TAPPING INTO FOREIGN CAPITAL FOR UGANDA’S BENEFIT

(This was initially posted online as a Twitter thread)

In 1962 when Uganda got independence the British left us with 1500 km of paved roads. Today 57 years later we have just crossed the 5000 km mark. Why should we care?

"Using population as an indicator in 1962 Uganda population was seven million and today we are 40 million. If population is up fivefold shouldn’t the road network have followed suit? We should have at least 7500 km of paved road by now...

Keep in mind that the British did the bare minimum, creating infrastructure to extract raw materials and service their own needs so even the 1500 km they left us was well below our requirements.

But let us stick with the 7500 km. To bring is to this level we would need at least $2.5b at $1m per km of road laid. Using current exchange rate that would be sh9.3trillion or about a quarter of our planned budget for 2019/20. The proposed 2019/20 budget is for sh40trillion.

Last year's budget for the works & transport ministry was sh4.7trillion, which of course didn't all go to roads. I think roads got about sh3trillion of that figure. So if we were to bridge the gap it would take about four years at the current rate of funding.

The challenge is that in three years we will be 44million going by our population growth rate of 3.3 percent, so the 7500 km will still not have brought us at par with our Independence day levels.

But an average middle income economy has five times as much road as we do, measured by km per sq. km of the nation’s surface area. Our figure is about 16 km per sq km versus 88 km per sq km for an average middle income nation.

This means that we need at least 25,000 km of paved road to compete with an average middle income economy, an additional 20,000 km of road or about an additional $20b to finance this. Uganda’s GDP is $25b.

Maybe we should just go slowly, do what we can now and somehow things will sort themselves out?

There are two problems with this. One, we are already behind schedule and two, the population of Uganda is not going to stop growing.
to let us catch up, in fact it is the roads and the economic activity they will throw off that will slow Uganda population growth.

"Also the reason we are not creating jobs as fast as we should, is because we have deficits in everything from roads to power generation to human resource capacities, which all have to be addressed. Ideally simultaneously...

The question is where will the funds to bridge all these deficits come from?

URA is expected to collect sh20trillion or $5.4b and government will borrow another $3b locally, which falls far short of our requirements.

There is much scope for mobilising local resources -- our tax to GDP ratio is around 14 percent but should be above 16 pct; our savings to GDP ratio is just as dismal.

But in the meantime what do we do?

Some estimates I have seen show that there is at least $135trillion of investable capital sloshing around the world today looking for a return.

The question is how do we position ourselves to tap into these funds, create a funnel so to speak and direct them our way?

By adopting a liberal economy we have already done some of the heavy lifting. More still has to be done especially in shifting mind sets to recognise foreign capital, if understood well and can be used as a tool for change. The operative word is understood.

And the rules aren't any different from those needed to attract local capital, only maybe that foreign capital's returns are denominated in hard currency, whose movement we need to understand as well to leverage for our own benefit.

And we need not reinvent the wheel ... South East Asia, post-World War II Europe and even China has done it ... why cant we?

.... TO BE CONTINUED

THE GOOD, BAD & UGLY OF PRIVATISATION

My column last week “We were right to privatize UCB,” threw up a lot of comment. Some of it illuminating but a lot of it based on rumour, urban myth and downright ignorance.

When the government set out to privatize state enterprises in the 1990s as a way to unlock their assets and stimulate the economy, it came up against loud, even shrill opposition. I learnt last week that opposition is still alive and kicking – despite the evidence to the contrary.

The critics argued that the government was in effect selling the family silver – never mind all of them were hemorrhaging money that would be more profitably used funding health, education and infrastructure rehabilitation; that foreigners would take over the economy – never mind that the economy was in shambles and teetering on the brink of bankruptcy; and that it would lead to a lot of job losses and social upheaval – never mind that most workers in these companies were not even being paid a living wage and many did no work to speak of.

"The critics were right to be worried about job losses, but those same companies have employed multiples more people than the old shells ever employed; The critics were right that foreign capital would dominate the economic landscape, but we are much better for it with improved goods and services, jobs and ever increasing revenues; the critics were wrong to rail against selling of the badly tarnished family silver, which were a drain on the treasury and disincentive to competition...

The benefits of the privatization in resuscitating these companies quickly, unlocking the value of their assets and jumpstarting the economy are hard to argue against once the facts are in your possession.

As a young reporter I covered the privatization process and below are some of the good, bad and ugly of the process, which if events had gone another way it is most likely we would be talking a very different language today.

THE GOOD: TORORO CEMENT

Previously the Uganda Cement Industries (UCI) the company whose plant had long ground to a halt was privatized in 1995. The value, to the investors who changed its name to Tororo Cement Ltd, was the lime deposits that came with the factory. The factory’s equipment had not only broken down, but was obsolete and a complete overhaul of the factory was required.

"The case officer in charge of the deal later said that the factory was so bad that he was relieved to be handing over the keys with one hand and embarrassed to be asking for a check in the other. He said he felt like a con man, that Uganda should have been paying these investors to take the companies off their hands rather than the other way around...

He could not leave the premises fast enough after the transaction was done.

But today Tororo Cement is the leading manufacturer of the building material and have completed an expansion of their plant that allows them to produce three million tons of cement annually. It has been at the center of the real estate boom of the last few years and now exports to the region as well.

THE BAD: Coffee Marketting Board (CMB)

This was one of the most difficult attempts at privatization. Around 1997 government begun the process of the divesting 49 percent of CMB. The company which until a few years prior, had monopolized the marketing of Uganda’s coffee.

Its share of the bean’s export trade had collapsed to less than 10 percent at the time, but the people at the privatization unit were touting the four million bag a year coffee roasting plant as the key asset for investors to look at, as well the land on which it stood in Bugolobi.

After the first round of bids Swiss coffee trading firm Sucafina was the highest bidder of four, with an offer of $8m. Unfortunatley the company had assets then with a book value of about $40m. MPs at the time thought Sucafina were indulging in daylight robbery and ordered the PU to cancel the process and retender the sale.

"At the second round of asking there was only one bidder left, Sucafina and this time they offered $4m, effectively giving us the finger. Needless to say parliament threw this one out, the company was boarded up and that was that. We effectively cut off our nose to spite our face.

THE UGLY: UGANDA AIRLINES

By the time Uganda Airlines came up for sale it was sucking sh10b (about $5.5m at the time) a month out of the treasury, flew one Boeing 737 (not the max) on a solitary route, the Entebbe-Nairobi route and its only claim to fame was it would keep time.

South Africa Airways (SAA) was the leading bidder and their proposal was to turn Entebbe into a regional hub, with flights flying out across the continent and beyond. The process was a start-stop-start again affair over almost five years. Rumours of some powerful types subverting the deal to pave the way for their own airline were whispered. Objections to handing over the routes to SAA, with some muttering about racism under their breaths, seem to have scuttled the deal in the end.

"Eventually President Yoweri Museveni shut down the airline arguing he couldn’t keep shoveling sh10b a month down the Uganda Airlines black hole and that we would be just fine without a national airline. We would not die. That was in 2002...

There were many more eventful privatisations – successful and failed. In some instances they even against good economic sense palmed off some companies to Ugandans, I can't think of one that is productive. There were some companies for which the industry economics were so bad that they failed to rise again and folded anyway.

I shudder to think what would have happened if those companies stayed in government hands. How much good money would have gone chasing bad money down those black holes, all because we wanted to hang on to the family silver.

WHY KENYA, UGANDA RELATIONS ARE KEY TO EAC

Last week President Museveni paid a state visit to Kenya on the invitation of his counterpart Uhuru Kenyatta.

It made sense that Museveni would overfly the capital Nairobi to start the visit in the Mombasa, the de facto gate way to the region. According to port authorities in 2017 Uganda accounted for almost a quarter of all trade through the port. Seven million tons out of a total of 30.35 tons of cargo that pass through Mombasa were registered to Uganda.

Museveni eventually went to Nairobi, riding on the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) first leg.

During the visit a series of agreements to allow greater access of Ugandan – sugar, dairy and poultry products and Kenyan goods – beef in the respective countries were signed off. The intention to lease 

Uganda land to build a dry port in Naivasha, one of the terminal’s of the SGR was also announced.

"Before Tanzania came under British mandate after the First World War it was just present day Kenya and Uganda, stitched together by the Uganda Railway, which had landed in Kisumu in 1901. A steamer service led to the construction of an 11 km line from Port Bell to Kampala. The line via Malaba to Kampala was completed in 1931.

The real core of the east African community is Uganda and Kenya, where the trade figures between the two countries is concrete evidence of their symbiosis.

In 2017 trade between the two countries stood at more than a billion dollars. A similar figure for trade between Kenya and Tanzania is about $500m.

It is clear that our relation is not based on sentimentality. Even during the 1970s when diplomatic relations were at their lowest, trade continue along the common border and over Lake Victoria, that once relations normalized was easily reformalised in the 1980s.

If there is one country that has provided sustainable economic benefit to Uganda it has to be Kenya. Their demand for food alone is slowly transforming our agriculture from the limbo of subsistence it has been stuck in to more commercial enterprise.

We have had a few moments of madness in the past.

In 1976 Idi Amin decided it might be a good idea to revisit an old map of the region which had the Ugandan border starting at the Kenyan Rift Valley.  Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta – father of the current president, massed his troops on our common border and swore, “Wacha ajaribu, atatutambua!” (Let him try and he will find out who we are).

A second time was at the end of 1987 when there was shoot out at the Busia border, that led to a border shut down for a few weeks. Both countries traded accusations with Uganda accusing Kenya of habouring anti-government rebels and Kenya claiming its neighbours troops had crossed onto their side.

Speculation mostly unproven, was that Kenyan commercial interests were unimpressed about noises from Kampala pushing for a resuscitation of our industrial capacity so as to wean ourselves away from Kenya’s manufacturers. Kisumu’s industry built up during the 1970s was targeted at supplying Uganda.

In both instances sanity prevailed quickly because there were real economic interests at stake beyond brotherly love.

"It has been proven time and time again, that trade relations are the more sustainable glue that holds communities together and prevent wars...

The Europeans put a stop to centuries of fratricidal conflict after the second world war, with the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, the precursor to the current European Union, which has allowed the free movement of goods, service and people.

This has had the effect of creating specialisations, with countries doing away with what they cannot produce competitively, choosing to import what they don’t produce and export their surpluses. This interdependence means war or even diplomatic rows have little fuel to sustain them.

The opening up of our markets will come with some short term pain as some industries are outcompeted by more efficient ones across the border, as is already happening. But as suggested above it will sharpen our businessmen’s sense of what they can produce competitively, so that they specialize, scale up their operations and gear up to supply our neighbour’s $75b economy’s needs.

There are those who will argue that our industries will need protection as they are still in their infancy, they will say that is how industries elsewhere survived. What they do not talk about is the opportunity cost in effort, resources – human and financial, that will be expended in ensuring that these uncompetitive industries stay afloat.

"If there are public funds to be spent they will be best employed helping uncompetitive companies retool or wind up, than subsidizing them to stay afloat, because as we have discovered they can’t seem to wean themselves off the subsidies once they have started to enjoy them...

The people of the two countries will be the eventual winners working for competitive sustainable companies and enjoying better goods and service in return.

POWER GENERATION THE CHALLENGE OF OUR TIME

Two things struck me while deep inside the cavernous bowels of the 600MW Karuma power dam on a recent visit to then northern Uganda facility.

One, that it is an amazing feat of engineering.

Basically some of the River Nile’s waters will be diverted underground, a 70 meter drop at the bottom of which it will turn six turbines and finally be ejected about 8 km to rejoin the mighty river on its journey north.

"And just to get a sense of the extent of the work already done, in preparation for the dam enough rock to fill 15 Namboole stadiums was evacuated to make way for the $2.2b project. The Karuma power dam is only one of two such dams on the continent, with the second being the Ruacana power station in Namibia.

My second realisation was that considering the size of Karuma, which will be the biggest power project in the country when commissioned at the end of 2019, we have a long way to go to meet the stated target of 17,000 MW generation capacity in the next ten years.

With only 20 percent of Ugandans connected to the grid, it is clear there is a lot of suppressed demand locally. This is before you consider, the potential uses in the mining, agro-processing and other industries or the unserved external markets of South Sudan and Eastern Congo and those looking to bridge their own capacity gaps in northern Tanzania, Rwanda and Western Kenya.

The real challenge for this country is how to finance these projects.

Given the average cost of $3m per MW according to the recent large hydro-power projects it will cost $51b or twice the current size of the Uganda economy to finance this ambition. Of course all the power will not be generated by tapping our hydro-electric power generation capacity, at last count 4000MW along the Nile alone.

Internally with a tax to GDP revenue of 14 percent and savings to GDP of 15 percent our scope for local mobilisation of the resources needed to rather limited. On the up side it also means there is also a lot of leeway to collect more revenue or to encourage more savings by the citizens.

However even with oil revenues, this unlikely to be managed fast enough.

So we are going to have to rely on loans and private capital to meet our obligations.

It has to be said that we had it relatively easy with the financing for the Karuma and 183 MW Isimba dam as we were dealing with one financier.

With a past project the 250 MW Bujagali dam there were multiple financiers led by the World Bank’s private sector lending arm the International Finance Corporation (IFC).   Multiple financiers is standard practice for big projects, as the lenders seek to mitigate the risk by sharing the burden with other partners. Despite the best efforts of the government and the project promoters, the financing was still pricey. As a result government has had to help refinance the project to ensure a lower tarrif.

The point is, the way to get cheaper money is to lower the perceived risks of such projects.

"In working out risk of a project financier’s look for four broad parameters does the project resonate with their mission, is the project viable, can it support the desired return and finally is the management credible and competent....

This last part is important in view of the government’s plans to recreate the old Uganda Electricity Board (UEB) by merging the distribution, transmission and generation companies as part of a wider restructuring of the government departments, agencies and commissions.

The restructuring being sold as money saving initiative may in fact cost the government more in lost specialisation.

For instance Umeme, the company that runs the distribution concession has done in the last 13 years of its concession what its predecessor UEB could not do in almost 50 years of operation. It has revamped and expanded the distribution grid, it has added a million consumers to the grid from the 280,000 they found in place, it collecting almost all the money due to its from clients and has reduced losses on the grid significantly.

They have been able to achieve this because they have specialised distribution of power which is different from transmission and generation.

This improved competence has opened them up to external financing and allowed them to invest heavily about $600m since the concession opened in 2005.

Umeme in its own right, is going out into the open market to tap the markets for cash to finance its capital expenditures and this is not by mistake. Over the last decade or so they have developed verifiable competence in what they do and their ability to do it profitably, year after year and as a result they tick the aforementioned boxes of what financiers are looking for in potential clients.

Using this as an example, this why a return to the old UEB would be a bad idea. While UEGCL is now building capacity to build and manage power generation facilities, subsuming them in amorphous structure would not only throw away the benefit of specialisation but will short circuit an ongoing process of creating capacity for it to stand on its own and drive our ambitious power generation targets.

WE WERE RIGHT TO PRIVATISE UGANDA COMMERCIAL BANK

Last week Stanbic released their annual results which were really more of the same.

Revenues were up to sh661b from 636b in 2017. Profits followed suit growing 7.5 percent to sh215b in 2018 from sh200b in the previous year.

But the number which caught my eye was the income tax expense. These leapt 25 percent to sh81.5b from sh65.2b in 2017.

The Sh81.5b check to the treasury would be cause for celebration in itself but if we looked further it has much greater significance.

Using the US dollar sell rate as reported in the Friday New Vision of sh3,730, Stanbic’s tax bill amounted to about $21.9m.

In 2002 Stanbic Bank bought the Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB) for about $20m!

"This means Stanbic is now making more money, many times over the buying price and after all expenses are deducted, the net is then taxed and this year is about equal to what they paid for the whole bank 17 years ago!...

Let that sink in for a bit.

That assuming continued profitability from the bank and relatively stable shilling we can expect the Stanbic Bank to pay us annually from here on end, the equivalent of the price they paid for UCB those many years ago.

And I am sure UCB successor is not the only one ringing the tills at the treasury. The same can be said for the breweries, the hotels, Umeme and any number of enterprises that prior to their off-loading were dead weight on the government budget but are now more than carrying their weight.

A perusal of the press at the time showed that many of the fears people had of flogging off UCB were unfounded.

A Joshua Musoke writing in the New Vision of August 31, 2001 was concerned that selling the bank to a foreign bank would leave the small saver in trouble.

“What will happen to the thousands of civil servants and small time savers if UCB is sold to a private bank … whose opening and minimum account balances are beyond the reach of many Ugandans particularly in the countryside.”

The bank can speak for itself, but going by the way deposits have grown since Musoke put pen to paper that fear didn’t hold up. In addition, since then we have had no minimum balance accounts introduced across the industry.

Another reader who preferred to remain anonymous argued that since public confidence had returned to the bank, there was sh100b in new deposits that came from depositors fleeing other collapsing banks, and since it had become profitable again — it made sh19b in its final year, though he acknowledged this was due to the bank’s portfolio overweighed towards government securities, there was no need to privatize.

But for the bank to fufill its full potential to Ugandans it needed to make its money lending to the private sector, and not to the government, the core of its business. If they had maintained that stand to date they would have helped mightily in keeping inflation down without lending much to the private sector.

From near zero lending to the private sector in its final year of existence, in 2018 Stanbic’s loan book stood at sh2.5trillion or about $670m!

There is a lot wrong with our financial sector, not least of all that there is little to no support for startup enterprises and the small businesses are treated as inconveniences to be suffered rather than supported.

But that is a function of structural issues and a lack of entrepreneurs with the muscle to fill in those gaps.

"The privatization process was a response to the reality that state enterprises were proving a black hole for government funds, were not producing and causing a lock jam in the economy, as most of them our monopolies....

With it came better management practices and new money that could unlock the assets. In UCB at the time of its sale in its various branches it had a multitude of computer platforms many of which did not only not to talk to each other but were invisible to each other. So where at its peak the bank held more than half the industry’s deposits they were of little use as they could not flow efficiently from places of surplus to places where they were needed.

But the naysayers will not go away. They argue that by handing over the bank to foreign capital rather than hold on to it, we have abrogated our duty to direct the economy through the strategic allotment of funds.

And they could be right. But at the time it was a choice between resuscitating the dinosaur, empowering to stimulate the economy or hold on to it content to let it sleep so it does little damage to its surroundings, when foreign owned banks continue to do what banks are supposed to do anyway.

Private lenders are not averse to supporting government programs – the South East Asians have proved that for the last several decades. Its juts that it will take more intelligence than having a “supporter” seating in the CEO’s chair and receiving chits all day, because truth be told that’s what many people think government intervention should look like.

"Congratulations are in order to Stanbic but they are just the poster boy of a farsighted policy that has helped unlock some of the potential of this country, that is yet to reach its full potential in everything from beverages to manufacturing; hospitality to transport....

BAT WIN IN EA COURT FOR ALL OF US

On Tuesday this week British American Tobacco Uganda (BAT) won a landmark case in the East Africa Court of Justice (EACJ) where they challenged the Uganda’s discriminative excise duty levy on goods manufactured outside Uganda but in the Community.

Some background will serve this story well.

In 2013 BAT wound up its cigarette manufacturing in Uganda, they had a plant in jinja. They then started importing cigarettes for distribution in Uganda from Kenya. In 2017 there was an amendment to the Excise Duty Act which required that Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) charged imported cigarettes more than the ones produced locally.

BAT challenged this successfully in a judgement that not only saw BAT receive a sh325m refund on taxes they had already paid, but also declared null and void any provisions in the law that are contrary to the EAC laws.

Kiryowa Kiwanuka of K & K Advocates, which represented BAT, said after the ruling, that the net effect of this is to make the EAC one country for tax purposes.

It was his opinion that manufacturers around the region will be forced to compete on the cost of production and distribution and not on tax levels.

Clearly this is an earth shaking precedent we probably missed because we were focused on imaginary assassins this week.

"It is a double edged sword.

On the one hand one can now expect that our products that were suffering arbitrary barriers to entry in the EAC like sugar and milk, that will be a thing of the past.

On the other hand there are products we are producing that face direct competition from companies in other member countries, some of which can be landed in Uganda cheaper than we produce them here...

With a level playing field they may very have to become more efficient or fold altogether.

So one can expect in the region there will be companies very in support of the new ruling --- the exporters and other companies for whom the new wave of imports will pose serious existential threats.

The principle of the common market is that there will be free movement of goods, services and people through the region. The common market will then be attractive for investors to make a bet on.

The community has a population of about 170 million at last count, of whom 34 million are urban dwellers.  These are just numbers unless the requisite infrastructure and enabling legislation is in place to allow for it to be one market.

The challenge then for individual countries would be their ability to attract the investors to their shores. If you are a country which is irredeemably corrupt, have port hole ridden roads and the quality of your workforce is imbecilic you will fare badly against your better endowed members, in terms of attracting investors.

However, the theorists argue that the improvement’s in living standards of the people from the increased trade will more than offset the loss of investment.

So for example if Uganda becomes the hub of grain production and production in the region, because it can produce at much lower cost that its neighbours, investors in the sector in Kenya and Tanzania will either have to shut down or relocate their capacity to Uganda. There will be job losses in Kenya and Tanzania but there will be some relief at the cheaper products on the shelf.

The workers though might find themselves in the absorbed in the soda ash industry. Soda ash – sodium carbonate, is only mined in southern Kenya, and is a compound in many industrial uses like dyes, ferterlisers and synthetic detergents. The Kenyan indsutry will have to ramp up production to serve all of the region and any other such operations elsewhere in the region would have to shut down.

One big advantage that would come with a full operation of the open market would be that individual countries would be forced to stick to their competitive advantages. There is no point why anyone else in the region should be trying to produce matooke other than Uganda for instance. This specialization will encourage efficiencies that can only make us stronger as a region.

"And that is why too the freedom of movement of goods and services has to go hand in hand with the ease of movement of people, because if I have just been laid off from a steel making plant in Uganda I should be able to relocate to Kenya to work in their plants...

Some people may think it unfortunate that its BAT that won the case, but the benefits of the ruling are not restricted to them. We can all benefit.

WE HAVE COME A LONG WAY

On March 19^th the New Vision in commemoration of its 33^rd birthday reproduced the inaugural edition.

The grainy, black and white production launched a multimedia empire that now straddles the industry like a colossus.

In its first year the it had revenues of sh9.13m and made a loss of sh9m. The company has seen better years but last year it registered revenues of sh90.6b and a profit of sh2.3b.

The anecdotes of the companies’ first days would leave jaws on the floor with amazement at how difficult it was to put out the eight-page first edition.

These days the presses not only turn out the 40-plus page New Vision but also the Luganda daily Luganda daily. On three other days Orumuri, Etop and Rupiny are published alongside the two dailies.

It would be interesting to go back in time to put the media house’s humble beginnings in context.

It was just under three months after the NRM had taken over power in January. Some people didn’t give the new government until the end of the year before it in turn would be turned out. There was still a sense of insecurity in the air. Days were kept short and the night life – clear, bitter and served out of a small glass, served as you sat on a rickety bench, was concentrated around people’s homes.

The New Vision’s whole print run was carried to town on the head of a single porter. The Taxis on Jinja road were an infrequent occurrence and the company did not have a vehicle to its name. And maybe couldn’t afford the fair for the porter?

The newspaper’s sh300 cover price could not have stayed that way for long with inflation raging at 240 percent, meaning prices were doubling every three months.

The paper sold a paltry 17,000 copies all year, that is less than the daily sales of the New Vision or Bukedde today.

But then again who was buying?

The population was a third of its current size. GDP was a paltry $3.9b. Today GDP stands at about $25b.

Not unlike today the buying public was concentrated around Kampala. The difference is that then there were no readers outside Kampala. Copies of the newspaper that would one day boast was the leading daily trickled up country along the bus and taxi routes, not always whole, often as wrapping for everything from meat to underclothing...

Besides it was near impossible to have national coverage of the newspaper as it was a nightmare getting around on the 1,500km of roads, a number that was unchanged since 1971. They were so badly riddled with the portholes that normal traffic rules did not apply as drivers weaved left and right to choose the more benign porthole that their car could tolerate.

As if the distribution issues weren’t a challenge almost half the economy was operating in the non-monetary economy, basically that people were battering goods and services rather than using cash for payment. It is unlikely though that the New Vision would accept eggs in exchange for a copy – eggs don’t lend themselves to the rules of double entry.  I wonder how much an egg cost?

It was nice to see the commissioning of the 183 MW Isimba dam last week. With one stroke we turned on three times the amount of power that we were capable of generating in 1986. No surprise then that apart from the printers unable to read the Russian manuals for the presses, the frequent power outages were such that it took more than a week to produce the two sheet paper.

But then again electricity demands were not that high. The only need for power in the newsroom then was for the bulbs. The typewriters were all manual and even the tea was brewed in a tin kettle on a sigiri behind the printer. Oh yes. The presses run on power.

You know what they say about work expanding to fill the hours, the same can be said for appliances multiplying to take advantage of the new power generated. So now we have PCs, TVs, mobile phones, electric kettles, fridges and even the lighting – fluorescent tubes, are many multiples of the handful of dim bulbs that attempted to light the newsroom.

Of course their downsides to this growth of the New Vision in tandem with the economy. In 1986 the workers of the new vision lived in places like Mbuya, Kololo, Naguru and Ntinda. They needed to because they either walked or rode bicycles to worker.

There were no cars in the car park and the surrounding streets were so empty, it is not hard to imagine tumbleweed rolled down the street, helped along by the wind, unhindered by cars to break its progress. Now the company’s pool cars and staff have filled the car park and flowed out into the street, dominating Industrial Area’s first and third streets. Mostly second hand Japanese types. Maybe in another 30 years we will have brand new European sedans in their place.

As a result, the New Vision worker is no longer lean and dark from continuous exposure to the elements but soft and light from travelling while seated in their cars or from riding in the taxis or bodas to and from work.

We have come a long way at the New Vision and as a country and the good old days weren’t all that.