WHY WE SHOULD BE CONCERNED ABOUT KCCA ROADS

Last week Kampala Capital city Authority (KKCA) boss Dorothy Kisaka announced plans to pave roads around Kampala, a project that would cost $288m (one trillion shillings).

Her political boss Mayor Erias Lukwago quickly jumped into the fray accusing KCCA of overinflating the cost of the project which by his calculation the 69km of road earmarked would cost sh14b a km to build. For a long time we have known that to build a kilometer of road costs about a million dollars or about sh4b.

KCCA are yet to respond to their boss.

The need for a functioning road network cannot be overemphasized especially in the capital.

"Speaking from personal experience without traffic I whiz to work in less than 15 minutes without pressing the accelerator to the floor. This is a far cry from 15 years ago where I would have to navigate badly rutted roads for most of the way to work. My productivity has increased as I can do more as I do not have to stay too long on the road....

I am not alone. Sine the paving of the roads in our leafy suburb, businesses have sprouted along the roads, real estate development a little off the paved roads is on steroids and generally it’s a more pleasant place to live – we are not chocking on dust and any number of pestilences that come with it.

As a driver of economic growth and subsequent development, improved infrastructure is critical. As shown above it improves productivity and efficiency and opens up new avenues for economic activity where there was none before.

It would help even more if KCCA could decongest our roads via the use of more organized public transport – bus and rail and the introduction of tolls for people wanting to drive into the city. But that is a story for another day.

At a basic level transport infrastructure links the producers to the market. The better the infrastructure the more the potential of the producers can be actualized.

I remember years ago that matooke used to ripen on the tree in one village in now Sheema district because the rains had made the murram roads impassable. As soon as the road quality improved the economic fortunes of the farmers improved exponentially.

No lesser an authority than the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have made the connection between the speed of traffic on roads and poverty.

"In a graphic of the world published last year, the IMF showed that the countries with the slowest roads are also the poorest in the world....

Surprise! Surprise! 

But the fastest roads – where mean speed ranges were 91 – 110 kph were in north America, Western Europe, Australia, Singapore and Japan. In Africa only Morocco and South Africa made the cut.

On a recent visit to South Africa distances the equivalent of Kampala to Jinja were being done in under 45 mins, thanks to express ways, as opposed to double that time here. The quality of the cars also had something to do with it. That time differential has serious economic implications.

It is no surprise that Kampala is the economic hub of the country given its concentration of road network, about 3.5km of paved road per kilometer squared as opposed to the national average of 0.02 km per kilometer squared. Is it any wonder that by some calculations Kampala’s GDP per capita is ten times the national $850 figure.

So that is why we should care about KCCA’s plans for the road network. Lukwago’s allegations should be taken seriously to the extent that over priced contracts mean we build fewer roads.

That aside it was worrying that KCCA reported their budget for maintenance of the roads was way below requirements and hence the proliferation of port holes on Kampala roads.

"Laying down tarmac all over the place if we can not maintain it is not a very prudent way of carrying out public affairs. You spend more on building roads than if you had just maintained existing roads in good time. Of course, the increased expenditure is an attraction for certain types.

We forget but Kampala, especially its suburbs are a better place to be than 15 to 20 years ago. That is a double-edged sword for KCCA as our expectations have been elevated not only in the places that have been paved but those who wait in anxious hope for the coming of tarmac in the other suburbs.

You know what hey say? When you give them an inch they take a mile.

KCCA and government by extension, need to pay attention. While the near-term benefit is to placate Kampala’s chattering masses the long-term benefit is increased and improved economic activity, more revenues for the treasury to build and maintain more roads. QED!

PS Since this column was published in the New Vision KCCA boss Dorothy Kisaka has explained that allegations of overinflation on road costs were misplaced as the costs have been explained and various stakeholders including the KCCA political leadership have signed off on the process that begun in 2016.

EDUCATION MINISTRY HEADING DOWN A SLIPPERY SLOPE

 The education ministry’s plan to regulate school fees in private schools is baffling because it goes against the spirit of the sector’s liberalization and is curious given our history with price controls.

A statutory instrument is in the offing to put caps on school fees from pre-primary to tertiary levels for all schools.

One can imagine that the move is in response to parents’ complaints about rising fees, especially last year when inflation jumped to its highest level in eight years.

It is ironic that the ministry would even consider regulating private school fees at all.

"When the NRM came to power in 1986 the need for more widespread provision of education services were clear. Less than half the school going children were in school, a number that had to be increased dramatically as a long-term investment in the future of the country...

The introduction of UPE in 1997 more than doubled enrollment.

However, prior to this government opened the doors to private institutions, which have been critical in providing education. At last count private schools accounted for 40 percent of the enrolled students in the system.

This is not the first time calls for fees to be controlled by government have been voiced, but the government has swatted back such calls.

The logic as I understood it, was quite simple. The government does not have the resources to provide universal education and therefore coopted the private sector to help in this endeavor.

The private sector recognized the opportunity and have been quick to take advantage. The explosion in private schools is an indication that it is a lucrative enough market in which to play.

There was reasonable certainty that if an investor committed funds, he could cover his costs and have some profit left over from the school fees they charge. Going by the competition, school owners could only charge so much, otherwise they would collapse due to more inexpensive competition.

Over the yeas investors in the sector have found an equilibrium, with fees shifting depending on economic circumstances.

The government on the other hand continued to struggle with provision of quality education in its schools and those parents who could opted for private education.

"One of the major byproducts of this increased private sector participation is that our education is biased more than ever towards passing exams and away from building well rounded, upright citizens of the country....

It makes sense. The most objective way to measure success and therefore to market ones school is by showing that they can churn out academic successes. So many schools do not bother with extracurricular activities – many don’t have a blade of grass to call their own. Though some argue that this is down to a failure of the education ministry’s inspection and enforcement of regulation concerning the setting up of schools.

However, if government enforced all the standards, it is arguable whether there would be as many private schools as they are now, as meeting all these requirements may make the investment unviable given the fees the market currently allow.

This last point is interesting because it suggests that schools are actually charging less than they should. A business man will do just enough to earn a margin on the costs of the business. So, if he can cheat on standards he can get better margins.

Relatedly the private sector is in education because there is a gap in the sector, both in terms of number and the quality of schools. The quality of education anywhere is determined by the public schools, the better they are the less likely there are to be private schools and the few that are there will be charging a premium...

Given government’s inability to keep pace with the growth in the school going population, controlling prices will cause the very thing that they fear – higher school fees.

This is how it will come about. You control fees and some businessmen will decide the sector is no longer viable and drop out. Best case scenario, they will sell to other businessmen who want to try their luck, worst case scenario they will repurpose the building for other uses and that would be a school lost.

In the worst-case scenario that will mean more students in fewer available schools. The disparity between supply and demand would widen, which in normal times would force an increase in school fees. But because government will have put a cap on fees, schools will find all sort of ingenious ways to charge more.

Invariably there will be some proprietors who would rather not play cat and mouse with government and fall by the wayside, further aggravating the demand-supply balance. All the while you can bet that government schools will not be getting better able to sponge up these kids who have no schools to go to.

"In the end the very thing the ministry is hoping against – runaway school fees prices, will come to pass and for much poorer quality service...

 

UGANDA ECONOMY TO GET WORSE BEFORE IT GETS BETTER

Observers project that the economy will get worse before it gets better, as inflation continues to rise and expected pickup in demand continues to keep us waiting.

According to official figures economic growth rose to 4.2 percent in the last financial year, an improvement from 3.4 percent in the previous financial year. This is the lowest it has been since 1999/2000 when the economy grew 3.0 percent. The recent slump in growth was due to the shut down of the economy – locally and internationally, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

"Expectations that the economy would return to pre-pandemic growth levels were thwarted by the war In Ukraine, which has slowed efforts to resuscitate supply chains still reeling from the covid lockdown...

As a result commodity prices – wheat and other grains, which Ukraine is major global supplier, jumped as did global oil prices, which rose to $120 a barrel in February with the start of the Ukraine war but has since fallen back to about $90 at the beginning of November.

As if that is not enough, western economies have been beating off inflation pressures, a hangover from the huge fiscal expansion prompted by the Covid-19 lockdown. In the US inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June the highest in more than 40 years.

 The US and Europe had various program to alleviate the suffering of their people during the pandemic, including in some cases, printing money to pay a monthly allowance. Those economies are now fighting to keep the ensuing inflation under control.

Other western economies have followed the US Federal Reserve, who have raised the key lending rate to four percent in November from below one percent at the beginning of 2022.

In Uganda this has had the knock effect of increasing the dollar rate. The dollar begun the year under sh3,600 almost touching sh4,000 in August, before falling back to about Sh3,750 ta the time of writing this.

By increasing the Federal Reserve rate, has seen a flight of capital back to the US to take advantage of the higher rate. As a result the US dollar has appreciated – attaining parity with the Euro for the first time in 20 years.

We have already felt the effects of the appreciation of the dollar with fuel pump prices crossing over the sh5,000 a liter mark before bursting through sh6,000 a liter mark all in August.

The jump in fuel prices has driven inflation up to 10.7 percent in October, the highest it has been since July 2012, before easing off to close the year at 10.2 percent.

On one hand the need to keep this imported inflation down while on the other keeping lending rates down to allow the economy recover, are almost mutually exclusive efforts.

"To head off the inflation Bank of Uganda has raised the Central Bank Rate (CBR) used to price bank loans to 10 percent from 6.5 percent at the beginning of the year. This has had the knock-on effect of the banks raising their lending rates....

In trying to restrict money in circulation -- the classical way to fight inflation, the central bank has with the same stroke, made borrowing for businesses more expensive putting the brakes on economic recovery.

While Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) reported record collections in the first quarter of the 2022/23 financial year, government has been doing its part not to fan the inflationary fire by cutting back on expenditure, which while it may have helped in slowing down price increases has depressed business activity.

The tax man announced that they had exceeded their target in the first three months of the 2022/23, collecting sh5.4 trillion against a target of sh5.1 trillion.  These collections were 5.6 percent higher than the same time in the previous year.

In the first quarter government released sh8trilion less than the sh12trillion earmarked for the first quarter.

It is against this rather bleak background of rising inflation, reduced government spending and higher lending rates that the economy enters 2023.

While the Bank of Uganda thinks the economy will grow by between five and six percent in 2023 they warn that,

“The risks to the growth outlook are tilted to the downside emanating from the emergence of global recession and the associated increase in the global economic uncertainty, escalation of geopolitical conflicts and the negative spill overs from the reform and higher than projected inflation. Other downside risks are a further decline in consumer and business confidence and heightened exchange rate volatility,” the central bank said in its latest “State of the Economy Report” released in September....

Their reason for higher economic growth in 2023 than last year is the step up of private and public investment in the oil & gas sector.

In February 2022 the Financial Investment Decision (FID) was reached which paved the way for the development of the 1400km oil pipeline from western Uganda to the Tanzanian port of Tanga. It is expected that until 2025, when the first oil is seen, about $20b will be invested in developments in the sector.

These new investments may lift the shilling, dampening imported inflation, allowing the central bank to loosen its monetary policy and government to increase spending.

But clearly it is not business as usual, as borrowing rates are rising around the global and it is not unreasonable to expect they will adversely affect investment plans in the Oil & gas sector.

The US Federal reserve said in November after its latest rate hike that it was premature to expect them to slow down on their rate hikes. Several more rate hikes into 2023 would increase depreciation pressures of the shilling and stretch out the central bank’s fight to bring inflation under control further into the year.

The central bank writing in September projected that inflation would peak before Easter in 2023 but this was before inflation hit double digits in October. The new reality means they will have to rethink their projections.

"Favourable, weather may put a damper on inflationary pressures as food production may not be badly affected. But there has to be a proviso on this, if drought conditions continue in Kenya and the horn of Africa our farmers may be forced to fill the gap pushing prices up and fueling further inflation....

Kenya has suffered four consecutive years of below average rainfall affecting harvests and affecting about 18 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia according to the World Food Programme (WFP). It is so bad that Kenya’s wildlife authority reported in November that hundreds of elephants, wild beats and zebras had fallen victim to the adverse weather pattern.

For the man on the street this means that further belt tightening will be necessary in the new year. Government’s continued holding back on spending may very well spell doom for some companies, while the BOU’s continued tightening of money supply will mean borrowing rates will continue to climb.

 

OUT WITH THE OLD AND IN WITH THE NEW

My friend is practically dancing in to the new year. In 2022 he had a eureka moment, which led him to track his financial progress.

My friend, lets call him Jack, had heard it all before, “What you focus on expands” , “You cannot manage what you do not track” etc etc. In fact he was guilty of giving other people advise on how to track their finances.

Jack in the evening of his working life, at the beginning of the year wondered what he had to show for all his “hard” work.

So, he put pen to paper and drew up a balance sheet of his life. At first it went beyond his finances, but the state of his finances stood out, among all the other things he was tracking. The others were his physical, mental and spiritual progress.

In the “Millionaire next door” authors Thomas Stanley and William Danko recommend a standard to determine whether you are doing well in how much you keep of what you earn – your wealth. Their formula – your net worth (assets – liabilities) should be more than your annual gross income multiplied by your age divide by ten, their measure of whether you have been an efficient accumulator of wealth or not...

Say you are 50 and have an annual income of sh100m you should have a net worth of 50 X 100/10 or sh500m. Your net worth is the sum of all you own, assets, minus what you owe, liabilities. So, if all Jack’s assets – house and other properties come to sh500m what he should owe no one anything. Of course, if he owes the bank some money it means his assets must be more than sh500m to qualify as doing well.

While at the beginning of the year Jack was comfortably over the mark – he had a net worth of just under sh800m, it was too soon to celebrate.

His salary constituted his major income and his assets were bringing in barely half of his annual income, so his assignment was to find ways to make his assets sweat more. This was the eye opener for him. That cut off from his job he wouldn’t get though half the year at his current lifestyle, despite a healthy net worth

He had always understood what asset rich and cash poor meant, but seeing himself as such drove the point home much better.

All along he had been walking around thinking he was successful but the reality on paper showed him he was a paycheck away from financial disaster.

Starting in the new year he started tracking his income and expenses, assets and liabilities and particularly trying to figure out how to earn from his assets and in he event he acquired more whether they made him money or not. He did this on a monthly basis.

His income from assets has not moved much but there has been an almost total shift in his mind set. He now has as his phone screen saver the saying “The goal is to be rich not to look rich” He has learnt that wealth is not loud. That the movements in his personal balance sheet will take a long time to be recognized by the general public.

"He has debunked the idea that you need to eat the sweat of your brow, that when you make money it is time to blow it. That was his previous mindset...

That, money is not for eating but for making more money. While he did not agree with that at the beginning of the year he has come around to that way of thinking more and more as the year comes to a close.

On the surface of it, it sounds like a miserly way to live, but he has since discovered that if he earns a thousand shillings and recommits sh700 to reinvestment and eats the rest his consumption is still sh300 more than it was the day before.

It doesn’t sound like much but if he maintains the discipline he will be eating sh3,000, the sh30,000, then sh300,000, then sh3m…. you get the drift. But before he can eat more he has to invest more.

By watching his numbers every month is much better able to make financial decisions than previously when he was guessing. He now knows how will allocate every shilling he gest to him the income from his assets rising throughout the year.

He now knows better, and wonders why he did not know this years ago. But he did, it was just not his time to appreciate it.

In the new year let us be like Jack lets track down our balance sheet, but more importantly how much money we are getting from our assets.

Merry Chirstmas and Happy New Year.

 

 

 

 

BEST OF THE BEST FARMERS AND THE RIPPLE EFFECT ON UGANDA

A week or so the New Vision celebrated the best of the best farmers from 2014 to 2018 Best Farmer competitions.

 Since 2014 New Vision has been profiling farmers who qualify to compete to determine who is the best.  The winners in addition to getting help to improve their farms, are flown to the Netherlands to learn from farmers. Another major sponsor of the event is dfcu bank.

"A better country than the Netherlands to use as an example, it would be hard to find. The Netherlands is second only to the US in terms of agricultural exports, in 2019 recording

€94.5b (sh366trillion), it accounts for a third of world chill, lettuce and cucumber trade and a fifteenth of apple production. Uganda’s agricultural exports in 2021 came in at about $5b(sh18.3trillion).

They produce four million cows, 13 million pigs and 104 million chicken annually. And as if that is not enough they have 24,000 acres or an area half the size of Kampala, under greenhouses.

This made all the more amazing when you realise that the Netherlands occupies about 42,000 km², a sixth of the area of Uganda.

Interestingly they have managed this high agricultural productivity while reducing water usage by 90 percent and ferterliser use just as dramatically over the years.

Just by looking at the numbers one can tell that the Dutch farmer has attained a level of efficiency and productivity, we can only dream of in Uganda, with our better weather, more arable land and double annual seasons.

One local ranch owner with a herd in the hundreds and lands stretching over a few square miles, on return from Netherlands years ago, concluded that we were joking in Uganda. He was put to shame by a farmer he visited who with a fraction of his herd and situated on barely 10 acres of land was producing more milk than he, many times over, with only he and his son as the permanent workers on the farm.

So, one of the tests of the best of the best farmers is whether they had improved their farming practice after their return from the Netherlands.

All the best farmers have returned from the Netherlands with the expanded outlook, improved their farming methods and increased their productivity.

Since 2014 the Dutch embassy and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines have sponsored the travel of 58 farmers, a motley crew that represent every region of the country. The best farmers have not only improved their farms but have proved useful resource for their communities. Many of them set up training institutions to transmit their knowledge...

It is not a stretch of imagination to think that if each of the farmers influenced 100 other that is 5800 farmers and if each of these influenced another ten and then … you get the drift.

There is a difference between politicians urging us to turn to agriculture or extension workers directing us what to do, but when we see one of our own working under in our context working and succeeding it is a higher level of learning.

And if the New Vision can keep facilitating the travel of our best farmers to the Netherlands the rural landscape can very well be transformed in our lifetime.

"While industrialization is what we aspire to, most countries transformed by first ensuring that they produced food surpluses. This did two things it ensured food security, which meant they reduced on their use of vital foreign exchange to import food and secondly, the surpluses beyond exporting them formed the basis of their agro-industries.... 

One of the things they learnt in the Netherlands is how to add value to their products and many of the best farmers now have cottage industries, processing their produce for use in their communities. Will be surprised when these same farmers become the backbone of our future agro-industrial base?

But the highlight of the event for me is when I sat with Flora Kakande of Pumpkin King. Her company grows and process pumpkin into a variety of products, but in addition is working to help farmers grow pumpkin, including refugees in western Uganda. Everything of the pumpkin is usable and have huge health benefits.

After hearing their story I wondered aloud why people like them do not make noise about what they do as the idlers who make more noise in begging ‘Gavumenti Etuyambe”

“But we are working when do we find time to make noise,” was her quick rejoinder.

MAKING SENSE OF THE BUSINESS OF SPORT

Last week former MP Odonga Otto lit up social media with claims that Uganda’s sports bodies, more specifically football governing body FUFA and the Uganda Olympic Committee (UOC) receive millions of dollars a year from the international parent bodies to support sport but that the sportsmen do not benefit.

The former MPs diatribe was prompted by the question “Why isn’t Uganda at the World Cup?”.

Interestingly movie streaming company, Netflix, released a docuseries “FIFA Uncovered” a damning expose of how football governing body is riddled with corruption.

All this was happening against the backdrop of one of the most exciting World Cup’s in recent memory.

I think the honorable Otto’s claims should be looked into, if only so our sportsmen can get the much-needed facilitation they sorely deserve. But that is a story for another day.

However, what piqued my interest this week was the release of Forbes annual list of highest paid sportspersons.

Its an exciting list, like all such lists go.

"At the top of the list was Argentine footballer, Lionel Messi who last year made $130m (sh480b) before tax on and off the pitch. Messi, 34, took a salary cut to join Paris St Germain from Barcelona but business partnerships with Adidas, Budweiser and PepsiCo more than made up for the shortfall and then some...

There were other household names in the world of sports on the list like basketball’s LeBron James ($121m), Stephen Curry($92.8m) and Kevin Durant($92.1m); Soccer’s Christian Ronaldo ($115m) and Neymar ($95m); now-retired Tennis player Roger Federer ($90.7m) and boxer Canelo Alvarez ($90m) among others.

Interestingly despite the recent global crisis, sportsmen’s earning have been seen a lot of inflation. A decade ago the highest paid athlete was boxer Floyd Mayweather who earned in ($85m) and Ronaldo was the only soccer player in the top ten.

A decade further back Tiger Woods was the top earning sportsman pulling in $69m that year. There was no soccer player in the top 10 that year. 

Clearly more and more money is being thrown at sport, are we seeing a corresponding jump locally?

Our sports associations are largely run by volunteer administrators, who while not getting a regular income (so we think), hang on to their positions like grim death. If you line them up they are not the most altruistic members of our society, so you have to wonder why they keep in office for so long. For the love of the game? Puleez!

That aside the explosion in incomes for athletes around the world is a reflection of the need for content to feed the media. Revenues from broadcast long outstripped matchday seat sales for premiership teams.

It makes sense, the more people watching a sport, the more people will pay to slap their logos on those athletes to gain top of mind awareness with the consuming public...

So that seems to be a logical place to start, how do we attract eyeballs to our sports? With internet and the falling price of data It is easier than ever before to do this.  A half decent smartphone positioned to film from a strategic place and live streaming on any number of social media would be a good start.

For people to consume your media product they need they need consistency and quality and then the numbers can be sold to corporate clients. Its not automatic that the numbers will flood to your uploads that is a function of awareness building and marketing.

The following that comes with that can then be leveraged for sponsorships. Increased revenues can then be used to beef up sportsmen welfare and improve existing infrastructure

I simplify of course but it is actually a linear logic.

The sports administrators will complain that this needs money anyway. True, but the administrators need to cross the table to the side of the corporate sponsors to see things from their perspective.

The man with the budget is looking to see how much bang he can get for his buck, the assurance that if he gives you money, he will be able to report more sales of his product or greater brand awareness. If you can show him that, it makes it that much easier to loosen the purse strings. Its sales 101, show me value and I show you the money...

The money man on the other side of the table want also to see organization, so that he is sure that at the minimum his money will be good use and better still there can be a long-term relationship built. So, our organisations need to get organized (ironic?) before they can get money. Is it in anyone’s interest to keep them disorganized?

By the time Ronaldo commands $55m in off field income, his agents can point to the more than 690 million social media followers around the world, as a guarantee of eyeballs on him. These are independently verifiable. And by the way Ronaldo has all these followers due somewhat to momentum – I am following Ronaldo because my friends are following him, but more because his followers came from a deliberate marketing effort. You try to get a thousand followers on social media and you will see how hard it is to raise numbers.

KAMPALA SHOULD LOOK BEYOND SOLAR LIGHTING

I am currently eyeballs deep into the book “Power Play” by Tim Higgins, a book about the building of electric car company, Tesla.

Tesla is the company responsible for vaulting South African-born Elon Musk to the top of the wealth rankings last year.

It is an amazing read for anyone interested in getting the unvarnished view about how to build anything – the discipline, the struggles and how often successful founders come to the edge of failure only to survive mostly on the strength of a lofty vision.

And it is also an interesting book about the issues surrounding the future of cars and their use as we know them.

One of the biggest challenges for rolling out the Tesla was that you needed charging points around the car routes, otherwise the market for the car will always be limited. It reminds me of a time when, if you wanted to make a journey say to Mbarara, you had to make sure you filled your tank at the start of the journey, because of lack of fuel stations along the way, which is not the case anymore.

A combination of private capital and government concessions have made it possible for Tesla to dot a lot of North America, Europe and urban China with their charging points.

Which brings me nicely to Kampala City.

Plans are afoot to install lighting on the streets of Kampala. This is long overdue given the hundreds of kilometers of paved roads that have been laid in the last decade or so.

The plan as I understand it, is that the lighting will be solar powered.

Before reading the Tesla book I might have been sold on the solar plan, but I have reason to rethink this given our current context and the future.

First off, we are going to have an embarrassing abundance of hydroelectric power within the next year with the long-awaited commissioning of the 600 MW Karuma dam. This is power will need consumers and street lighting will be a good place to start. We know of course that this will cost money to the City authorities but I am sure government would be amenable to some concessionary tariffs for streetlighting. Package it as a security issue and the argument will get a lot of traction.

But money will not be an issue if we repurposed these street lights to not only provide lighting. They can serve as the basic foundation for electric vehicle charging points, starting with electric motorcycles and eventually cars. These cannot be serviced by the solar panels that would be installed for lighting.

The beauty of it is that while solar power is green power, what better green power is there than hydroelectric power.

But looking into the more immediate future, plans are underway to introduce 5G and other communication technologies. 5G technologies will require small cells to be installed at regular intervals for the efficiency of the system to work and these will require power 24/7. It would make sense to design the new poles in such a way as to accommodate these new technologies, which the current solar lighting poles are not designed for. By using the streetlighting poles even services like location finding would be much better than they are today and make ecommerce all the more efficient.

"One of the challenges of Kampala is that we do not have common conduits for infrastructure. That is why every time one utility or another wants to lay their infrastructure they come and tear up our roads and compounds. This is expensive and inefficient.....

If KCCA thought beyond just streetlighting, they would help in alleviating this problem. The streetlighting grid can serve as a useful backbone on which all these other technologies can ride if it uses hydroelectric power and not the current limited solar powered solution.

In the world of finance there is also now a lot of green funding as the west tries to assuage its guilt for messing up the planet. So, funding this project if well packaged might be much less costly than anything else.

And the icing on the cake for KCCA, these applications – EV charging, 5G networks and whatever other uses are planned for the future, will be growing revenue streams for the city as we shift towards electric transport and use our phones more and more in our daily lives.

And for the citizens of Kampala reduced disturbances from workers tearing up our roads every other day to lay this or the other infrastructure.