than the rest of us and choose to create extra lanes, and post onto Twitter.

The hash tag StayInYourLane has caught on and more and more people are clicking away and exposing these nefarious types all day, but mostly in the mornings and evenings.

The idea, rather a genius one, is that the offending drivers, can be shamed into good behaviour – notice that #StayInYOurLane doesn’t waste time with taxi drivers, will be chastised by their bosses – the feed has been dominated by police, army and ministerial vehicles and the impossible can happen, we will have orderly traffic in this city – James is already reporting nothing short of miraculous improvements on the Namugongo-Kyaliwajjala road.

It maybe too soon to pass pull out the champagne but the campaign and its initial results suggest that there is hope for this country.

The argument can be made that the law is made for the middle class. For the lowly classes, survival trumps the rules as a moderator of behaviour. For the upper classes, they get away with so much crime by virtue of their position, impunity sets in and to hell with the law.

The middle class is scared of being shamed. Being made to look bad in society. They are conscious about their appearance, what people will say about them, which is kind of weak because, when no one is watching the middle class –church going or otherwise, get up to some really nasty stuff – see all the billions pilfered out of the government coffers annually. You shine a light on them and they straighten out.

So #StayInYourLane is helping show that our middle class is not beyond redemption, if they can be shamed into good behaviour.

Imagine the uses it can be applied to, in the fight against corruption for instance.

What if we started a hash tag #HowDidYouGetIt or #ShowMeTheWay or #DoesYourMumKnowAboutThis every time we saw someone flaunting inexplicable wealth that we know for sure they could not have amassed given their public servant salary?

It would be priceless to be that fly on the wall when the corrupt official sees his house splashed all over social media or he is captured ordering Black Labels by the bottle on a Tuesday night or flying out first class on Emirates – wife, children and maids in tow to blast away in the Pacific. #DoesYourMumKnowAboutThis.

In the immortal words of the wandering Jew, “Let he who is without sin hurl the first stone”.

We are not blameless. But if we can nip such antisocial behaviour in the bud we can have fewer people falling out of the middle class, hopefully fewer still climbing into the ”impunity” class and we can live happily ever after. Or at least with less aggro on our roads.

There is a reason why society sets out laws, a code of conduct or rules of engagement. This is to ensure there are pre-set, agreed upon and objectively arrived ways of doing things that allow us to live together, work effectively and efficiently.

Often they are time tested under numerous circumstances and have been shown to work. There are a small minority who are more intelligent than the average and the people who cannot #StayInYourLane are definitely not among them...

As #StayInYourLane is showing good behaviour is not impossible.

A few years ago I discovered the “four way crossing”. It was marvel to behold.

While being driven around South Africa more than a decade ago I kept noticing that my host would stop unbidden when they came to a four-way crossing in the road, even when it seemed there was just enough space to squeeze through.

I asked what that was about. The explanation was that when one stops at four way crossing, you have to let everyone else who was there before you pass before you attempt to do so yourself. So if you get to the crossing and there are three, four or whatever number of cars on any of three intersections, you cannot cross before each has done so. And this happens in the order in which they happened on the crossing.

If you are a Ugandan driver you would have to see it to believe it.

Happy Easter to you all.