WHITNEY, AFRICAN AMERICANS & MONEY

For me the biggest news last week was the death of Whitney Houston. She burst on the scene when some of us were cutting our romantic teeth, plagiarizing her lyrics mercilessly in attempts to score points with the fairer sex. One couldn’t but feel what a waste her death at forty eight was, while watching videos of her past hits.

A lot of ink has already been spent eulogizing the queen of song but the tragic last years of her life point to a greater problem among African-American celebrity: an apparent failure to handle the immense wealth that comes with success.

While it is estimated that she lives behind an estate worth about $20m – a fraction of her earnings over the years, she joins a long line of black celebrities that include Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, OJ Simpson and Gary Coleman, who have squandered fortunes – potential and actual.

Observers of financial matters would not be surprised.

"Financial illiteracy is endemic among blacks in the US, with more than half of their population without a bank account. Financial literacy is an understanding of money, which allows individuals to make choices and take other effective actions to improve their financial well-being and protect their financial resources...

As counter intuitive as it sounds it is easier to make money than to keep it.

The successful black celebrity after years of hard work – it takes more work to excel as a celebrity than it is to get a first class degree, follows a familiar pattern; they buy the biggest house, the flashiest cars and the blingest jewelry; live large, flying their private jets and patronize the high end streets. But they worked hard for their money why not let them enjoy it? We ask. And that is at the heart of the problem.

The white celebrity – often in film, music or golf is much wiser. He knows or is advised that one, money is for making more money not for spending, secondly, that there are only two decisions with money, you either invest it or consume it and finally, that there is a difference between earning money and making money.

On the basis of these three premises you are unlikely to see the white celebrity indulge in orgies of ostentatious consumption, which means they are unlikely to fall into destitution when their earning power diminishes as inevitably happens.

As an example former tennis professional Andre Agassi early in his career created a company to which all his earnings paid – prize money and endorsement fees amounting to a few million dollars a year. He was an employee of his own company, earning $400,000 annually or about a tenth of annual earnings. The company then invested this money on his behalf, multiplying his wealth to an amount many times over his total $31m career earnings. Today Agassi – whose father was an Iranian Olympic boxer and naturalised American, continues to earn from his investments and it is unlikely that he, his children or their children will ever want for anything.

"It is not that the black man is inherently allergic to wealth accumulation through steady work and diligent investing. Maybe what can be said is that the black celebrity does not have the financial expertise around him to shepherd him along, leaving his financial decision making to his base instincts. Never a good idea...

Nearer to home last week I went through the arduous task of compressing more than a 100 years of Madhvani history into 800 words. The Madhvani empire as we know it today is the product of hard work, but just as importantly delayed gratification and judicious investment.

Also more importantly the Madhvanis will never be accused of conspicuous consumption and if such displays of wealth are a sign of having “arrived” who better to have arrived than them?

Which brings us to the state of our local “rich”. When we make a few millions we plunder the company capital to buy a four wheel drive car, plan holidays to Europe and upgrade our taste in alcohol.

Partly our troubled past, which one can argue we should have put behind ourselves by now, but mainly our rural approach to urban excitement means there are barely any Ugandan businesses that are passed down the generations. The idea of a financial legacy is alien to us as we believe we must eat all we have made.

Whitney Houston’s death is sad on many fronts but it is most telling as a sign of the black’s ineptitude around money.

UGANDA POWER PROBLEMS STILL SOME WAY TO GO

Last week Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi witnessed the first turbine at the Bujagali dam generate its first 50 MW for the grid.

This is arguably the most anticipated 50 MW in the history of power generation. Previous dates for its appearance last year fell by the wayside as technical considerations conspired to delay its arrival. In the meantime we suffered the worst loadshedding in five years.

The Bujagali dam project has suffered a tortuous route to realization navigating through a minefield of environmentalist do-gooders, opportunistic law makers, bureaucratic delays and donor ambivalence before the first unit of power could be generated.

For a relative small dam of 250 MW it is scandal that it has taken almost taken 20 years to come to commissioning.

It is hard to determine the loss to the economy of these delays but it would not be unrealistic to stay it must ruin in the billions of dollars.

The most telling sign is that, judging by our power load curve, we use more power at night to watch TV, security lighting and boiling tea than we do for industry. What heavy industrialist in his right mind would set up shop here when our power situation is so inadequate? So our wealth creating and therefor job creating potential is capped and yet we have been growing at more than an annualized five percent for the last fifteen years. It boggles the mind to think where would be as a country if only we had enough power all this time.

Contrary to what has been reported the dam is on schedule to be completed on time – the contractor’s deadline is June this year and with the phasing in of the remaining four turbines over the next few months, we will see a total elimination by Christmas of loadshedding because of low power generation.

Experts project that this happy situation may continue for at least another year or two before we start suffering loadshedding again.

For the time being expect that normal loadshedding – power off every other day, should continue until the second turbine comes on line.

Expect that the last diesel plant we have at Mutundwe will be decommissioned soon so that Bujagali’s power can take its place. Government is shelling out almost $10m a month to keep the Mutundwe plant running money we can least afford at this time.

Energy drives economies. No energy, no growth. Energy is needed to keep us from regressing into lower levels of development and chaos.

We should determine as a country that load shedding should never happen again. Thankfully the process for starting on the Karuma dam has begun, with construction of the 600MW dam expected to kick off by June. The dam should be commissioned by the end of this decade.

In the meantime we can expect small hydro–power plants of up to 20 MW to be up and running.

Karuma is going to be a test case of the whether the government using internally generated funds, can build the dam. It helps that oil will be coming into production within a year or two and those resources are already earmarked for among other infrastructure needs power generation.

The beauty of using our own funds to build the dams, we will not have financial backers making us jump through hoops.

During AES’ doomed attempt to build the Bujagali dam donors, including the World Bank, had then energy minister Syda Bumba scurrying around the region to solicit pledges from our neighbours that they will buy our power. Never mind that in Uganda electricity coverage was barely five percent of the population at the time.

It is estimated that Karuma dam will cost $2.2b – a figure that includes a several hundred kilometer transmission line.

On the other hand one wonders whether it’s a good idea for government to involved in trying to build a dam, given its officials propensity to dip their fingers in the till at every turn.

FACEBOOK, UTODA AND THE UGANDAN BUSINESSMAN’S FATE

Facebook last week announced that its much anticipated share sale was going into its final stages. The Initial Public Offering (IPO) when it comes to the market could value the hugely popular social interaction site at as much as $100b. The original concept was hatched to slight an ex-girlfriend in 2004 out of founder Mark Zuckerberg’s university room.

Zukerberg, whose interest in the company would be valued at upwards of $18b – or larger than the economy of Uganda, is only 27.

Nearer to home multi-billion shilling concern UTODA (Uganda Taxi Owners & Drivers Association) saw their knees chopped from under them when KCCA took over the running of Kampala’s taxi parks.

UTODA, which was set up ostensibly to represent the rights of taxi owners and drivers, has run – or run down, the parks since 1993. By losing the contract UTODA will go into the record books, next only to mobile provider Celtel, which ceded its control of the mobile phone industry to MTN at the end of the 1990s, as a company that took for granted and let slip a Godsend of a deal.

While UTODA is a test case of how not to run a monopoly, Facebook is very much the opposite.

Last week Zuckerberg wrote a letter to his shareholders outlining his company’s reason for its existence, its vision and explaining why facebook is going public.

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected. … Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. …These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits,” he said.
Three things stand out in the above that successful businesses are created to meet human needs, secondly great business are driven by great men motivated by creating great things and finally, that profit is not the be all and end all of business.
And the kid should know. He has built a company bigger than the economy of East Africa from a standing start in 2004.
Obviously this letter came too late for the old men of UTODA.

In a new publication “50th Uganda; Past, Present, Future” published by the Vision Group and currently on the shelves, I suggest that the Ugandan businessman as we know him now – single proprietorship, running a local operation and continually plundering the business capital, will be extinct in the next half century.
Years of instability and questionable national policies have not helped the indigenous businessman. With the collapse of national borders the Ugandan businessman has no time to go through the usual evolutionary processes, he has to quickly identify his competitive advantages, aggregate their resources to become more formidable enterprises and be pen to partnerships with foreign investors.

Nationalistic sentiment will balk at the idea, but the way things are going there is a real threat that Ugandan businessmen will be relegated to corner shops or as bit players in the economy. And they can rest assured the consumer will not be in their corner especially if foreign concerns are providing satisfactory service.

What does it matter if our local businessmen get swept off onto the dung heap of history? Local businessmen are more likely to opt for local over foreign suppliers, local businessmen are more likely to reinvest profits in the economy and local businessmen will be less aloof of local politics, interested in continued and sustainable stability.

As a start local businessmen would do themselves a lot of good to refocus themselves towards providing a service first, in the faith that once this is done profit will be the welcome byproduct.

By focusing on a goal greater than themselves issues of forming partnerships for example, will not seem so abhorrent.

In Asia, in the middle of the last century, some governments forced some companies to merge in order to compete and were favoured as national champions to expand out of their respective countries.

For that to work however you have to have a firm entrepreneurial base otherwise government as often happens, will end up throwing good money after bad.

Back to UTODA, there is unlikely to be any tears shed for their demise, which is not a good place to be for any business to be, because at the end of the day the business’ clients are the best guarantors of its survival.

UGANDA’S ECONOMIC CRISIS SOWN IN COLONIAL TIMES

The decision to not make Uganda a settler colony, the nationalization of companies, the expulsion of the Asians and the liberalization of the economy under the NRM are arguably the biggest decisions that continue to reverberate through the economy.

Fifty years after independence services account for about half of GDP, industry 25.1% and Agriculture 22.2%. As economies develop, agriculture significance reduces as manufacturing and services not only create more value from agricultural commodities among other things but also that manufacturing and services employ more and more.
In Uganda however Agriculture employs four in every five workers while industry employs five percent and Services about 13% according to 2009 estimates.

What this means is that the overwhelming majority of Ugandans have been left behind by the economic boom of the last 26 years as most of the growth has come from the services and the manufacturing sectors.

To ferret out the root of this problem you would have to go back to the beginning of the last century to see how this came about.

"Sir James Hayes Sadler, who was a commissioner of Uganda between 1901 and 1907, decided that Uganda was not attractive for human settlement. The hot humid climate, which came with malaria infestations and the tse tse fly, he decided should best left to the Africans. The tse tse fly and the distance from the sea, would make commercial agriculture untenable....

Sir Hesketh Bell, who came after Sadler, was also sold on the idea and did little to encourage European settlement.

While in neighbouring Kenya the temperate climate of the highlands straddling the rift valley were more suited to the settler and with the large unoccupied tracts of land could engage in commercial agriculture.

The repercussions of this single decision – despite massive pressure from certain quarters to allow for European settlement a la Kenya, is that our tenure system was not regularized.

To do commercial agriculture you cannot afford a disparity of the tenure system that currently exists in Uganda, but not in Kenya or Zimbabwe or South Africa, British colonies on the continent. In these colonies all the arable land is titled meaning it can be verified, transferred or collatralised. Land becomes a commodity and attains commercial value.

So in the wish to develop Uganda as an African state small holders farmers were used to plant cash crops – cotton, coffee and tea. The introduction of poll tax and the harsh penalties one would incur if they did not pay, served as incentive enough for farmers to grow cash crops.

"So successful was the cash crop economy, mainly due to cotton, that the British treasury stopped subsidizing the Uganda administration in 1914...

Shut out of production the European and Asians found themselves restricted to the commercial and processing side of agricultural produce.

If Sadler and Bell thought there were doing the African a favour by keeping settlers off the land the unintended consequence – or was it?, is that the European and Asians ended up controlling the more lucrative parts of the value chain.

As a result by the 1970s a handful of families – mostly Asian, controlled more than a third of the economy of Uganda.

Milton Obote, with his move to the left attempted to redress this by nationalizing enterprises, reasoning that by having the government hold and run this assets in trust for Ugandans would redress the wealth disparities.

Analysts of the time say with his slap dash nationalization policy Obote “disenfranchised the non-citizens who run the economy without empowering the Africans who had not been allowed to participate in commerce, industry and large-scale agriculture” – a recipe for disaster.

His successor Idi Amin while becoming increasingly isolated from his erstwhile sponsors, especially the British, and hoping to bolster his local support expelled the Asians in 1972 at the height of his economic war.

The vacuum caused by these efforts at “nationalization” accelerated the economy’s down turn.

"In his native wisdom Amin sought to slow the slide by publicly executing or torturing people involved in economic crimes – hoarding, smuggling, overcharging and dealing in foreign exchange....

The extent of the destruction of the economy is captured by the fact that of the 930 companies registered in 1971 only 300 remained by the time of Amin's demise in 1979 operating at five percent of capacity. The economy had shrunk by an annual one percent, while the population continued to grow. All sectors collapsed apart from subsistence agriculture, for lack of imported inputs.

Obote’s second administration was dogged by insecurity, although some progress was made at recovery. The economy grew by 5.5% and inflation fell to 20% while the share of agriculture fell from 70.5% of to about 50% of GDP.

The NRM’s triumphant entry into Kampala in January 1986 was therefore tempered by the reality of a basket case economy and enormity of the task of resurrecting it.

"In 1986 per capita GDP was less than half what it was fifteen years earlier, the government tax base had collapsed as subsistence agriculture and the informal sector accounted for almost all of economic output...

A country is only as viable as its private sector, because it is the private sector that pays the taxes that sustain governments and finance infrastructure and social services.

In the beginning the NRM deeply opposed donor prescriptions for the economy. It revalued the shilling, allocated commodities administratively, sought to control prices and maintain the parastatal monopolies.

But there was only so much a government with empty coffers could do.

Years after Obote’s nationalization drive and Amin’s expulsion of the Asians no comparable indigenous business class had emerged to fill the void left, by these well-meaning but disastrous attempts at economic engineering.

"Faced with the urgent need to jump start the economy with little money to sustain its central planning agenda the NRM did an about face invited the Asians back -- a process that begun with the Obote II government, privatized state corporations and liberalized the markets....

This was the much needed shot in the arm the economy needed.

A combination of these policies in addition to liberal dozes of foreign aid have seen the country enjoy its longest stretch of economic growth in the last 50 years.

Revenues are up a thousand fold from 1986, manufacturing and services now dominate economic output and exports have been diversified away from coffee.

Uganda in recent years has been judged the most entrepreneurial country in the world. The nationalization of enterprises, the expulsion of the Asians and hard economic times could take the credit for bringing about this situation. The challenge though is, for lack of know how the indigenous Ugandan businessman has failed to graduate from a subsistence businessman. To get to the next level the Ugandan businessman would have to learn how to aggregate his efforts with partners in order to pursue ambitions beyond his own personal upkeep.

"The frustration of the colonial settler farmer and the expulsion of the Asians denied Ugandans that skill transfer and the insecurity of the 1970s and 1980s short circuited the learning process further...

As a result of these decisions taken generations ago we find ourselves in a high inflationary situation partly because our agricultural production could not fill a regional gap left by drought that hit Kenya last year. While we continue to be donor dependent because the informal sector continues to dominate the economy and hence a narrow tax base.

Going forward – and politics aside, the resolution of our land tenure system and the development of a more credible entrepreneurial class will determine whether we continue on a growth trajectory or not.

WHAT IF UGANDA HAD NOT BITTEN THE BULLET

This week the nation commemorated the 26th anniversary of the coming to power of the NRM in 1986.

The New Vision has been running the Golden Jubilee project, which looks back on the last fifty years of the country. In addition a magazine due out soon will poll various experts on their opinion on how Uganda will look 50 years from now.

In the last 26 years the thing that stands out is the revival of the Ugandan economy. It has been interesting revisiting what this government did to turn around the economy.

"There still is a lot to do and in hindsight we could have done a few things differently but we are far better off than we were in 1986. The discontent with economy is more that our expectations have been raised and we have come to expect better and better from the economy from our government...

And that is always the danger of success for every organization or government that has shown some initial success, you eventually become a victim of your own success. Keeping up with the expectations you have created becomes the loadstone around your neck. Ask Arsenal.

It’s a hard to talk about economic recovery when the economy is going through the worst times in more than two decades, but if we step away we can discern the forest from the trees.

"Releasing the energy of the private sector by rolling back government’s role in business and creating a more liberalized environment for it to thrive have been at the center of the economy’s recovery...

We take it for granted now but making the decision to empower the private sector came up against a lot of resistance from the populists, inside and outside government, who wanted to jettison the donors and revive the economy by central planning.

What if the populists had won the day and by some miracle their thinking had held sway to the present, what would Uganda look like?

The main areas of growth over the last two decades have been services and industry which grew as a total of economic output (GDP) to 52% and 25% from about 20% and three percent in 1986 respectively.

The explosion in services came with the liberalization of the telecommunications, retail and finance sectors. The entrance of MTN, supermarket chains like Uchumi, Nakumatt and Shoprite and the beefing up of their presence by banks like Stanbic, Standard Chartered and Barclays – all private enterprises have spearheaded this boom.

If government had insisted of keeping private money out and retained its stranglehold of the telecom sector through Uganda Posts & Telecommunications Corporation (UPTC) or banking through Uganda Commercial Bank or retail shopping through Foods & Beverages it would be doubtful whether things would be the same.

Government bureaucracies are not wired to be commercially efficient deriving their raison d’etre from more than commercial considerations. The inefficiencies we were used to from government corporations were mainly structural – meaning they couldn’t help themselves but be inefficient due to the structure of incentives, there was no competition and therefore no reason to fight to increase market share.

As a result government would have continued to sustain these inefficient firms at the expense of spreading social services and building infrastructure, affecting the corporations ensuring they continue to be a drain on the economy. A vicious cycle.

"We should also keep in mind that the problems of our failed companies beyond political interference, was a lack of managerial capacity. With due respect to the respective managers at the time. Were they managerial or entrepreneurial savvy many of them who were retrenched would have started up companies that would be household names by now more than 20 years later...

The thinking that was against opening up the economy to private players feared that more liquid foreign players would overran the economy buying all the privatized firms or taking advantage of abolition of government monopolies to set up monopolies of their own.

These fears have come largely to pass with the major business concerns in whatever sector being controlled by foreign capital. However this has been largely mitigated by the wide availability of goods and services, increase in available jobs and improved tax collections.

That all being said after two decades its time to take stock and ask ourselves whether the model we have pursued still holds.

Two things can be counted as major failings – the inability to use agriculture as the springboard for industrialization and the lack of a more credible indigenous entrepreneurial class.

Agricultures share of GDP’s collapse to less than a fifth from more than a half in 1986 reflect the normal progression of economies, but in our case our farmers have remained largely subsistence. At the root of the problem is our land tenure system which in many parts of central, east and northern Uganda does not lend itself to commercial exploitation.

"The indigenous business community’s seeds of destruction were sown a lot earlier, so that by the time the NRM came to power our business community was largely subsistence, unable to aggregate into formidable concerns that could take advantage of economies of scale and shut out foreign interests – like Kenya’s business community is doing with some limited success...

In My mind resolving those two issues by government but mostly by our own entrepreneurs will determine whether this economic recovery continues or fizzles out in coming years.

THE MARKET IS OUR BEST HOPE

Half a century after independence Uganda has come to another cross roads in its economic history.

The economy is working its way through the worst shock since the Kenyan post-election violence of 2008.

At that time for a few days our lifeline to the sea, the Mombasa road was impassable, patrolled by crazed gangs of ethnic cleansers and opportunistic looters. In Kibera, allegations that Uganda was involved in putting down riots in western Kenya so incensed the mobs that they tore out sections of the railway line to Uganda. Never underestimate the foolishness of people in big numbers, they say.

Subsequent fuel shortages caused inflation to spike to just under 15%. Thankfully the drama was short lived, the Kenyans came to a compromise of sorts, and we went back to business as usual.

But we probably have to look back to the early 1990s when government embraced fiscal discipline, to find a comparable period of personal distress as we are going through now.

Last year inflation hit record highs peaking at 30% before slipping back to 27% by year end. The spike was triggered by higher food prices and a falling shilling against.

And as they say problems rarely come alone, the failure to get Bujagali online at the end of last year caused further gloom as government, unable to continue subsidizing expensive diesel generators, lifted the subsidies pushing up power tariffs by as much as 69% last week.

In recent weeks city traders have threatened strike action in protest against the rising lending rates and power distributor Umeme, who they blame – erroneously, for the persistent load shedding.

The traders want government to prevail on the banks to lower lending rates and to cancel Umeme’s concession. Neither of which is likely to happen.

Earlier last year they had threatened strike action again, this time because the dollar was going through the roof.

The high lending rates are the price we have to pay for lowering inflation and strengthening the shilling.



Traders have been the largest beneficiaries of the country’s adoption of a free market economy. Setting prices, sourcing goods where they please and building up their wealth largely unmolested.

But the market, which they so love, has to be maintained and every so often desperate measures have to be taken to stabilize it. And that is what is happening now.

To continue or not to continue with the market economy, that is the question at the heart of what the traders are asking for.

Government pandering to short term discomfort can very well issue an edict to banks to lower interest rates.

Banks will stop lending to business and start lending money to government by buying better yielding risk free treasury bills and bonds. The lower lending to the private sector will slow production and weaken the shilling, partly because the banks will convert their holdings into hard currency and look to cash in on a weaker shilling or repatriate the money all together to more benign economies.

Of course the government can jump up and forbid them to send their money out of the country. But as always happens in these situations a black market – called a parallel market in polite company, develops with rates reflecting the real market reality. If you think loan shark rates are high, you wait for the black market!

The traders, more than the rest of us, are feeling real pain. Many risk losing their businesses and property. We can wonder whether it is fair for them to pay for the sins of politicians and short sighted planners, but the truth is we find ourselves in this situation and what do we do?

It may bring short term relief for the traders if the government goes back to a price control situation however temporary but the eventual consequence for this will be economic distress leading to failure and business collapse, the very thing the traders are going to forestall.

At the risk of sounding callous in the current crisis there will be some business failures, it’s the brutal reality of the market, with the leaner more efficient operations coming out the other side of this tunnel of despair. But to even contemplate subverting the market using price controls will doom us to a fate worse than death.

But governments do not always operate by logic. Whether we roll back the market is really a function of politics. We can only wait and see.

But as an illustration of how the market knows no strongman.

In 2008 Zimbabwe’s inflation shot beyond 1000%. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe ordered shopkeepers to revert to prices of a few months ago as a way to put the brakes on inflation. Shop shelves soon went empty and good uncle Bob arrested shopkeepers for hoarding and ranted at imperialistic plots to topple him.

He has since had to bow to the authority of the market but at what cost? Most transactions in Zimbabwe today are carried out in dollars —US not Zim dollars, meaning his monetary policy is being dictated from Washignton, a fate he tried to prevent.

UGANDA'S GRADUATES SHOULD KEEP THE FAITH

By Eva Wakabi, Guest Writer

This week marks the start of the real challenge for Makerere University’s 11,022 fresh graduates. After investing their money and their finest years in getting an education, the graduates have to go out to the real world – and make their investment pay.

The unbelievable atmosphere of pessimism which is gaining a stranglehold in this country is going to make many of those graduates give up without even trying. “There are no jobs out there for me, so why should I even try?”, one of the graduates told me yesterday, an admittedly good looking girl. “The only hope for me is to find a rich man who will take care of me. That is what I will concentrate my efforts on”. The Daily Monitor’s Tuesday headline (Abdu Kiyaga, “11,000 graduate to 83% joblessness”) reflects this pessimism.

But the truth is not so simple. Youth unemployment is unbearably high, but other statistics reveal why Uganda is considered an economic success story in many countries. In the 2012 Index of Economic Freedom, published last week by the Heritage Foundation in Washington, Uganda ranks first in East Africa in all economic parameters. The index, which ranks countries according to their financial, legal and regulatory environments, gave Uganda a grade of 61, four points above Kenya’s grade of 57. Uganda also ranked as the 8th best country in Africa in terms of doing business.

These are not the only numbers which reveal a different picture than the one we are used to reading about in the newspapers. Foreign Direct Investment in Uganda, it turns out, has reached a staggering $847.6 million in 2011, compared to only $133 million in Kenya.

And yet, when you open an average Ugandan newspaper (even the government owned “New Vision”), you don’t get these numbers. Ugandans generally don’t know that their country is the preferred investment destination in East Africa. They mostly get the impression that theirs is a country in severe crisis, with no hope in sight. Faced with such a presentation of reality, many of them give up and don’t even try.

Ugandans frown upon gradual, hard work, the kind that has built innumerable other countries, such as China, Singapore and (just next door) Rwanda. They don’t see the need for discipline in achieving their goals. Bad Black, the goddess of easy money, is an object of love and admiration – but when the President chooses to give the KIIRA EV project his unlimited backing and support, he becomes an object of scorn. And yet it is exactly those projects which have made Uganda a target of international investment. Building a country, those investors know, is slow, hard work. That is something we have yet to learn.

So to those graduates who have become discouraged at the headline which placed their odds of finding a job at only 17% (since a full 83% of all youths are allegedly unemployed – although this statistic has only an indirect connection to the much smaller segment of university graduates) – to those graduates who have given up, mentally, on making it in the real world without even trying, I say this: you live in a country with sound economic fundamentals. The rest is up to you. Don’t let anybody discourage you until you have made your fullest, most passionate efforts at success.

A lot have been said about our education system: the way it focuses on books and not real technology, and doesn’t give graduates hand on experience. This is gradually changing, and major global newspapers such as the New York Times have already reported that Makerere University has become a regional centre of excellence for IT. Possibly the solution is found in the direction already implemented by Kenya: more professional colleges and technical schools, less university enrollment.

Above all, we must remember: in this age of global competition, in which lifelong learning is mandatory and is no longer an option, and in which all the world’s information is at your fingertips via the Internet, success for those who really want to get it is more an option than ever before.

Worldwide, Uganda is considered a good place to do business. The fact that our most educated people are afraid of going into business, and instead seek the so-called safety of regular employment, is one of the reasons why so many foreigners control businesses here. Rather than scaring people off with gloomy reports and suggestive headlines, the media should try to reverse this trend. The fact that Uganda regularly gets top ratings as far as business friendliness is concerned means that you have more of a chance to succeed in business here than you realise. It’s all in your head.

Ms. Eva Wakabi is a Student of Law, living in Kampala.