LEICESTER FC’S LESSONS FOR BUSINESS

Last week unheralded Leicester FC won the premiership for the first time in their 132 year history. 

Everybody is calling their run to the pinnacle of English soccer a fairytale, and be glad you lived to see it. At the beginning of the season the betting companies had given the team a 5000 – 1 chance of winning, the same odds they gave the possibility that Elvis was alive or that rocker turned philanthropist Bono can be the Pope.

The team had shown little inkling of greatness, even though they had escaped relegation the previous season by winning six of their last eight  games. Their £48m (sh235b) wage bill is less than half of league runner ups Tottenham and only a fourth of highest spending Chelsea’s payroll.

What made the feat even more improbable is that the team has sustained quality for a whole season and 36 games. So a fluke it was not.

"The feat puts to shame all the people, businesses and governments who faced with little financial resources, inadequate manpower or other assets are content to wallow in mediocrity having convinced themselves that it is useless to even try and compete with the big boys...

So if it wasn’t a miracle, how did Leicester do it and how can the rest of us mere mortals benefit from their wonder run?

Already the book deals are being signed to explain this, but maybe we need not look further than,  “Execution: The Discipline of getting things done” written by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan.

Bossidy cut his management teeth at the feet of Jack Welch at GE, before moving on to manage aerospace engineering firm, Allied Signal.

In the book Bossidy points out that it’s the interaction between human resource, operations and strategy that determines whether companies can get things done.

In his experience it is a rare company that can have these three elements complimenting each other to unleash the full potential of a company. Often times two of the three maybe in sync – and not always the same two or that if the three are in unison, it is not often enough to produce consistent results over a prolonged time.

Let’s try and decipher the Leicester magic.

1.       Human Resource

"What seems like a motley crew of underachievers, veterans in the sunset of their careers and big team rejects were brought together deliberately, systematically and then melded into a single unit. The whole was greater than the sum of the individual parts...

It started with the recruitment, which was based on solid statistics and analysis of the players strengths and weaknesses and how these fit into the way the team wanted to play.

They also had a backroom staff of administrators and medical staff committed to the team’s success and willing to explore the cutting edge of management and sports science to extract maximum value from their charges.

We talk about sweating assets in terms of plant and machinery, Leicester showed us how to sweat human assets. Employing the smallest team in the league, with little change from game to game and still keep most injury free.

2.       Operations

You can have the most talented staff but the operations, how these interact with themselves and their tools in pursuit of a common goal is where everything comes together or apart.

"Coach Claudio Ranieri, a bargain acquisition too, worked at creating a family atmosphere in the team, discouraging big egos, promoting the mission over the individual and emphasising the process over results...

He was aided by a management that was confident to give him his brief and let him run with it. He was no amateur and in hindsight may be credited with laying the foundation for Jose Mourihno’s winning teams at Chelsea.

The technical team threw the training book out the window, emphasising explosive workouts and ice boxes to speed up player recovery between matches – explaining their low injury downtimes.

3.       Strategy

It starts with the strategy – what is your vision? How are you going to achieve it using what you have?

Clearly Leicester while they might have aspired to greater things, knew their place. With a relatively small wallet they went shopping for good value selling at a discount, both on and off the field. On the pitch they eschewed possession for efficient, counter attacking and trained with that in mind. Is it possible they lost early in other competitions to focus on the league, because they had the smallest team and couldn’t afford to rotate them?

Of course this does not even begin to scratch the surface about what went on behind closed doors at the club.

"But if there is any moral to this story it is that a team, business or country, can over turn the tables by having a good understanding of their place in the greater scheme of things, question and be unafraid to buck conventional wisdom and to practice unrelenting discipline in executing their strategy....

Of course  a thorough examination of their human resource practices would be instructional – their identification of what they need, the systematic way they went about acquiring it and what will be a true test for them going into the next season,  their ability to retain that talent.

TIME HAS VINDICATED THE SAPS

Imagine a situation where your income is dwindling while the demands on that same income are rising – rent, food, fuel and family. For a while you try sticking your head in the sand and ignore what has to be done.

The truth be told you know what you have to do --  cut down on spending and/or get a better job.

 After a while of postponing the inevitable, things have become unbearable enough and you call in your friend who has expertise in finance, who to help you out insists that you put your house in order first.

His prescription? Move to a cheaper house/neighbourhood, downgrade children to Kyanamukaka PS, reduce meat eating to Easter and Christmas (it had got that bad) and if you must drink replace marwa for your favourite Black Label.

The basic idea is that by cutting down on your spending you can stretch the few shillings you have a bit longer. The resulting surplus can be used to service the debt your financial guru friend may organise.

Uganda’s situation in the 1980s was not unlike the fictional one described above.

The economy had contracted by almost half since 1970(income was low), the population had doubled (family members up) and you had a huge public sector that was bringing little income but consuming most of your budget (huge staff doing nothing at home).

"With empty coffers, a backfiring economy and at its wits end, the government, like almost all others in Sub-Saharan Africa, turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank for help.
In order to access lifesaving loans and grants it was prescribed that we cut public spending and raise revenues, unpopular recommendations wherever they were proposed....

We cut spending by retrenching civil servants, shedding non-performing companies off our books and cutting out other expenditures we couldn’t afford but could live with out – closing embassies, reducing the government fleet among others.

In order to raise revenues we sold our companies to more efficient operators, opened up the market to more competition and set up URA.

We take it for granted now but there was a time in our recent past when people got paid without working and once paid did not pay taxes.

Of course what was going for the NRM at that time was that it really didn’t have any political opposition to make the prescriptions unworkable.

And thank God for that.

Since the economic reforms started in 1990 we now collect 1000-fold more revenue, we finance 80- percent of our own budget, which was the opposite then and we have a more vibrant private sector, which not only have boosted revenues but are more efficient at delivering goods and services – can you believe there was a time it took months, even years to get a telephone line?

"We have short or selective memories, but those reforms proposed by the IMF then have to a large part got us to where we are now, which is a more robust economy and a good launching pad for the next stage of our development journey....

On Tuesday this week the IMF launched the Regional Economic Outlook report in Kampala and in a discussion with senior economists, it was clear that while Uganda has come a long way there still remains a lot to be done.

The time for resting on our laurels is not yet here.

The world economy is stalling as China, which has provided most of the demand in recent years sees output plateauing, while the US, Europe and Japan are still trying to work their way out of the after effects of the global financial crisis.

The net effect of this is that demand for commodities, which most African countries rely on to boost their accounts, is at historical lows and prices have plummeted. Their currencies have followed suit, making it hard for them to meet their international obligations.

The countries that will come out on top are those which will hold the discipline of cost management, while at the same time creating the environment for business to thrive and therefore raise more revenue.

Ironic as it sounds, we will stay out of the IMF’s clutches if we keep doing what they recommended.

To return to the analogy of your household, once you have swallowed your pride and moved into a smaller house, ejected all the hanger ons, adopted a spartan diet, increased your income and climbed out of your earlier depression, now is not the time to throw a party and return to the ways that got you in the hole in the first place.

"You need to hold the course so that you can accumulate more of a surplus that will hold you in good stead to push more ambitious reforms through or for when the next crisis comes along, because for as night follows day there will be another crisis soon enough...

CLEARLY WE ARE NOT READY FOR OIL

You can’t have missed our honourable members machinations to have taxes on their allowances waived. MPs are hopping to save more than sh5m a month in taxes with this provision they muscled into the Income Tax bill.

These manoeuvers were necessitated – in our honourable members’ minds, by a February high court ruling for them to pay taxes on their allowances like all other workers of Uganda. They somehow weren’t paying since 2004.

"Following a public uproar about their self-serving ways they, last week threatened to hold all of us ransom by refusing to pass the budget if they were not accommodated. Not unlike the toddler throwing its toys out of the play pen in a tantrum...

I am not hopeful that we can stop our honourable members in their quest for tax free living.

However this kind of attitude does not bode well for the country’s future.

All around the world, when politics comes up against economic, politics wins and often to disastrous effect.

Last week Uganda made the decision to pass the oil pipeline through Tanzania and not through Kenya as was earlier expected, which brings us one step closer to oil production now, now expected for before 2020.

At peak production Uganda expects to be piping out 200,000 barrels a day. To put this number in perspective using $40 a barrel, our exports of goods will double from around $3b annually currently. 

Of course all these monies will not find themselves into the national coffers but our share of the price of a barrel, the taxation of oil companies and the revenues from supporting industries will amount to a very tidy sum.

"As incredible as it sounds, if our political leadership is not focussed on the long term benefits of this windfall and only see the short term gains they can milk from the situation, we will soon be worse off than when we had no oil...

Hard to believe?

Well, Ghana established commercial viability of their oil find in 2006 around the same time as we did. Their fields were off the coast so easier to evacuate the oil. In the excitement and driven by bad politics – an election was around the corner, the government leveraged future revenues to raise public service salaries by 50 percent in one fell swoop, in addition to other jumps in consumption spending.

A populist move that has cost them dearly, because now with the collapse of oil prices from highs of $140 a barrel in 2007 to around $40 now, Ghana finds itself looking to International Monetary Fund (IMF) for help in paying for its imports.

Across the pond in Venezuela, during the oil boom, the Latin American nation initiated many populist social programmes and even had time to thumb its nose at the US. Since then prices have plummeted and the country finds itself unable to sustain the programs, with inflation jumping to 500 percent. It has become so bad in fact that last week it was reported that the government is running out of money to print more money to keep up with inflation.

It would have been funny if you don’t think about the man in the street there.

In all these crisis you can bet there were politicians – like our own honourables, throwing caution to the wind, disregarding basic economics to plunder the treasury regardless of the plight of the country in general.

You can bet the representatives in Ghana and Venezuela are also hatching plans to increase their pay as you read this.

But the winner has to be neighbouring Equatorial Guinea. This little country has proven that it is not population size but political management that is key. With a population of about 760,000 they have the highest GDP per capita on the continent of about $20,000, however its populations is among the poorest on the continent with more than three in four  living on less than a dollar a day.

President Teodoro Obiang, his family and cronies have squirrelled away hundreds of millions of dollars in western banks (maybe why he is the longest serving president on the continent) and squandered it on high living. But you can bet there are politicians in the country who have been co-opted into the racket in total disregard of the people.

"Politicians all over the world are the same, they will always be on the lookout for personal gain, their baser instincts tempered only to the extent that strong institutions, societal censure or basic good manners prevails...

The correct thing to do is to invest these windfalls so the returns from the investment can pay for improvements in the wellbeing of the people.

Investments in social services, which improve the quality of the human capital, or building infrastructure, which reduces the cost of doing business are better than raising MPs salaries, which is not an investment but a price we have to bear to keep up appearances of a democracy and maybe more expensive than the bother.

A fly on the wall reveals that reeling from the public backlash MPS are now trying to extend the tax exemption to teachers, doctors and other public servants, so that there plan is not seen for what it is – a shameless grab for resources which, on close scrutiny,  they have no right to over the rest of us.

BAILOUTS? GOVERNMENT IS DAMNED IF IT DOES, DAMNED IF IT DOESN’T

Last week Standard Chartered Bank got a court order to put Steel Rolling Mills under receivership for their failure to honour their debt obligations.

The Jinja based industry became only the latest casualty in a hostile environment that has been buffeted by rising lending rates, shilling depreciation and an underachieving economy.

The steel manufacturer is facing closure following refusal of the commercial court to issue an injunction temporarily stopping the bank from shutting it down pending the main suit. In the main suit the company is challenging StandardChartered’s bid to put it under receivership.

In 2014 Steel Rolling Mills borrowed two loans of sh18b and $10m (sh35b) to purchase a sponge iron plant, which turns iron ore into steel. However, last year the bank recalled the loan in its entirety but the company argued that the loan was for 96 months and that the 45 days’ notice to repay was unreasonable.

Company officials argue that unforeseen developments in the economy have made it difficult to service the loan properly but point out they have already paid about sh26.5b of the loan.

“A combination of things – a drop in demand form the construction industry, falling steel prices, rising interest rates, currency depreciation and increased cost of production, all unforeseen at the time of taking out the loan have made it difficult,” Steel Rolling Mills’ Sami Alam told Business Vision.

Economic growth is expected to come in at five percent, down from the projected 5.8 percent. The shilling has stabilised in recent months but last year peaked at a historic high of sh3,700 to the dollar from below sh3000 at the beginning of the year. The shilling has since clawed back some value and is now trading in the ranges of sh3,300 to the dollar on the open market.

Lending rates also jumped following the central bank’s raising of its key Central Bank Rate, which serves as a benchmark for commercial lenders. The CBR peaked at 17 percent in February this year from 11 percent twelve months prior, this had the knock on effect of raising lending rates to as high as 25 percent for prime borrowers.

The Bank of Uganda felt it necessary to raise the CBR to head off potential inflationary pressures.

The enterprise under threat is the only one in Uganda which converts iron ore from a company owned mine in Kabale and from artisan miners into steel at their Jinja plant.

The company, which also trucks 250 tons of iron ore daily from Kabale and produces 4000 tonnes of steel a month, also employs about 4,000 people directly and indirectly.

Industry leader Roofings Ltd produces about 350,000 tons of steel products a year from imported semi processed steel.

But the multi-million dollar investment is not the only one creaking under the weight of hard economic terms.

"According to a senior businessman small businessmen who owe sh40b and are failing to pay are in danger of losing up to sh120b in assets pledged as collateral for the loans...

Everest Kayondo the boss of the Kampala City Traders Association (KACITA) could not confirm the figure but said the pain was real.

 “The high interest rates in a situation where business is declining means many of our members have seen their businesses going into receivership,” Kayondo said.

“It is particularly painful when as we predicted the banks are showing healthy profits, but at the same time they are treading on dead businesses.”

Banks, which have released their results recently, have shown that they are bringing their bad loans under control, provisioning less for them last year than the previous year, while profits have mostly come in higher in 2015 than in 2014.

A closure of these businesses would put thousands out of work and compromise the ability of local businessmen to create more jobs.

Already big names like supermarket chain Uchumi have been placed under receivership and WBS TV has been taken over by URA. Meanwhile the classified pages are inundated with properties being auctioned to redeem bad loans as numerous small operators have sunk quietly out of sight in recent months.

Inevitably when such economy wide distress arises calls for government intervention are not far behind.

“This is not a normal situation,” agroprocessor Andrew Rugasira told Business Vision.  “When you are in a situation of recession pressures government has an important role to play in assessing distressed loan portfolios to reduce the stress either by having the financial sector restructure these loans or by injecting liquidity into the economy.”

He argues that the cost to the economy in terms of jobs lost, loss of business to support companies and a general lowering of demand make the case for government intervention important.

Politics will always be a factor in how government intervenes in the economy, benefiting some who may not be deserving of government help to the detriment of those who are but who might be at odds with the establishment or not have the correct connections.

“There will always be politics. There is no perfect scenario. But the discussion must be had and systematic, orderly way for government to lend hand come out,” Rugasira said.

Opponents of government intervention are hard to find.

"The classical argument is that companies should be allowed to fail, that to intervene is to distort the market’s ability to allocate resources efficiently and only serves to perpetuate the inefficiencies that led to the collapse in the first place...

Governments around the world are having to rethink this orthodoxy.

During the global financial crisis that started in 2007, the US, European and Japanese governments pumped money into their respective economies and partially nationalised some of their biggest financial institutions as a way to climb out of the crisis.

Only last week The Financial Times reported that the UK government was going to re-nationalise up to a quarter of distressed Tata Steel and lend them hundreds of millions of pounds to the firm which had threatened to close down after suffering substantial losses  for years.

The UK government cited the 40,000 jobs under threat and the strategic importance of the steel industry to the economy as the reasons for interventions.

THE OIL PIPELINE:ITS ALL ABOUT THE OIL, OR IS IT?

Last week Uganda decided that the oil pipe line from the western oil fields will go south through Tanzania rather than through Kenya, as was earlier expected, a decision that served to open up old wounds and threatens to shift the region’s economic center of gravity.

The Kenyan route through Lokichar and onto Lamu, was discarded on account that it would be more costly to develop due to expensive land compensation claims, its passing through environmentally sensitive areas and the state of unpreparedness of the Lamu port, which was deemed too shallow and exposed to high tides, less than ideal conditions for oil tankers to operate in.

The route through Tanzania to Tanga port was shorter – though not by much 1500 km through Kenya as opposed to 1,410 km through Tanzania. This would be factor though as the waxy nature of Uganda’s oil which solidifies below 40 degrees centigrade necessitates heating plants every so many kilometres. In addition because all land belongs to the state in Tanzania compensation would be kept to a minimum and leases secured faster.

It also helps that Tanga port is already up and running unlike Lamu. This would mean Uganda’s first oil exports have a better chance of being realised before 2020 using the southern route.

"And it did not help that Kenya has not established commercial viability of their oil finds in the north...

This was important for both countries but more so for Uganda, because if Kenya didn’t have viable quantities to ship out Uganda would find itself carrying a disproportionate portion of the piping costs.

While Tanzania has no oil deposits of its own to share the pipeline there gas reserves are convenient as heating fuel for the length of the pipeline. In addition the development of infrastructure through southern Uganda as a plus given the unexploited iron ore deposits in the region.

Of course Kenyan officialdom and the business community were left unamused at the latest development. Some commentators went as far as to accuse Uganda of playing off its neighbours against each other, sticking it to Kenya over some unresolved and unclear past slights and threatening to jeopardise the joint multi-billion dollar Standard Gauge Railway(SGR) project.

The Mombasa to Nairobi leg of the SGR is already underway and will cost about $5b while the $8b has been earmarked for the Malaba-Kampala leg.

The economics of the project were lost in the hysterics.

It is understandable that Kenya Inc should be concerned.

"Fashioned as a colony the British never saw themselves ever leaving, like South Africa or Zimbabwe, the other territories around it were fashioned to feed into Kenya’s industries, leading to its regional economic dominance, a situation that persists to date...

However with Uganda’s economy finding its feet over the last three decades and Tanzania’s embarrassing wealth in natural resources – natural gas, gold and other minerals, means Kenya is increasingly having to see itself as first among equals rather than the 800 pound gorilla straddling the region.

Channelling Uganda’s oil, the fourth largest reserves in sub-Saharan Africa, through Tanzania threaten to redress historical regional economic imbalances. Uganda’s reserves are estimated at 6.5 billion barrels of which about 1.5 billion are recoverable.

It is not unreasonable to believe too that the accompanying improvements in infrastructure along the pipeline will make the much neglected Tanzanian route to the sea more attractive for Ugandan, Rwandan and Congolese commerce, a worrying situation for Kenyan transport interests.

And finally with tensions in South Sudan beginning to ease off -- rebel leader Riak Machar was sworn in as Salva Kiir’s  vice-president, the issue of an oil pipe line to the coast will be revived, only this time there will be an alternative through Tanzania to the Kenyan route.

"It is safe to say that when history is written the events around the evacuation of Ugandan oil to the sea will be seen as an inflection point in the region’s geopolitical alignment...

It is not only about the oil, but then again it is.

MEASURE HAPPINESS NOT GDP

Uganda’s economy has grown at a steady clip over the last three decades or so.

So much so that the economy has grown five-fold during the same period. Aside from a rebooting of the economy, experts say the country can credit this fact to the low base from which we begun, but which results would have been so much better if, during the same period, the population had not doubled in size.

What is also clear, is that not everyone has benefited from these statistics. In fact the figures show that the benefits of this exponential economic growth are being enjoyed by a few and the majority are getting poorer.

Clearly something is wrong.

"To paraphrase the great teacher, “GDP was made for man, not man for GDP”...

The question then is are we measuring the wrong thing by emphasizing GDP growth?

They say what you focus on grows, which explains the growth in the economy in the last 30 years. We have really focused on that number.

Last week the World Economic Forum on its twitter handle, released five other measures that work better than GDP growth – good jobs, well-being, environment, fairness and health.

They are not the first. In 2011 the United Nations passed a resolution calling on member states to measure the happiness of the people as a way to guide policy.

Prior to that there was the Human Development Index, also by the UN, which measured individual countries ability to improve standards of living of their people by measuring against such things as infant mortality, life expectancy, literacy and access to water.

It is an interesting debate that has been thrashed out in the deepest annals of economic theory, but has only burst into the fore in recent years, as people have put the aid industry’s record under closer scrutiny, especially in Africa.

How is it that tens, even hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into Africa over the last few decades with little or nothing to show for it in the way of the improved livelihoods for the continent’s people?

"The obvious answer seems to be that the overemphasis on growth, which wold inevitably trickle down to the masses, is a fallacy...

So maybe we should focus more on the improving the citizen’s well-being, which sounds like the obvious end product that politicians and planners strive for.  Then why didn’t it happen?

To paraphrase another former Kenyan president Jomo Kenyatta in responding to his Tanzanian counterpart Julius Nyerere’s call for a move towards socialism for the region, “So what are you going to distribute? Poverty”

The logic is irrefutable.

The trick clearly is to see GDP growth as a means to an end – improved well-being for everybody, and not an end in itself.

But what one can see how the technocrats got so enamored with GDP growth.

How is economic output and hence growth measured? It is the sum total of consumption, investment, government expenditure and the difference between exports and imports.

"So to move the GDP growth needle government can just spend more, like they are doing now on roads and dams and there will be a corresponding growth in the economy...

However imagine if our targets, which we tracked monthly or annually were such things as the social indicators listed above and celebrated them as widely and as much as we announce improvements in GDP growth, one would expect more dramatic improvements.

Interestingly all these targets are there but as has been mentioned we don’t trumpet them from the rooftops like our macroeconomic gains and secondly, and as a consequence of the first, we don’t place much emphasis on the outputs from investments in the things that will have an enduring effect on people’s living standards – health, education and other social services.

So we have statistics flowing out of our ears and noses on how inflation or monetary aggregates or balance of payments are progressing or not, but nothing comparable in terms of quality of the outputs of our education and health facilities. There we are content with such amorphous figures as enrollment, literacy and life expectancy and not quite into the finer details of curriculum relevance to the environment or preventative medicine.

Again what you focus on is what expands.

"The problem with focusing on the outputs – improved quality of life rather than input – classrooms or health center built, is that it is too hard. The interventions needed for example to increase academic achievement across the board, needs more interventions than form only the education ministry. You would have to rope in the works, health, energy and all other ministries at once to achieve meaningful progress....

So we take the short cut and focus on GDP and may the devil take the hindmost.

In the last three decades we have demystified growth. Our planners know what to do to keep the growth machine going even in their sleep. A legacy not to be frowned upon.

To cement their legacy they need to learn how to translate that growth into meaningful development for the majority.

In trying to do that they may even realise that five percent economic growth is nothing to write home about.

DEMOCRACY IS ALWAYS A WORK IN PROGRESS

Makerere’s Dr Stella Nyanzi dominated the headlines this last week.

The happenings around her and Professor Mahmood Mamdani would be fitting fodder for this week’s column. But we shall desist. If only because we think the people around the good doctor are doing her a disservice and would be best advised to seek professional help for her.

She may have provided much grist for the printing presses, material for our wagging tongues and itching whatsapping fingers, but we need to see it for what it is, a tragic meltdown being played out in full public view.

Our attention diverted we might have missed the New York Democratic Party primary on Tuesday.

The US is deep into nominating its presidential flag bearers for the Republican and Democratic parties. There are currently winding their way through the primaries and on Tuesday the state of New York was voting.

Hillary Clinton annihilated her rival Senator Bernie Sanders in an election that was marred by closed polling centers, missing voters on the register – 54,000 by some counts and broken voting machines, the equivalent of tampered ballot boxes here.

"It was interesting how the reporting on these incidents gave the electoral officials the benefit of doubt, reporting the incidents more as incompetence than a deliberate ploy to gift Clinton the victory. And no one blamed Clinton for the chaos...

At what point is it election rigging and at what point does it become unbiased incompetence or system malfunction or, even better, just bad luck?

And at what point do you decide that one person’s intentions were noble and the others not?

There was a lot of snickering on social media at this turn of events.

But the events in New York should have come as no surprise to long term observers of politics around the world.

The classic definition is that politics is the management of society, but in analysing politics we might be better served if we focused on power – the ability to influence events, people, the environment.

"Politicians strive for power and even the best of them are not averse to disregarding society’s moral code to attain power and once there to hang for as long as is possible under the law or even in total disregard of the law...

That probably explains why we look at all politicians with a jaundiced eye.

With a politician what you see in not necessarily what you get. There is always an angle, an ulterior motive, a hidden agenda.

So how is it that the failures of New York's electoral officials were not placed at Clinton’s feet? After all she is an establishment figure, well embedded with the power brokers of the Democratic Party. And there have been several allegations, all unproven of her sharp practices as a lawyer in her previous life and questionable decision making as the US’ top diplomat in Obama’s first administration.

It helped of course that Sanders slunk off once he determined how badly he had been trounced.

But what if he had gone to court and challenged the result – as is his right? Never mind that it is unlikely It would be overturned in his favour, but maybe he might have won a repeat of the election.

Or what if he just started a narrative that the vote has been stolen and he never had a chance anyway and kept shouting it from the rooftops and twitter?

You do not say these things in polite company but isn’t it that “These things don’t happen in the west” because the people would not allow it? Because their politicians are not like ours?

Mbu they are ethical politicians. An oxymoron if ever there was one.