CORRUPTION CORRUPTS EVERYONE IT TOUCHES

One of the more sobering ways to understand corruption is to translate the numbers into human terms.

Last year, Mulago National Referral Hospital told Parliament that its Shs122 billion allocation was grossly inadequate to run the country's largest referral facility and fully operationalise critical units like intensive care. Recent hospital and research data indicate Mulago now handles roughly three million patient interactions annually. That means, very roughly, the hospital spends about Shs40,000 per patient encounter.

Now place that beside the roughly Shs28 billion reportedly discovered in currencies in properties linked to former Speaker Anita Among.

At Mulago's expenditure ratios, that amount alone could theoretically support treatment for about 700,000 patient visits – or the population of Isingiro district; or nearly triple the Shs10 billion the hospital said it urgently needed to fully operationalise its intensive care units...

But here is what the numbers alone cannot capture: corruption does not simply steal money. It corrupts everything it touches. The thief. The witness. The bystander. Eventually, the entire society.

That is the real danger.

It first corrupts the individual.

Once individuals accumulate extraordinary wealth through public office, losing power becomes existential. Retirement stops being an option because without continued access to the machinery of the state, sustaining those lifestyles becomes impossible. No employer in Uganda's economy pays enough to maintain convoys, mansions, entourages, luxury shopping and political patronage networks at that scale. Very few legitimate businesses generate such cash flows either.

So corruption mutates. What begins as theft becomes dependency. What begins as greed becomes survival. Office holders stop behaving like custodians of public institutions and begin behaving like shareholders protecting a revenue stream...

That perhaps explains reports that Anita Among briefly contemplated resisting directives to step aside as Speaker — reportedly exploring an independent political path before raids on homes and the freezing of accounts neutralised those ambitions. One almost understands the logic emotionally, even while rejecting it morally. When a person becomes accustomed to limitless facilitation and elite privilege, stepping away from office can feel economically catastrophic.

Corruption has, by that point, already corrupted the person entirely.

It then corrupts institutions.

As corruption deepens, loyalty shifts from institutions to networks of mutual protection. Politicians protect procurement officials. Procurement officials protect businesspeople. Security actors protect politicians. Everyone possesses compromising information about everyone else. The system survives less on legitimacy and more on shared vulnerability.

Public institutions — hospitals, Parliament, the judiciary stop functioning as instruments of national development and begin operating as platforms for elite extraction. The state does not disappear. It is simply repurposed.

But most insidiously, corruption corrupts the rest of us.

One of the most depressing features of recent public discussions around the Anita Among saga has been the language ordinary people casually use. "Let her eat, after all other people are eating." "Why was she eating all that alone?" "People just need to know when to stop eating."

Notice what has happened there. The debate is no longer whether stealing public resources is wrong. It has shifted to whether the sharing was equitable, or whether the appetite simply became too visible. Corruption has been normalised — treated as an unofficial entitlement of office. We have stopped measuring leaders against principles and begun measuring them against the hunger of those around them.

That is how corruption corrupts citizens. It lowers the moral floor so gradually that people barely notice they are standing somewhere they once would never have tolerated.

This matters because a society can survive inequality. What it cannot survive is inequality stripped of legitimacy. A businessman who builds factories and creates jobs may grow rich and still command public admiration. But wealth born of political office triggers deep resentment, because citizens instinctively understand that public office exists to protect the common good — not to serve as a private ATM.

History repeatedly confirms this. Societies rarely collapse simply because people are poor. They collapse when citizens become convinced that elites are enriching themselves obscenely while ordinary people cannot afford school fees, rent or hospital bills. The French Revolution was fuelled as much by the visible excess of the aristocracy as by poverty itself. The Arab Spring was driven not only by unemployment but by perceptions of corruption, exclusion and elite impunity.

Hopelessness is politically combustible. People eventually stop asking how to succeed within the system and begin asking whether the system itself deserves to survive.

Social media has sharpened this danger considerably. Lifestyles once hidden behind walls are now displayed in real time before frustrated citizens. The gap between what is flaunted and what is endured has never been more visible — or more volatile.

Uganda today is wealthier than it was 40 years ago. There are more banks, highways, telecom towers, malls and private fortunes than ever before. But development without fairness creates instability, because visible prosperity raises expectations. People can tolerate hardship. What they struggle to tolerate is humiliation.

And that is why the fight against corruption cannot be framed as merely a moral or financial issue. It is a question of what kind of society we are becoming. Every time we shrug at stolen billions. Every time we joke about who is "eating." Every time we measure a leader's wrongdoing against someone else's greed rather than against principle — corruption wins another convert.

Because that is precisely how corruption works. It does not only take the money.

It takes us with it.

TRUMP REVOLUTION THROWING UP UNCOMFORTABLE FACTS

Since the beginning of February the new US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has cancelled more than a billion dollars in government contracts that were deemed unnecessary and therefore wasteful.

It would be interesting to see what these savings are channeled towards in coming days.

Trump, a member of the economic elite in America, which has argued for lowering taxes for businesses, has decided to answer critics of this initiative by showing that by cutting out the “waste” in government the country can very well afford the tax cuts he intends to ram through.

"The revelations from DOGE are that a lot of money was being funneled to programs with questionable benefits to the US people or the people they are intended for.

Hence the shutting down of USAID.

That being said, Trump’s actions are being driven by a right wing ideology that calls for leaner government and more benefits for businesses. The critics say, by business we are talking about the rich. It doesn’t help that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man now heads the DOGE.

The principle for pushing for government efficiency is hard to argue against. You may frown at the way it is being done, but one can argue that when you are going up against entrenched interests, the slowly-slowly approach may not work. Shock and awe may be the way, so as not to allow the said interest groups to regroup and retaliate.

This column has argued previously that wealth inequalities within populations are more a factor of government inefficiency than the failure of the market.

The market generates the wealth and governments, through taxing economic activity and the budget distributes this wealth. Not by handing out money at street corners, but by funding security, infrastructure, social services and public goods, which when taken advantage by the population will give more and more people a chance to benefit from the market.

The US, the world’s biggest economy has got there by leveraging the power of the private sector. However, the US has major wealth and income inequalities – many lesser developed countries have better stats, whose responsibility can be put squarely at the government’s feet.

What the DOGE is finding out bears this thesis out. Millions of dollars were being paid out for dubious projects inside and outside the country, while major initiatives in education, health and general infrastructure went begging.

In my ideal world, the government is in place to serve the people. It does this by primarily ensuring safety of life and property for everybody. This does not only mean having a functional security apparatus, but also ensures that the legal system works for everyone and corruption is eliminated.

In such an environment business can thrive, in the process creating jobs and paying taxes.

The taxes collected are then deployed to improve and expand public goods, which then allow more and more people the opportunity to benefit from economic growth.

So if your economy is growing but less and less people are not enjoying its benefits, look to government and not business...

To that extent DOGE is a long overdue initiative in the US. That would probably be the work of the Inspector General of Government (IGG) here in Uganda.

It is interesting that businessmen are pushing this agenda in the US. Because government inefficiencies have a way of affecting business and weighing it down.

In the real world things are not as cut and dried. The first thing that happens when people get into government is to ensure they stay there. In our part of the world this maybe by force of arms, but also by catering to your supporters.

That is where the trouble starts, because in pandering to these loyal constituencies, government efficiency is compromised.

That is why it is not wise for government, any government, to be in business. Because business sustainability, which comes with increasing profitability and growing market share, are secondary to the need of government to retain power...

So in a country like the US where all business is in private hands, the temptation to expand government to accommodate supporters, is the next logical thing. And as night follows day, results in growing inefficiency.

Trump and Musk seem to be flipping the script. Their actions suggest that government efficiency is more important than kowtowing to cronies. They are betting on improved services for the people being the incentive for the people to keep them in power. That they will not rely on cronies for that.

While the current push for government efficiency has affected us in faraway east Africa, it will be interesting to see how it plays out in coming months.

Will the bureaucrats mount a fight back or have they been scuttled and their threat dissipated.

Time will tell.

 

CORRUPTION: THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THINGS REMAIN THE SAME

Looking through the end of year columns of the last decade a consistent theme was for the wish for the end of corruption.

In November 2010 this column pointed out that the fight against corruption was a joke as long as civil servants were being paid a pittance

“As long as the Government continues to pretend to pay, people will continue to pretend to work while devising other means to meet their basic needs. It is blindingly obvious.”

The column continued to point out that, “The lowly paid civil servant lives in Nakasero, Bugolobi and Ntinda, is building in Namugongo and Buwate and is unstintingly loyal, racking up five, ten, 15 years in the civil service.

This would be an illusion if they were conjuring this lifestyle out of their payslips.”

In 2011 while reporting about the passing of two new pieces of legislation – The Whistle Blowers Act and the Anti-Corruption Act, noted the vice will always be difficult to fight.

“Unlike murder or even outright theft, in corruption cases, bribery for instance, both parties are guilty of a crime, witnesses are hard to come by and paper trails can be obscured. The aggrieved party is a faceless government or a far removed public, neither of whom maybe aware a crime had been committed or an unable to do anything about it for legal or bureaucratic reasons.”

The column which was published on 12 December 2011 ended on a hopeful note, “Corruption is everywhere the challenge is to relegate it to the fringes of our daily lives, current evidence suggests we maybe on our way.”

In December 2012 the column reported an aid pull out following corruption scandal in the Office of the prime minister but were skeptical the action would provide a lasting solution or even accelerate the momentum in the fight against corruption.

The column explained that due to the individual agendas of donor countries, a lot of it to do with maintaining influence over the Kampala government, the pull out would be shortlived.

“The recent aid suspensions amount to a slap on the wrist and one can expect we will be back to business as usual by this time next year. This is not thumbing our noses at the donors, it’s just the way the world works.

 "It is bad enough that we continue to rely on donors to cover our budget shortfalls. But it is bad upbringing to expect the donors to come in and clear out our mess.”

And of course in 2013 we wondered whether our honourable representatives were looking out for our best interests,

"Honourable MPs, with your sh20m salaries, hundred million shilling four wheel drive guzzlers and billion shilling car park, you make us – the down trodden of the earth, wonder whether you are  irredeemably stupid or that you have ulterior, self-serving motives that we are not privy to, that motivate your actions.”

And in 2014 we brought home what the real cost of corruption was,

"So instead of 1,000 inpatients being treated at Mulago, one man buys himself a Toyota Land Cruiser VX or sends his four children to a top international school locally for a year or organises a week long holiday for his five-member family plus nanny to the Maldives or Seychelles.”

If recent reports about monies stolen from the treasury or people forging the president’s signature, are anything to go by, no space is sacred to the white-collar criminals we are breeding.

Not to belabor the point, but corruption remains a thorn in our side, slowing down growth, hobbling development and hurtling us inevitably to social unrest and political instability.

Looking back it is hard to say that there has been meaningful progress in slowing down the corruption juggernaut, if the apartments sprouting out of every wet land in the suburbs are anything to go by, I am afraid corruption has only picking up pace.

We at Shillings & cents would love to be wrong, because this is our country and we hope to bequeath our descendants a better place than we found. But the logic is inescapable. And every year that we do not implode in an orgy of social upheaval, is one more year to be worried.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

 

UGANDA, BEWARE OF WHY NATIONS FAIL

The current move by parliament to have sittings in four regions of Uganda is disturbing and part of an established trend, where public officials seek to extract the maximum they can from the treasury and Ugandans be damned.

Last week parliament announced it is going to have sittings in West Nile, Lango and Karamoja ostensibly to bring the workings of parliament nearer the people. They would spend at least three days a week in each region. In the face of it, a noble endeavor but it can be argued there are more cost effective way of doing this.

This means parliament will have to provide for the more than 500 MPs to make the upcountry trips, in addition to about 200 staff, per diems all around. It has been reported that, at the minimum this will saddle Ugandans with a bill of sh5b a day.

"We should be concerned, because this is part of a trend of shifting resources away from production to consumption, a trend that history has shown does not end well...

In their book “Why Nations Fail” authors Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, after researching centuries of data on political evolution, came to the succinct conclusion that nations fail when their institutions are more extractive than inclusive.

Invariably extractive institutions derive from extractive politics where the power elite use these institutions to consolidate their power.

Extractive institutions are those that concentrate wealth and opportunity in the hands of a few as opposed to inclusive institutions in which broad based participation is encouraged, property rights are protected, which in turn foster innovation, investment and economic growth.

It does not take a nuclear scientist to work out that the inevitable outcome is poverty and wealth inequalities for the greater majority of the population.

It’s a vicious cycle, which if let alone leads to social chaos and political instability.

"These are serious issues, especially in this time when the economy is still struggling to recover from the Covid-pandemic, money is short and for many hopelessness is beginning to set in...

The lessons of the book, written in 2012, endure and we would be best advised to pay attention.

Uganda’s economy has grown by an average of six percent for the last 38 years, the longest single stretch of unimpeded growth in the history of the country. The challenge is that this growth is not being equitably enjoyed.

As it is the urban populations – despite our incessant whining, have been the biggest beneficiaries of this growth. So much so that, more than half the nation’s economic output (and I fear this is an understatement) is concentrated in Kampala.

This means that while the rest of the nation is struggling to get into middle income status -- $1,100 the per capita GDP of Kampala is easily over $5,000.

We have historical antecedents to this, the colonial state concentrated opportunities in a few hands, educating a handful of Ugandans for instance – there were 300 A-Level students at Independence and focusing infrastructure on extraction of raw materials rather than on availing access to markets for all.

Our post-independence governments have continued the trend, perpetuating the cycle of benefits accruing to a small group disproportionately.

"This move by parliament is just a symptom of this disturbing trajectory towards a failed nation....

There are hundreds, if not thousands of school going children or sick in those very same regions that would prefer that money is channeled towards education and health services.

The education ministry says it would take about sh14m to build a primary school classroom, so about sh98m to build seven classrooms add another two million for the head master’s office to round off the number to sh100m. So the sh5b a day spent on MPs pontificating and fulminating means 50 primary schools go unbuilt, a primary school every third district. So the three days the want to deliberate per region would account for a primary school a district.

Do we want to go into the beneficial ripple effect of educating a few hundred kids a district?

Or that Mulago spends about sh200,000 per out patient annually and therefore 75,000 out patients would be denied treatment at Mulago because we chose to splurge on an upcountry junket  for MPs.

Whichever you look at it, this is an ill-conceived expenditure we can do without, as a poor country trying to make sure everyone benefits from the miraculous recovery and growth of the last four decades.

Let us be serious. We are already on a very slippery slope, what with all our corruption, for us to indulge in such flights of fancy. Whether we continue to the slippery slope’s logical conclusion or not, will depend on how our political elite and public servants are restrained from gouging themselves at the public trough.

 

ON UGANDA CORRUPTION AND WHY IT IS DIFFICULT TO FIGHT

In recent weeks several public officials have come under a determined barrage of allegations on social media about their misuse of public funds.

President Yoweri Museveni’s pledge to move on corrupt individuals during the state of the nation address two weeks ago, that was quickly followed by the arrest of several MPs, has only served to stoke the flames.

Some people have argued that the word corruption is too polite and that people caught stealing public funds should be branded thieves so there is no ambivalence about what they have done. I would agree only that corruption goes beyond stealing public funds to include, misappropriation, intentionally causing financial loss, favouritism, nepotism and a host of other ills intended to unfairly advantage the corrupt official...

According to the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index 2023, Uganda was ranked 141^st out of 180 countries with a score of 26, where 100 means not corrupt and 0 means totally corrupt. We have never threatened to rise above the bottom quartile of the index since it was first published in 1995.

These were just numbers until we learnt that personal generators bought with tax payers money were being given precedence over the more urgently needed generators in up country referral hospitals. Even more galling was that the generators being procured for the senior government officials were surplus to requirements for even the hospitals.  

This column has argued that corruption apart from distorting the market, it concentrates resources in a few hands and widens inequalities.

The current case illustrates it properly. The three referral hospitals according to the health ministry serve 6.5 million people. Before we go into details of the costs of the senior officials' generators – three times more than market rates, this means that the two officials are consuming the equivalent of 6.5 million people’s resources.

So the public will be forgiven for not swallowing the perennial lament that government is short on cash.

There is a concept called opportunity cost, which means that when you use resources on one thing you have invariably denied another project the resources.

So if you spend half a billion shillings on ensuring a cushy existence for our senior officials you are denying more than six million people, lifesaving services. It would be interesting to find a place where this can make sense.

Even more scary to contemplate, is that this is only the tip of the iceberg, if we took a second glance at the accounts of parliament, where this largesse was being doled out, you will need to be of stronger constitution to keep your food down.

But it also suggests that there is complicity across government. How is it the Auditor General missed this? Where was the Inspector of Government? The Criminal Investigations Department? Parliament’s own internal auditor?

And it is not even over yet. There is widespread complicity by us, the rest of society. When we know that there is no way our father and mothers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, can sustain their lifestyle on a public servants’ salary and yet we still give the pride of place at our weddings, funerals and even churches.

Society’s message being, the end – riches, justify the means.

Many years ago in a discussion among friends, someone made a huge sigh of relief because a recent audit had failed to discover that she had been abusing her fuel allocations. She put it down to her Christian background, “God protects his people.”

"That is how bad corruption has become, to the point that we can explain away our maleficence because we are God’s children...

And therein lies the challenge of fighting corruption in Uganda. More than the fear that fullscale assault on the evil may very well topple the state – because the thieves will not just lie down and die, they will fight tooth and nail to keep their loot, is that it is so baked into our DNA as to totally overturn our moral sensibilities.

Many years ago a minister had solicited a million dollar bribe to grant access to the president, when he was he was aprroached by the media to explain himself, he complained that they were unfair exposing him when there were bigger thieves in government.

So where does one start?

Some quick wins can be gained by carrying out a lifestyle audit of all officials signed up to the leadership code. Our corrupt officials have reached such levels of impunity that they enjoy their loot in full public view.

If government can survive that exercise, it can then go on two restructure and strengthen the law enforcement agencies concerned with white collar crime. The laws will have to looked over to especially what kind of people, from a moral standpoint are allowed to hold public office.

Let government survive those two first before we can talk about long term measures.

"Ideally we should get to the point where the disgust shown a public official mirrors that of a father who defiles his toddler daughter, then we will see progress...

 

DEVELOPMENT: EVERYBODY WANTS TO GO TO HEAVEN BUT NO ONE WANTS TO DIE

Last week downtown Kampala was shut down for a day or two as traders protested Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) methods of revenue collection.

As I understood it the new Electronic Fiscal Receipting & Invoicing Solution (EFRIS) leaves little room for discretion and has a long memory, which can make some people uncomfortable. EFRIS has then compounded a long standing complaint about invoicing, and how URA uses its own set of values to determine taxes on goods imported for instance. Another long held gripe is when the trader is liable to pay tax on a product or service sold at the point of invoicing or when cash actually changes hands.

You have to sympathise with this last one. Imagine delivering a service to government, you invoice today and are immediately liable for the tax but government pays you years later, this can wreak havoc on your cashflow situation.

In the same week the Bank of Uganda released its state of the economy report, which for me had some interesting revelations.

First, that in the first six months of the financial year, July/June our interest payments grew 17.4 percent, growing faster than revenue collections which grew by 12.4 percent, essentially that while government revenues are growing they are not keeping pace with the rate of growth of debt repayment. Interestingly most of the debt repayment is for local debt, mostly contracted through monthly government paper auctions. This is a double edged sword.

This was necessary as net external funding for the budget fell off a cliff to minus-sh122.3b compared to sh1,352b in the previous year. For any number of reasons external lenders are not coming through with their pledged funding, forcing government to look more to the domestic market. And even then they could only do it within reason, with net domestic financing only increasing by 6 percent.

And secondly that back ground probably explains why domestic arrears repayment collapsed by 73 percent to Sh175b from sh651b, which was also a pittance, in the previous year.

The recent friction between traders and URA, reminds me of the VAT strike of 1996, months after it was introduced. Then like now, one has the sense that not enough sensitistaion was done and traders going about their business as usual have found themselves on the sharp end of URA’s pressure to collect. But as said earlier, then as now, there is a section of people used to dodging taxes realizing that their space for maneuver is becoming increasingly squeezed.

The most sustainable way for an economy to develop is if it does this under its own steam, using resources generated internally, more than relying on foreign charity.

In Uganda it seems we are on the right track as revenue collections grow and government has built a credible mechanism for raising funds locally.

But to build up revenues more of the economic base has to be taxed. New taxes will always be a source of discomfort, as will the case be if you haven’t been and now have to start paying taxes.

Workers in formal employment forgo at least 30 percent of their income to the tax man. But out of a working population of about 11 million only about two million pay taxes on their income.  Pay As You Earn (PAYE) accounted for 17 percent of revenues collected in the first half of this year.  Imagine if half the workers of Uganda paid their taxes and doubled this percentage?

People are quick to argue that the wastefulness of government is a disincentive to paying taxes. But those are excuses. It is also possible that law enforcement is so starved of resources they are fighting an uphill battle to clamp down on wastefulness. It is not in doubt that they are under resourced.

"The claim of a lack of political will is there, but unless we want arbitrary arrests and convictions directed by the politicians, there is no way around the resourcing of the law enforcement agencies, to have a long lasting impact on the fight against government waste and corruption...

So we have to pay our taxes.

We point at places like Sweden that have nice infrastructure and working social services, but they pay 43 percent of GDP in taxes. In Uganda we are only touching 14 percent.

And finally while we mobilise more and more resources via government paper – to bridge the gap between our expenditure and tax collections, it is happening at the expense of the businessman. The treasury bond coupon rates are currently in double digits, which means it is impossible to have lending rates lower than that.

The theory is that if more of us paid our taxes government would have less appetite for borrowing locally, lowering bond rates and forcing banks to lower their rates to borrowing public. It is all connected.

"An argument against paying taxes will always be a popular one, but if a more developed country is heaven, while we all want to get there one day we do not want to die – pay our taxes...

TO FIGHT CORRUPTION WE MAY HAVE TO RELY ON FOREIGNERS

It was an interesting week last week.

We had President Yoweri Museveni reporting that corruption had sipped into the military establishment, especially with soldiers serving as enforcers in land disputes. It was also the week that finance ministry permanent secretary Ramathan Goobi called for a leaner government, complaining that the cost of public administration had galloped out of control.

 A related story and probably even bigger than the aforementioned was the removal of Uganda from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list.

The FATF leads global action to tackle money laundering, terrorist financing and the funding of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

"The FATF, while it has been around for at about thirty years, really got its teeth during the fight against terror, that kicked off at the beginning of this century in the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers in New York on 9^th September, 2001...

Uganda along with Barbados, Gibraltar and The United Arab Emirates were lifted out of the grey list last month, while Kenya is still there. One of the major requirements that we have only just complied with, is registering ultimate beneficial owners of businesses that was completed at the end of last year.

Companies with unclear promoters were being used to transfer illicit funds and by lifting the veil on these interests, the hope is that it will be plugging one more conduit for transferring ill-gotten wealth.

As mentioned above these moves have gained impetus since the 9/11 attack on the twin towers, as investigations have shown the people responsible used US financial services to fund and  shift resources around.

A failure to comply with standards and a fall into the FATF blacklist or high risk jurisdictions, would have had far reaching implications for the economy.

North Korea, which is on the blacklist, the FATF has advised other countries that deal with it to subject its companies and banks to extra scrutiny and to close their bank branches and end all correspondence relationships with North Korean Banks.

For country with aspirations to ramp up exports, attract foreign direct investment and encourage its citizens in the diaspora to send back more remittances, such action on Uganda would set us back a few decades.

While western economies are targeting bigger fish, our merchants of corruption, if they know what’s good for them need to seat up and take notice.

There will be greater scrutiny by financial institutions on the sources of income of funds and transferring abroad to hide them from local busy bodies, has become that more difficult, not least of all because of the sanctions on financial institutions if they are found to have abetted transfers of illicit funds, means it will not be business as usual.

Which probably explains the increased number of safes in people’s houses and the proliferation of the forex bureau in the suburbs, because if you think about it, it is easier to handle $100,000 than sh390m.

We can expect that in coming times there is going to be an industry built around money laundering to beat not only local anticorruption legislation but the FATF as well.

Expect a few to be caught in coming days, those who think they can do-it-yourself the process and don’t need the experts.

"Of course Uganda whose economy is largely informal, up to 70 percent by some counts, there are still a lot of avenues for people to launder their ill-gotten wealth. But we have to recognize that these too are fast being sealed....

In a previous life if you stole your billion shillings you could go and buy land, start building. Nowadays you have to justify the source of your income to URA and if it has not been taxed URA would charge a hefty 40 percent of the sum. While if you had stolen the money it would not be a bother to pay tax, but you enter a database, which are increasingly becoming integrated and sometime in the future someone may very well pull this fact up.

Or if you have the land already and decided to spend you ill-gotten gains putting up apartments for sale or rent, the issue of the income to build the apartments will come up.

All these means that that it is that much harder to launder money than it was two decades ago.

"It would be naïve to believe that the coalition of the corrupt will see the writing on the wall and scale back on their actions. More likely to happen is that they will go further underground, employ expert money launderers, but at least the impunity will have been toned down....

Ten years ago this columncelebrated the passing of the Anti-corruption law. Even then the cynics dismissed it as a tick box thing to appease western donors. There are a few score of individuals who have gone through the court and are not laughing.

So let us check back in 2034 and see how much the FATF has changed.

 

THE ATIAK SUGAR DEAL LEAVES A BITTER TASTE IN THE MOUTH

We all know someone like this. You come together as group to contribute to a business venture, but they despite their initial enthusiasm for the project, are reluctant to contribute to the endevour. The rest of you get it off the ground with the little you have managed to put together and what in patient hope for the coming of their contribution.

It doesn’t come and there is always an excuse why. It is beginning to get on your nerves because the defaulting member is benefitting from the project disproportionately to his contribution. You could have let them freeload – after all we are all friends, but the sheer injustice of the situation is beginning to poison the friendship. And the freeloader seems totally unbothered by the situation he has put you people in, oblivious to the risk of jeopardizing the project all together.

Last week the Auditor General released his report for the year that ended in June2023. Wading through the inane stuff that included air supply in local governments, our ballooning public debt, ghost works in government I happened upon a report about our interest in Atiak Sugar Company.

"If lack of capital is a reason for most business failures in Uganda there is no way, absolutely no way, Atiak Sugar Company will collapse...

The project is located in Amuru district, northern Uganda and has the potential to process 1650 tonnes of cane daily for a production of 66,000 tonnes of sugar annually on the 7,900-acre plantation.

 They have struggled to get off the ground, with production being pushed back from 2016 before limited production begun in 2020, but had to be shut down in 2022 for lack of cane to run the plant following a burning of 3000 acres of their fields. Observers think it won’t be until 2025 when they resume operations.

Industry players in private are not surprised by the teething problems the project is suffering as the promoters thought they would circumvent certain key processes in setting up an operation as they had envisaged.

For a project of this magnitude to take almost a decade after its initial commencement to take off is mind boggling.

But maybe not.

Over the last six years government has pumped sh459b into the project in equity and loans through Uganda Development Corporation (UDC). But also an additional sh69b has been received from NAADS (National Agricultural Advisory Services) for such things as slashing, weeding and planting.

But to break it down even further these monies at sh14m a classroom, build about 40,000 classrooms or almost 6,000 primary schools. This would  put a dent in our horrific number of more than 1.4 million kids dropping out of school annually....

These funds, which are more than were allocated to the manufacturing and tourism sector – sh491b, in the last budget, is five times more than government’s commitment to the project. Government is a 40 percent shareholder in the project for which they were supposed to contribute sh80b.

But it gets better.

John Muwanga the Auditor General reported on government’s partners in the project, Horyal Investment Holding Company (HIHC), “There was no evidence to confirm that the private shareholders had provided their capital contribution to the company.”

All I could say was, Wow!

But not only has government given HIHC a blank check to set up this financial black hole, but also was not adequately represented on the board. Government has only one instead of two board members. This kind of negligence is criminal.

To simplify several of us got together raised money and then handed over the money to the one among us who has not contributed to the business and we are not bothered what he is doing.

Where is the incentive for Atiak to work?  The promoters are already being paid hand over fist before the project starts, why suffer with staffing and operations, when we can just be paid for twiddling our thumbs?

I would love to be wrong but it is not rocket science to see what is going to happen.

"The promoters will throw their hands up in the air in defeat, walk away, government will take over the project to make a show of trying to recoup their investment and eventually give up as well, let the bush grow back and let the machines rust away....

It goes without saying that this country cannot afford this kind of waste on such an industrial scale.

Government actions in this project make one wonder whether they really wanted the project to succeed. If they really wanted it to succeed, the obvious thing to do would be to contract someone who has experience in this business, pay them probably a tenth of what they have already shoveled into this doomed project and just maybe we would have sugar from northern Uganda within a finite time.

And now its on to the next scandal.

 

 

 

CHICKEN COMING HOME TO ROOST ON CORRUPTION

My jaw hit the floor last week when it was revealed that the Uganda National Oil Company (UNOC) was “sold” to a Chinese businessman.

While the “buyer” had documents to prove he had paid for UNOC, he did not or declined to reveal, who he dealt with and how much he had paid. He was blissfully unaware the company was a government entity, or so he said.

This came hot on the heals of another con perpetuated in the energy ministry where some Serbian ”Investors” were relieved of more than a billion shillings and the con artists had set them up for another $50m payout.

"If this is your only country; if this is where you intend to while away your years; if this is the country you hope to raise your children and your children’s children in, you should not laugh off these incidents in between sips of your beer...

Both scams show a level of preparation and sophistication that can not be learnt from a text book, but have come from practice and long experience. The scammers have been honing their skills on us, getting away with fleecing Ugandans because they have cover from higher officials, who can command the justice and law system to look the other way.

How did we get to this point?

There is a backhanded complement in there somewhere. In years gone by the big scams were of reams of paper going missing or bicycle procured, which never landed or other instances of pilferage.

But as the economy has grown and the budget with it --- in 2013 the national budget was sh12trillion compared to this years sh52trillion budget, the corrupt and their schemes have grown as well.

"As a result Uganda’s reputation now rivals a certain west African nation, which is the buzz word for everything corrupt....

Attracted by our growing reputation for corruption, unsavory types (the kind who carry $20m in bags around Kampala) have flocked to our shores.

While it is understandable that the Fortune 500 are not falling over themselves to come to Uganda – our market is too small, we are clearly not getting the next best thing, as the cost of doing business, with corruption added on is too prohibitive for them.

It cannot be emphasized enough that corruption is a terrible thing. The theories about allowing our elite to crudely accumulate wealth as a way to build an indigenous capital base is a fallacy and does not hold up to the most cursory study....

If this held true, in the three decades since 1986 we would see some of these crude accumulators, legitimize their business and turn up as some of the biggest tax payers or employers or would have developed a national presence. It has not happened and it will not happen.

 They have squandered hundreds of billions of shillings on questionable initiatives, hairbrained projects, white elephants – all private, and have nothing meaningful to show for their access to the state coffers. So let us bury that idea once and for all.

Beyond concentrating public resources in a few hands, it also denies us quality public goods in education, health, infrastructure and even security, the ingredients needed to climb the social ladder for  the least of our brothers.

As a result of their dubious ways, thousands if not millions of citizens are not getting a fair chance at improving their standard of living.

Corruption is a terrible monster that feeds off itself, growing, squeezing out honest endeavour, leading to frustration and despondency of the general population.

Our corrupt do not stay in their cocoon for long, especially if they are not caught. They soon link up with regional and international networks to extract more and more.  They are not very discriminating about the networks they fraternize with and very soon we will have organized criminals not only roaming our streets but getting photo opportunities with and bending the ear of the high and mighty.

The problem with these criminals is that when you give them an inch, they will want a mile.

They will not stop at just emptying state coffers but will want to protect their enterprise by compromising politicians and security. So very soon, if it is not already happening, they will be smuggling drugs, guns, wild life trophies and vulnerable people right in front of our eyes, with full cover of the law....

They will turn the country in to a hub of illicit trade, benefitting a few elites while impoverishing the rest of us. These actions will see us ostracized from the international community.

It has happened before.

In Montenegro, a country in eastern Europe, in attempt to circumvent sanctions imposed on the former Yugoslavia, the leased their ports and airports to cigarette smugglers. With afoot in the door these gangs stayed on long after sanctions had been lifted on Yugoslavia and Montenegro had broken away.

The gangs so entwined themselves in the country’s running that the Italy once had w arrant out on the head of former Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic for his role in smuggling cigarettes.

Essentially the corrupt and their cronies can hold the state hostage, to a point where it becomes impossible to move on them—except for few sacrificial lambs. Inevitably this leads to major dysfunction....

Believe it or not we are not the most corrupt country in the world or even in our region, but that is a competition we should not be aiming to win.

 

WHAT WE DON’T KNOW ABOUT THE CORRUPT

My man, I will call him Jack, has fallen on “hard times”.

This time two years ago, he was a high-flying government official, with huge budgets at his beck and call. Needless to say he was dipping his hands in the kitty and his lifestyle had grown to match – he had a palatial mansion in a Kampala suburb and one in the village. He and his wife had matching four-wheel drives bought from the showroom. His children had done the international school circuit and now were studying in foreign universities, whose annual fees would pay for at least 34 undergraduate students at Makerere. This is what we know or can discern. It may be the tip of the iceberg.

He had worked in government for the last 30 years or so and his known salary – even if you add all the allowances he gets, could not sustain his lifestyle, at least the one that was open to the public.

I would pay to see his balance sheet.

Two years ago, he left government and the reality begun to set in.

I am going to hazard some assumptions.

"Let us say he had a sh50m a month lifestyle, which would come to sh600m a year. His expenses included maintaining his palatial homes, paying schools fees and upkeep for his three kids abroad, maintain his farm in the village, paying the salaries of a phalanx of workers here and in the village and of course sharing his money with needy relatives and friends. In addition, there was some construction works going on here and there. He did not have a rambunctious nightlife, as far as a I knew, but then again you never know what he got up to in his mansion after dark....

He has easily another 20 years of working life in him but can not be employed in the public service again and he has no skill that the private sector would need.

So, he has had to resort to his savings and investments to stay afloat.

The funny thing with life is, when things are good, we don’t put aside anything or enough for a rainy day.

Assume Jack maintained his sh600m lifestyle he would need assets of about sh3.2b. I got that number by using the 18.5 percent annual yield on the 20-year bond. If his assets were in shares on the Uganda Securities Exchange (USE) he would receive dividend yields of between 0 and 14.3 percent at current rates. Assuming he has all investment in the highest yielding shares he would need assets of sh4.3b to sustain him and his family in the way they have been accustomed to.

If he had invested in real estate at the average return of between two to five percent a year, he would need assets of at least sh12b. If he was doing business returns can much better or much worse, but it would still be a stretch to find a business which would net him sh50m a month especially since he has not built it up over the last so many years.

The New Vision SACCO with which I am intimately familiar, has been in operation for 18 years. Last year they managed a net profit of sh976m, this off sh11b of assets or about 9 percent return on assets, but even then, only made a dividend payout of about sh120m. And this is not indicative of usual businesses as the SACCO works off a very low-cost base and is exempt from corporate taxes on its profits.

So, the “hard times” for Jack have come in the way of drastically scaling down his lifestyle, as he has significant amount of dead assets, assets not making a cash return even though they maybe appreciating, we think. But don’t cry for him yet he scaled back lifestyle may mean he is down to spending sh20m a month, though he would be best advised to take a panga to those costs even more...

All the land or assets in the world will count for nothing if it is not generating incomes when you need the cash.

I know too he has been selling off some of his assets to plug his expenditure holes, but that is a slippery slope, because if you sell assets where will future income come from?

We forget that even when these officials are pilfering our taxes, they most probably consume more than they invest, the way we mere mortals behave with our hard-earned income. It’s a natural thing when you think the taps will continue flowing long into the future.

It is hard to sympathise with such retired public officials, instead we wonder what they did with all the money they were “eating”.

And that’s the point, they ate the money.

HOW WOULD A CORRUPTION FREE UGANDA LOOK LIKE

This week President Yoweri Museveni responded to critics to his easter messages on a number of subjects, not least of all corruption.

The President pointed out that there are institutions mandated to fight corruption and he as the president would be overstepping his mandate to start hunting down the corrupt. He nevertheless pointed out that he set up institutions to fight corruption though complained that some had been infiltrated by the very corrupt they were meant to be fighting.

"The argument that corruption should be fought based on evidence is hard to fault and it is as it should be. The seduction of public lynchings and arbitrary arrests and jailings should not be encouraged. Such methods may win a few cheap points with the people but will eventually lead down the dangerous path to destruction and chaos...

What about if the government was to give all the corrupt amnesty? That they come forward confess their sins, refund our monies and we live happily ever after.

This would be useful in helping us start from a clean slate and secondly serve as the basis for a determined attack on the corrupt. The deal would be you come forward or we come after you hammer and tongs.

And this would not be very difficult. Random lifestyle audits will easily uncover the corrupt. Our public officials have become so emboldened they are not afraid to live in palatial mansions, by their cars from the showroom rather than the bond, send their children to study abroad and holiday in exotic locations, right before our eyes.

I remember almost two decades ago during the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) probe, officials uncovered living a life way beyond their known incomes resorted to blaming “relatives abroad” for their massive wealth.

An amnesty for the corrupt is not unusual. During the early 2000s government passed a law granting Amnesty to people fighting against the government. The condition was that you would publicly renounce your insurgency against the government, get a certificate, on condition that were you to backslide your amnesty would be revoked and the full force of the law would be brought to bear on you.

This was offered to people who had committed despicable crimes -- rape, maiming and mass killings, why can’t the same be offered to our corrupt?

Of course, the practicality of publicly confessing your corrupt ways could be a challenge, your children’s classmates will not let them forget...

But assuming we could go past this stage, what would a corruption free Uganda look like?

For starters many public servants would have to cut back on their budgets. They would have to look for cheaper houses to rent, mothball or sell altogether, their monster private four-wheel drive cars, suspend weekly visits to the farm and much more of their ostentatious living.

This will have repercussions not only for the redeemed public servants but for their wider social networks.

The story is told of the minister who used to customarily ferry people to the village every weekend he was travelling. When he lost his position, he started going to the village on random days of the week to dodge his constituents’ demand for lifts.

Kampala at night, may not be as happy as it is now. Many years ago I met a big night club owner at Kigali airport. We were both returning home. I suggested to him that Kigali would do with good nightclub like has in Kampala. With a wave of his hand he dismissed my suggestion, “There are no corrupt in Kigali, who do you think come to my place?”

Which makes you realise that the biggest beneficiaries of corruption in our government are among us in Kampala and not in the rural areas.

So, a halt to corruption would be good for rural Uganda. Schools would be built and resourced, health centers the same, feeder roads would be opened up and maintained, essentially rural Uganda and the more marginalized urban dweller would be have access to the tools that would help him climb out of despondency and poverty.

"There would be much gnashing of teeth in the hills of Kampala as our public servants take a marked cut in their lifestyles and maybe because they would have to rely on public services, would ensure they worked well – after all they cannot afford treatment in Nairobi or Delhi or Johannesburg....

It would be interesting to see how long our public servants would continue with this class suicide before they fought to return to business as usual.

That is the challenge with fighting corruption in this country, it is now baked into our DNA to the point that the enforcers of the law are themselves part of the racket. As if we don’t know that.

REALIGNING THE STATE WITH THE PEOPLE’S ASPIRATIONS

Last week Karomoja affairs minister Mary Goretti Kitutu was charged in the Anti-corruption court and spent the Easter weekend in Luzira.

This happened because she was the alleged mastermind of the Karamoja iron sheets scam that has held our attention over the last few weeks. Minister Kitutu, it has been reported, dished out hundreds of iron sheets meant as relief aid for Karamoja, to her well-heeled minster colleagues and other senior government officials, who among other things used the sheets to roof their animal pens.

This column has had a thing or two to say about corruption since it begun almost 20 years ago. Looking through the archives I came across this gem (If I may say so myself) from September 2014 which run under this very headline, in which I tried to put this whole corruption thing in perspective.

Beyond showing that the more things change the more things stay the same, a less cynical me thought there was hope for the anti-corruption fight, with a hopeful ending that I think has been overtaken by events. You will be the judge.

Read on dear reader.

What is corruption? Corruption is the employment of public goods for personal enrichment.

 

Or maybe we should add, employment of public goods for personal, family and friends’ enrichment.

By this definition corruption goes beyond stealing money, but will include employing company facilities – using official cars to ferry charcoal or official computers to do private consultancies or official time to do private errands.

 

To complete the definition we might add, corruption is the employment of public/company goods for personal, family and friends’ enrichment. And you can be sure we have not covered all the bases.

 

Corruption comes from a misalignment of ambitions between the government officials and the public or between the employees and shareholders or clients. If you can align those two ambitions, corruption need not exist. I think.

 

The theory is that governments are in place to improve the welfare of their people, be it in terms of improved security, services and infrastructure. Generally governments are, or should be, in the business of creating a conducive environment for their people, to not only survive but thrive.

 

It is not automatic.

 

"For government to execute its mandate, its bureaucracy needs to one, appreciate the end goal and two, make their own personal ambitions subservient to this overarching goal...

Without the latter it will matter little if everyone understands the former.

 

So, under what circumstances do personal greed override the well-meaning intentions of the government?

 

It progresses slowly but increases in pace as more and more people are roped into the scam.

It starts when the bar of what is considered corrupt is raised. One minister famously complained that he had only eaten a few hundreds of thousands of dollars when others had eaten more. That the press should stop witch-hunting him!

 

Proceeds on to when public officials get away with more and more without getting caught. When we hear official so-so and the other have stolen billions of shillings, it rarely is the case that they did it in one fell sweep. Often times the stolen billions are the cumulative effect of years of “hard” work.

 

And then when the bosses start co-opting subordinates in their shady deals.

 

The story is told of former Zaire now Democratic Republic of Congo president Mobutu Ssese SSeko. Whenever he wanted some money from the central bank he would send his personal assistant with a note for say $10,000, the personal assistant would trot over to the central bank, but only after adding a zero to the request to make it $100,000. The central bank governor would unlock the vaults,  but only after adding his own zero to make it $1,000,000.

So at the end Mobutu pocketed his $10,000 (maybe even tipped his PA $100!), the PA got $90,000 and the central bank boss got $900,000. Makes you wonder whether Mobutu was truly the richest man in Zaire.

 

And finally, the institution becomes a machine for the promotion of private enrichment for its officials. It may even hire out its competence to people outside.

Of course, the logical conclusion to all this is that eventually the government is captured, it forgets its original raison d’etre and becomes a free-for-all-but-the-people eating spree.

By this time even inserting your most upright citizens to cause a clean-up is an exercise in futility, as the “eating” networks are so pervasive and coordinated, that the most righteous individual will soon be subsumed by the sheer magnitude of the racket.

And the people?

Well, they will get a few crumbs when the officials charge down to the village in government monster four-wheel drives or pay fees in decrepit schools, in a bad state because they do not get enough funding from the government or a few contributions for weddings, whose standards have been blown out of all reasonableness by the example of these thieving officials' own parties.

"Actually, the worst thing that can happen is not that the government becomes a machine feeding off the people’s sweat for the enrichment of the few. The worst thing that can happen is that the whole population – the thieves and victims, slowly but with increasing pace accept this state of affairs as the new normal....

When your brightest minds clamour for government jobs over the private sector, where the jobs are more enriching – in the sense of professional development and advancement, you know all is lost.

Thankfully that last part has not happened in Uganda. Not yet!

 

WHEN IS ENOUGH EVER ENOUGH?

Many years ago a local paper published a story about how one minister had proposed he be paid a few hundreds of thousands of dollars to organize an audience with the president for the payers.

As soon as the story ran, the minister called the newspaper and in his defence complained that other people had eaten more money than him and that they should go after those ones before rounding in on him. He did not deny he had solicited the funds.

"We have been served up spadefuls of moral relativism over the last two weeks with the revelations about the Karimojong roofing sheets.

According to the story, the Office of the Prime Minister and more specifically the ministry of  Karamoja affairs, has been dishing out iron sheets meant for development in Karamoja, to everybody but the Karimojong.

Beneficiary politicians have argued they used the sheets for roofing schools, health centers and even an animal shed. None of these charitable projects are within walking distance of the Karamoja region.

The politicians, while sidestepping the question of why they got the iron sheets, clearly marked for Karamoja, have gone on to explain that the sheets were not for their individual benefit – though one minister acknowledged it would help his reelection prospects in 2026.

If you were hoping for a wave of cabinet resignations on this clear abuse of power, do not hold your breath.

One does not know whether to laugh or cry.

The NRM government has not got a patent on corruption.

The colonial project was a corrupt exercise, in which the colonialists  took control of the country, extracted resources cheaply for their industries, while putting back the bare minimum into the local economy, just enough to subjugate the people, train a local elite as their agents and ensure the continuation of the extraction. At independence out of a population of seven million there were 300 A-Level students.

"After independence, to reverse this naked exploitation, government, short on manpower, never the less pushed the africanisation of public offices agenda, where the colour of your skin rather than competence was the leading qualification. This was the beginning of the end of the little meritocracy that the colonialists bequeathed us....

We went beyond the colour of skin to the language we speak, the village we came from and who we married, non of which were a gauge of one’s competence.

When the NRM came to power in 1986, top of the agenda was to broaden their narrow political base. While denials will come fast and furious, that it was not official policy for the victors to help themselves to public resources, it is clear at least, that the NRM has pointedly looked away when officials have enriched themselves beyond what their public emoluments can justify.

It has not been unusual for senior officials to retort at questions about their wealth by evoking their bush day credentials.

And we Ugandans are also complicit in this looting. We were so grateful for them saving us from the dark days that a penny pinched here another there, would not raise much alarm.

But as one media personality asked in exasperation many years ago, “Why don’t they give us their invoice and we pay them?”

And that is the crux of the matter. When is enough, enough?

However, corruption does not work like that.

Take a normal working Ugandan, who is used to a monthly paycheck. Take that away and there will be much gnashing of teeth and renting of cloths. The same with public officials take away their office where they have had unrestricted access to the public kitty and all hell will break loose.

"They have commandeered the public purse – this year’s budget was sh48trillion, and by some moral gymnastics, have convinced themselves they are allowed to plunder the treasury at leisure. You can see it in their replies when they are caught with their hands in the till. There is no remorse, to the point that they wonder what the fuss is all about...

And of course the extent of corruption has grown from year to year. Not only because the resources in the treasury have grown – many years ago one minister resigned because he had appropriated 2000 liters of diesel to himself, compare that with 12000 iron sheets stolen from the Karimojong and you begin to scratch the surface of the exponential growth of this industry.

It goes without saying that we should be worried. These rapacious officials will not suddenly get a moral revelation and stop their thieving ways, but instead their appetites will grow and grow. They will become so powerful they will capture the state, making themselves untouchable and woe onto anyone who tries to move on them, they will dispose of that person install their own compliant crony and accelerate the eating.

The playbook is well established, documented and time tested.

 

 

 

DON’T LET CWE OFF THE HOOK, THEY MUST FIX ISIMBA

Last month we had a crisis with the shutdown of the 183 MW Isimba dam which led to major blackout unseen for at least a decade.

The shutdown followed a flooding of part of the power house partly due to human error but largely due to defects that arose from the dam’s construction.

The challenges at the dam persist. Engineers – local and foreign, have looked over the dam and have reported that there are such serious defects as to threaten the very existence of the facility. In so many words, maybe out of professional courtesy, the reported the dam was shoddily built and major remedial works will be required to ensure the dam lives to the full length of its anticipated life.

But these are just symptoms of one of the worst procurement processes in living memory and full responsibility for this debacle should fall squarely on the shoulder of energy ministry officials, past and present, who were involved.

It started off in 2011 when government invited bids to build the Karuma dam in northern Uganda. The multi-billion-dollar project brought out the worst excesses of our public officials who in cohorts with private sector players fought viciously to win the deal. The

energy ministry officials at the time, ignored judicial reviews, parliamentary and cabinet resolutions to force their favourite contractor – China International Water & Electric Corp (CWE) past the finish line.

It took a meeting with President Yoweri Museveni to resolve the issue. His Solomonic wisdom at the time was to offer 600 MW Karuma dam to Chinese contractors Sino-Hydro and the 183 MW Isimba dam to CWE, which while it was irregular, made sense given the impending power shortages.

But the issue was far from over. The energy ministry then refused to relinquish control of the project to Uganda Electricity Generation Ltd (UEGCL), never mind there was an agreement to that effect, only doing so when the construction was far along. The result of this is that poor supervision of the construction has led to Ishimba’s current problems and the more than three-year delay for the commissioning of Karuma dam.

While all that is water under the bridge, it provides useful context in understanding todays shenanigans and determine what drastic steps have to be taken in the future.

According to people familiar with the situation CWE has been dragging its feet on initial remedial works on the dam. Some suspect they want the Liability Defects Period to expire and they leave Uganda holding the bag with a bad dam.

But the recent aforementioned engineers report on the dam, show that it is urgent that the major defects to the dam be repaired otherwise the dam may very well be swept away, especially if the rains raise the level of Lake Victoria.

Populations down stream as well as key infrastructure are at risk if Isimba is swept away, so the need for urgency in fixing the issue cannot be overstated.

Instead CWE is playing hide and seek and trying to wiggle themselves out of making good on their shoddy work....

According to sources familiar with the situation they dispute the scope of remedial work required, have even suggested a financial compensation instead of them fixing the defect even they acknowledge exist and dismiss any attempts to withhold monies still due to them on the original contract.

CWE only have their professional reputation to care about, which they clearly don’t think much of, but for Uganda Isimba dam’s fate has far reaching consequences for our economy. Clearly, we do not have the luxury of time.

While financial compensation for bad work is on the table, we should insist that CWE remedy the defects and hand us a dam that works as it was supposed to, rather financial compensation. Maybe we should cut our losses, hire another contractor to do the remedial work, hoping that the monies still due to CWE would be enough to sort out the problem.

But this should be a lesson to us as a country.

While we are grateful to China for coming to our rescue in building our electricity generation capacity when everybody else was looking the other way, it is bad manners, in what ever culture, to then deliver shoddy work. 

The dam is not an act of charity by China to us, in fact, we are paying commercial rates for the loan we took out with the China Exim Bank to build the dam. The China Exim Bank may want seriously consider blacklisting CWE, like the world Bank did in 2014, if they do not bring this misadventure to a mutually satisfactory conclusion...

One last thing. While we complain about the cost of the tariff due to the Bujagali dam, which was built and is being operated by Bujagali Energy Ltd, we are not tearing our hair out trying to fix or at the bare minimum Bujagali despite our complaints may end up being cheaper than the “cheaper” Isimba dam.