TO PRINT OR NOT TO PRINT, THAT IS THE QUESTION

All hell broke loose last week when social media came alight with the story that there was a high level investigation into the possibility that senior central bank officials may have printed excess currency for their own use.

If the social media narrative was to be believed these officials had a side deal with French currency printers Oberthur Fiduciare to print an extra sh90b – actually sh87.5b to be exact.

We are able to establish this because the 20 pallets that contained the “official” currency consignment had sh350b (this is not BOU information, so where did it come from?) so by simple arithmetic the “extra” five pallets had sh87.5b.

This is not your run of the mill conspiracy theorist who would get everything from spelling to punctuation wrong, they at least whipped out their calculators to make the story real.

To go further down the social media narrative, the officials then had the whole consignment flown to Uganda. But things begun to unfold for the officials at Entebbe Airport, in their very own backyard.

Some pesky official from URA or Security Aviation who, when they opened the cargo hold immediately noticed --- I imagine after doing a finger count, that there were five more pallets. Which puzzled him because he knew there were supposed to be 20.

The “officials” noticing that this airport official was brighter than normal, then cobbled a few dollars together among themselves, to try and help turn this officials head, make him look the other way.

"But the official would have none of it and woke the Bank of Uganda governor (he has him on speed dial?) from his bed to tell him about the mess...

So assuming each pallet had sh17.5b. Assume further that these had wads of sh50,000 exclusively, then each pallet had 3,500 wads of sh50,000 notes. Assuming these were batched ten across, ten high and 35 wads deep one would need a container truck or a Fuso to truck at least to get them out of the airport.

So somehow the bank officials managed to brush aside the peeping tom whistle blower, strong arm their way past customs,  airport security and loaded the five pallets into their truck and drove into the night to destinations unknown? Wow!

The social media narrative somehow also does not explain how they got extra currency to be printed off the books at the Oberthur Fiduciairie plant, where our notes were printed. How did it happen did one of our officials while bumming a cigarette from a printer at the plant, with a wink of the eye, convince him to add an additional something-something? That they haggled about whether he could do 20 or 10 before settling on five, which he could get away with? And what was the greasy handed (I imagine he also had ink under his nails) printer’s cut on the deal?

Once the sneaky French printer (again I imagine they would be Frenchmen) had done the deal they had to surreptitiously load the five pallets onto the truck for them to get away.

But wait. How heavy are these pallets? Can they be tossed around a factory, moved around when the supervisor turns his back or goes to the loo? Or maybe there was an organized loadshedding at the factory in France, blacked out all the lights and security cameras etc?

"Simple arithmetic suggests that each pallet would weigh 350kgs! Or seven bags of cement or 50kgs sack of sugar.

So this had to be a major operation involving cranes, trucks and not a few men – Frenchmen or not.

The Swahili say ”Hakuna siri ya watu wawili” directly translated there is no secret of two people. This five-pallet-conspiracy took six weeks to break. Six weeks?! In Kampala?

The central bank last week said they reported the incident because there was a discrepancy in the inventory on the plane.

We have since learnt that there were other people’s cargo that should not have been on what was thought to be an exclusive charter flight. How that came about security said, is the subject of investigation.

This missing-five-pallet theory has kept us entertained for the better part of this week, except the Bank of Uganda of course.

But it doesn’t stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny – as above. It was fun while it lasted but probably time to shut it down.