OF BLUE FLIES AND FOREIGN INVESTORS

1994, my worst Christmas ever. I remember it like it was yesterday.

I had stayed over at the university for the first term holidays.

When Christmas day came I had not factored in that the food vendors around campus would also want to go and be with their families.

At lunch time I wandered through Wandegeya, with my tummy sunken to my spine, in search of a meal but no one was open.

In the end we found some left overs – that’s what they seemed to me, at the market.

My enduring memory from the day was the blue fly. Have you ever noticed how flawless the blue is on those flies? I noticed that day. Given the source of its sustenance how could the blue be so perfect?.

Fast forward to today it’s unlikely that a liquid university student today would suffer the pangs of hunger that I did on that Sunday afternoon.

"In 1994 I couldn’t afford a bank account – they insisted on a sh100,000 minimum balance. Nor a mobile phone – and Ericsson 628 was going for at least a million shillings. Nor a taxi cab – the minimum fare was a few thousand shillings, maybe sh10,000 then....

Given a similar situation now my options would be much more open.

Not only are there many more food outlets, off my mobile phone I could tell where they are, get a ride there and once there even pay for the meal off my phone. Or order in and have them deliver to my room. Or better still call some long lost relative, determine their availability on the day and go and share their Christmas lunch for the cost of only the cab ride to and fro.

In the quarter of century since then, the explosion in investment has made such stories --- my Christmas saga, the stuff of campfire tales and made the standard of living so much better for many people.

In an ideal world every nation should have its own resources to develop itself in the way that it sees fit. But we don’t live in an ideal world, Uganda more so, given our history of civil unrest and economic collapse.

When the NRA came to power in 1986 the economy was on its knees and their political project was in danger of being dead on arrival.

An initial attempt to be independent led them to trying all sorts of remedies, including letting the money printing presses run free, before the reality sunk in: Uganda needed resources to resuscitate the economy, resources that were not available at home. Hence the look outward. The rest as they say is history.

They sold off the dieng state enterprises, broke up the failing produce marketing monopolies and opened the economy to investors from far and wide. The net effect of these policies was to make Uganda an attractive investment destination both for local and foreign businessmen.

The results are really there for all to see.

I remember speaking to an official of the privatisation unit in the 1990s and he revealed that when he had to handover the Tororo Cement factory to the buyers, he was so embarrassed, the factory was in a dilapidated state and its machinery obsolete.

“I felt like a con man. The truth is we should have been paying some of these investors to take these bad companies off our hands instead of them paying us to buy them,” he moaned.

Today after tens of millions of dollars in investment --- the latest expansion to increase production 70 percent to the current three million tons cost $25m, the same factory is the largest producer in the country. The company says on its website that it directly employs 900 people and 16,000 indirectly, a far cry from the mothballed factory of two decades ago.

"The foreign investor has become such part of the fabric of our society as to now become clichéd. We actually take them for granted...

The interesting thing would be to look back to my 1994 Christmas lunch and as to who was around at all at the time and try and remember what life was like without them.

As a group the South African firms would serve as a useful case study, as they only started to stretch out into the continent around the same time.

Last year the top 20 South African companies paid more than a trillion shillings in tax to the treasury.

A run down the list shows that only Barclays Bank, now owned by South Africa ABSA group, were around with only two branches in Uganda, one on Kampala road and another on Luwum street and Nile Breweries, then a Madvhani owned company were in business.

So think about it, we had no MTN mobile phones, we didn’t have a Stanbic bank, we had no digital satellite TV, no Game or Shoprite stores and ESKOM was not generating our power from Kiira and Nalubale dams. And by the way it is not as if these firms came in to replace or muscle out existing players, all the above services were not being rendered – oh! Except bad power distribution by the Uganda Electricity Board (UEB).

These South African companies as far as I could tell, have laid out at least seven trillion shillings in investment over the last seven years in capital expenditures, property and equipment and intangible assets.

"One can safely say investors from China, UK, India, Netherlands and even Kenya in investing their money here, have not only found it very lucrative but have served to improve our standard of living through the products and services they provide and their contributions to the national budget...

On the other hand if these investors were in town on that Christmas lunch so many years ago I may not have appreciated the perfection of the blue fly!