THE PEOPLE ARE CALLING YOUR BLUFF

Last week Major General Matia Kyaligonza and his body guards got into an altercation with a traffic police woman on the Kampala-Jinja road – to put it mildly.

The hapless police woman whose “crime” was to call them to order for breaking the traffic laws – making U-Turn where they were not supposed to, was roughed up for her trouble.

This would have been filed away as another urban legend surrounding the General were it not that it was caught on camera, with the general’s identity hard to deny.

"This country has a torrid history of military abuse. The worst excesses counted back four decades ago, when soldiers had no qualms disposing of people permanently or bundling them into the boots of their cars and driving them off to unknown destinations but certain ends.

The fact that the manhandling of Sergeant Esther Namaganda almost broke the internet on Sunday; the fact that she even could go and report the senior officer to the nearest police station; the fact that the general’s actions have been called in question loudly and publicly is a sign some would say, of how far we have come as a country.

Even more important for me is that the people are calling the bluff of the bush war veterans, “You said you went to fight for a restoration of democracy, so that is the standard we will hold you to”. Which is as it should be.

Holding those in power accountable has also been aided immeasurably by social media, where now everyone is a media house to record and transmit the happenings around them at will.

"Democracy is not an event but a process, which involves among other things, compelling the powerful to conform to the rules. Progress is never achieved in a straight line and progress often doesn’t look like it, often a case of two steps forward and four steps back...

Of course some people will argue that the only crime the general committed was getting caught, that these violations are happening every day. While very much in the public eye but far from the cameras which would alert the chattering masses to the transgressions.

Well even that is progress, that the perpetrators of the violations chose to do them under the cover of dark or away from prying eyes.

There was a time centuries ago that the kings of Europe used to have the power of life and death over their subjects, when France’s Louis XIV could declare L’etat c’est moi (I am the state) and King Leopold could use the state machinery to subjugate the people of his private possession Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo and still sell it back to Belgium for a tidy profit.

These despots did not relinquish their hold on power out of the goodness of their hearts. They were compelled to do so first by the parliaments they set up, which in themselves were concessions to mounting pressure for a say in the governance of their countries, and then by the people as communication improved, word could get around faster and people could be mobilized easier.

"One thing that can be said for the NRM though is that while they were the initiators of opening the political space by, their experiment with direct democracy, sticking to electoral cycles, maintaining a vocal if not rowdy parliament and eventually lifting the ban on political parties, they have often enough shown themselves willing to go where the wind blows – not always in directions they would have liked or preferred...

Every so often there is push back, but they have their have often shown presence of mind, even sense of occasion, to sheath their claws before things got too far out of hand. Not always, but enough times to allow progress to continue.

But it is like they say, when you give a man an inch he will take a mile or that after you have given the people some they, like Oliver Twist, will beg, even demand for more. That is the natural order of things.

It is the sign of the times. Everywhere not only in politics, but also in the economy, in society generally the old command and control structures are coming under scrutiny, under threat even, and it will take a different mindset to not only appreciate these changes, but leverage them or step out of their way all together.

GOVT MUST GIVE ITS COMPANIES A CHANCE TO WORK

The recent Auditor General’s report was, as ever, an eye opener about how government its departments and authorities conduct their financial affairs.

It is mind boggling how parts of government get away with financial mismanagement year after year and nothing seems to be done to the responsible officials.

I was particularly interested in the state enterprises performance.

"Of the 24 state enterprises the Auditor General reported that just under half or 14 of the 29 enterprises showed a profit. For many the quality of the earnings didn’t stand up to scrutiny, when viewed against their asset bases, but that is a story for another day....

No details were given of the individual company accounts but one wondered how Uganda Electricity Generation Company ltd (UEGCL), Uganda Electricity Transmission Company Ltd (UETCL) and Uganda Electricity Distribution Company ltd (UEDCL) continue to be loss making.

The three companies are as a result of three way split of the former Uganda Electricity Board (UEB). The thinking was that the unbundling of the dinosaur would improve specialisation and make the component parts much easier to flog off to private operators.

So with Eskom taking over the Kiira and Nalubale dams and Umeme taking over the power distribution, UEGCL and UEDCL remained as custodians of the assets that the government had leased to the private players. The transmission function remained with government.

You are loss making when your expenses exceed your revenues. In that case you are not making enough money --- often a failing of the marketing department or your costs are unrealistically high.

The financials of UETCL and UEDCL were not available online.

But UEGCL’s numbers were and they showed that the company earned income from the concession fees paid to it by the operators of power generation plants and some grants. I suspect this is the same for the other two entities.

Depreciation and amortisation is the greatest expense, wiping out UEGCL’s entire income. When you add on staff and admin costs it sinks UEGCL further in the red.

So either UEGCL’s is not pricing its services well enough or costs have run amok.

"As it turns out UEGCL is not allowed to charge depreciation on the assets in the concession – dams, which it owns. The depreciation they booked was for assets that were used to supervise the projects and not on the fixed assets like the dams...

While if fully provided for this would sink UEGCL further in the red, adding it to the portion of the tariff due to UEGCL would increase their top line considerably.

More importantly it would mean these would be funds the company would revert to, to finance other hydro-power developments. Depreciation is not paid out but retained in the company to at least finance replacement of existing assets.

But one can understand the logic of removing these charges from the books. It artificially keeps the tariff low but compromises the ability of UEGCL or the other companies to carry out their mandate sustainably...

What it means that under the current arrangement for all subsequent power plant developments UEGCL will have to fall at the feet of government to provide the required funds, unnecessary if they were allowed to charge for it.

Given the government’s shifting priorities this is not an ideal situation for any manager to be in.

It’s no surprise then that government is now resorting to expensive loans to finance its power expansion ambitions. A classic case of the chicken coming home to roost. Because it seems expedient to bury our head in the sand and keep tariffs artificially low, this short sightedness then comes back to bite us and actually hampers the appropriate roll out of new power plants in the future.

This year the 183 MW Isimba and the 600 MW Karuma power projects are coming on line and one can expect that government will continue with this pattern of doing things in attempt to keep tariffs low.

We have a set target to increase power generation to 17000 MW by 2028, this means that under the current arrangement UEGCL will be unable to budget to build or cooperate in the building of new plants unless government provides the funds.

We can expect the convoluted process to construct Isimba and Karuma to played out in subsequent power generation projects because UEGCL’s has its hands tied.

Essentially what government is doing is not allowing UEGCL to succeed. It is hard to see how the company will break even under the current circumstances and therefore compromise its capacity to fulfil its mandate...

As I said I couldn’t see the financials of the other two companies but it would come as no surprise if they are treated the same.

And one last thing that unlike other Independent Power Producers (IPP), UEGCL is not allowed to add a Return on Equity (ROE) to their portion of the tariff. Again for the reason that it would raise the tariff to uncomfortable levels. This too hobbles UEGCL’s long-time viability and usefulness to the country.

"Across the border in Kenya UEGCL’s counterpart KENGEN relies on its own resources to expand power generation. It is no wonder that KENGEN, a profitable company in its own right, has greater generation capacity than Uganda despite our greater potential to generate power – at least hydro-electric power...

THE HARVEST MONEY EXPO AS AN EYE OPENER

Last weekend the Vision Group and its sponsors hosted the third Harvest Money Expo at Namboole, an event that brings together exhibitors and farmers – current and potential, in an increasingly popular event that is fast becoming the premier event on the agricultural calendar.

This year’s theme was “Farming as a business” and given the stated ambition to shift the sector away from subsistence to commercial production, there is no reason why that is not a constant theme going forward.

At the expo where exhibitors were set up all around the exterior of the stadium, the thousands of visitors who walked through the gates were exposed to everything from tractors to seed varieties to agricultural processing plants and machinery to agricultural financing products.

It was a revelation to see what is available to farmers on the market on one hand and on the other the magnitude of interest in the subject by people from all walks of life, gender and age.

As seven in ten Ugandans derive their livelihood from the soil, what happens or not to agriculture has an effect on Uganda’s fortunes.

"The anaemic growth in output of agriculture when seen against the progress in construction, industry and services, means that the economic fortunes for the majority of Ugandans have been barely touched by the country’s 33 years of unbroken growth....

This should concern everybody because the growing income and wealth inequalities cannot go on for ever before they trigger insecurity and instability.

There is a lot to be done with the land tenure system, improving farming practices, promoting farmer cooperation and facilitating access to markets.

One of the major challenges of dealing with farmers in sustainable and scalable ways is that they remain largely informal. Being such an agricultural country it should be that agricultural enterprises are comprise the largest number. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.

So farms are often unregistered sole proprietorships or partnerships that are operated to meet this or that families’ subsistence needs, which even they don’t do well.

In Mityana around Africa’s largest coffee plantation Kaweri Coffee, coffee farmers have been organised into groups to improve their farming practices, bulk their crop giving them better bargaining power when the middlemen show up.

The Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) estimates that the average yield on our farms is 0.5 tons. The Kaweri farm does 2.5 tons per hectare and the local farmers do about half that. The trick has been in improved planting, husbanding and processing and organising of the farmers into groups not only for marketing of their produce and improved bargaining power with suppliers  but also as a forum for shared learning.

The last I heard the groups were planning to incorporate. A change in their status may very well signal an improvement in their fortunes as suppliers, traders and even financial institutions would find it easier and more convenient to deal with them.

"Like with business people the sector complain that there is no access to tailored agriculture finance.  While that is true, being incorporated with proper books would give financiers a better appreciation of the business and improved sense of the risk they would be underwriting....

Finance is scarce everywhere often because financiers cannot appraise the enterprise with any degree of certainty.

The issue of the agriculture in this country is one of failure to unlock the full potential of the bounty around us. We can’t do that because the sector --- starting from the ministry, is not geared for the job.

The proof is the foreign concerns who have entered the agricultural space and showing world class productivity and quality  – the aforementioned Kaweri coffee farm for one; Exclusive Cuts a company operating out of Kiwenda, Wakiso export up to five million flower seedlings a month to the flower auctions of Europe.

As the Harvest Money Expo showed – to me at least, the sector has to get organised to get access to inputs and capital that will help the country live to its full potential as the food basket of the continent. Further afield the demand for what we can produce is boundless, it’s a scandal that we continue to be a poor country.

KENYA OIL COMES A CROPPER

Seven years ago ( has it been that long ago?) then Kenyan energy minister Kiraitu Murungi gleefully reported that oil exploration firm Tullow had found sizeable oil deposits in northern Kenya and gleefully hazarded that these were  larger reserves than neighbouring Uganda (I wonder who gave the minister that impression?) which had established commercial viability six years prior.

Seven years down the road Kenya has ditched plans for a refinery to process their crude for lack of adequate resource.

Who is fooling who?

TECHNOLOGY AND THE CHANGING WORLD OF THINGS

What was it like the day after fire was discovered or the wheel was invented or the first gun was fired or the first printing press started rolling. Probably not any different than the day before, for the majority of the human race.

It took thousands of years between the first wheel’s creation in Mesopotamia and the widespread use of the wheels for carriages; It took more than 1500 years for gun powder to make its way from China to gain widespread use in Europe; It took 500 years between the invention of the printing press and its adoption in all world regions.

These and other inventions have change the course of human history, speeded up the process of human development and for better or worse have caused irreparable change when they have been widely adopted.

It is the greatest of understatements that the internet will pale in comparison, not only the scale of change it will engender but the speed with which this change will be adopted, so much so that in the next 10-, 20- or 50- years – not few centuries, when we look back we will not recognise the times we are living in now.

The first I heard of the internet is in the early 1980s that there was this computer network students off the east coast of Canada, on Prince Edward Island, would use to access libraries on mainland North America. That many people could read the same book at the same time. And they would read this in near real time – computing speed was much slower than, but still to my little mind at the time this was the stuff of science fiction.

While I grappled with this notion of clairvoyance then, my sons now, aged 10 and eight, would struggle to wrap their minds around the concept of a library as we knew it then, where one would go to a big room of books and borrow a maximum of three books for a week, to read at home. And that if someone had borrowed the book you wanted you would have to wait for them to return it before you could read it .

This difference in reality for these little boys – me three decades ago and my sons today,  is separated by more than time.

"It means for one, that with knowledge now so readily available, these kids can, will and do, know much, much more than we knew at their age; It means that their teachers are no longer the authority figures they used to be in our day, because today teachers standing in front of classroom may very well be spouting old news to a kid who has gone well past the bantu migrations or the rift valley formation or newton’s laws of physics in his random browsing of the internet at home....

It raises the age old dilemma that many have suffered with their richer parents, uncles or spouses, which is “What do you give a person for his birthday who has everything?”

Edgar Kasenene who started out as an IT engineer but now grapples with these questions in helping companies adopt for the new era argues that, “It’s not any more about facts but about creativity, what you can do with those facts, because facts have now been commoditized.”

In our day you would hear of a textbook that was the best for Geography, History or Mathematics and that there was only one copy of it and you didn’t have it. Facts were scarce. That is not an option now.

Everything we own or use is based on knowledge. If knowledge is now so prevalent it means the scarcity of things will soon be or is already in some instances non-existent.

So if there is no scarcity of information or knowledge leading to no scarcity of goods or services where does that leave economics, defined as the management of scarce resources?

Kasenene argues that the structures to manage our lives – at home, at work and in the world generally are designed to cope, manage or exploit scarcity. The status quo is redundant in a world where scarcity is not an issue.

Seen in this light, scarcity is a function of a lack of knowledge or ignorance.

So in my day (see how I refer to my day as if it is long gone? Because it is gone) having an education, speaking English or knowing how to do my tables was a competitive advantage. In this brave new world I have no competitive advantage of anyone with access to the internet, the winners are and will be those who can access this knowledge and creatively work with it to innovate and produce more.

"In workplaces all the manual jobs are or will be automated. Which makes one wonder whether factories will really bring jobs to economies like they did in the industrial age. That time is dead...

When we did field trips to the beer, soda and other factories in our younger days there were always people manning the lines, supervising processes and generally being around. Thankfully those same factories are still around. If you went there now there are not only fewer people on the factory floor but the output of these enterprises are multiples of what they were when their workforce was thrice or quadruple the size they are now. It is only going to get worse.

So what to do for us in working life staring into the abyss?

Kasenene says that career planning is out, things are changing so fast whole careers have been wiped out; Learning plans are in. That because of the speed of change we have to keep learning to remain relevant and not only a continued upgrade of our current skills but the acquisition  of other areas of knowledge and skills is imperative.

As is fast becoming evident these days, that no sooner have you learnt something – got your degree or master or PhD, than it becomes obsolete.

And finally this speaks to how we work in or run our companies.

The only way to continue to be relevant is to have an obsessive focus on the customers’ needs.  While management gurus like Tom Peters have been counselling this since the 1980s, it is now even more relevant. Because of the aforementioned explosion in information and options, the client does not need to stick with you – remember there is no scarcity and your competition can come from anywhere in the world from unrelated industries.

An innovation driven by evolving customer needs is the only way to remain relevant.

“Innovation is no longer a department it must become a way of life,” Kasenene said.

WE NEED, NO, MUST CHANGE THE RULES OF THE GAME

Last week tourism state minister Geoffrey Kiwanda kicked up a storm, while in trying to promote the Miss Curvy beauty pageant, put his foot in his mouth and then some, by saying the Ugandan woman’s fame curves  can become a tourist attraction.

The way women took offence to this reminded me of how many years ago the headmistress of Maryhill High School, Mbarara took issue with the government school truck.

Sr Felice could not imagine transporting her girls around in the truck, which had “Produce for export” emblazoned on its side. She promptly had it changed to “Support girls’ education”.

Earlier this week President Yoweri Museveni while speaking at the 32^nd Summit of the heads of State at the AU called on his counterparts to generate a sense of urgency in pursuing a common market for Africa and an eventual political union.

He argued that it’s only by coming together economically and politically can we banish the stereotype of the continent as being bedevilled by hunger, disease and poverty and also prevent a repeat of the colonisation of Africa.

Two seemingly unrelated events but which highlight the major challenge of our continent.

"While some sections took offence at using our women as marketing tools and objectifying them, if you looked at it another way it’s a clever, if not original way, of shifting the measure of beauty...

Western media through its sheer dominance has created a standard of beauty characterised by tall, slim and light skinned women, which we have come to accept, even if only at a subconscious level.

It is this thinking that, I was reminded years ago, saw no Ugandan lady nominated to contest for the “Face of Africa” model search competition almost a decade ago, because our women were not tall enough and had too much around the waist and hips.

It is the kind of thinking that subconsciously has men hankering for lighter skinned partners, with straightened hair.

But as mentioned above, because of this standard of beauty, our women have next to no chance at foreign beauty pageants, which is why Quin Abanakyo’s run at the Miss World beauty pageant was such a surprise.

"When you get into a game in which you do not make the rules, chances are you will be competing at a disadvantage. You either muster the rules and hope you can excel despite your lack of input in their formulation; you can contravene the rules and guarantee that you will lose anyway or walk away and go and start your own game with your own rules...

The organisers of the Miss Curvy competition have in essence gone away and created their own game, where their contestants can compete from a position of strength rather than from other people’s measure of what constitutes beauty.

Whereas they may not, or never, get world wide acclaim, because they don’t fit in the “conventional” definition of beauty, you can rest assured they will do just fine controlling a niche that makes sense in our context.

The call for a unified Africa falls somewhere between learning to play by established rules and breaking the rules anyway, which is the only way one can hope to compete better in a game not of ones making.

The colonial era saw Africa split up by arbitrary boundaries based on a logic that was not our own. That is how you find our border communities everywhere on the continent just don’t take this political boundaries seriously.

"But the boundaries never the less have served to separate our populations, disaggregate our resources with the net effect being the basket case that the continent is today...

We have to contravene those rules on one hand, so that on the other hand we can compete more effectively in the global arena, where size is might.

Africa’s resources are so vast that it’s a scandal of prodigious proportions that we are the poorest continent on the planet.

By one example it is estimated that the mineral resources of the Democratic Republic of Congo have an estimated value of $12trillion. That’s just a number, but when you realise that this is the total economic output of the US, you have to wonder.

When you drill down to its essence, the reason this is so is because we are divided, playing by someone else’s rules, which invariably work in their favour not ours.

So yes taking a leaf from the Miss Curvy organisers, if we are to have half a chance of not only surviving, but thriving as a continent we need to take a hard look at the rules and tweak them, scuttle or ignore them altogether. The sooner the better.

NEWS --- THE MOSQUITO KILLER PAINT MAYBE JUST WHAT THE DOCTOR ORDERED

Last week paint producer Plascon launched their Mosquito Killer Paint as part of their contribution to the quest to eliminate malaria from Uganda.

Mosquitos that land on the painted surface will die and the efficacy of the paint has been tested and proven to last up to two years.

The health ministry estimates that at least 5,000 people die of malaria annually. This is the equivalent of about 360 14-seater mini-vans or the death of a whole 14-seater minivan weekly. It is the leading cause of death not only in Uganda but globally.

It is even more tragic that 70 percent of deaths due to malaria are of children younger than five. And hence as part of the “Hold my hand to 5” initiative, Plascon will donate Anti-Mosquito paint to under privileged schools across the country.

Uganda is the second country after Zambia to adopt this new initiative and this will complement government’s other efforts – case management of malaria, distribution of free insecticide treated mosquito nets and larviciding among others.

The Kansai Plascon Anti-Mosquito paint has been tested in Uganda and approved for use by the health ministry, National Drug Authority (NDA) and the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA).

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