MTN RESULTS AND THE FUTURE OF TELECOMMS

South African telecom MTN last week released their 2019 results, with the Ugandan figures rebounding strongly from 2018, the envy of any CEO in this trying economic environment.

Revenues were up 22.9% to sh1.54trillion from sh1.248 trillion in 2018. EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) jumped 59% to sh725b from sh455b the previous year. Last year revenues managed a 4.4% growth form the previous year. This was amazing growth by any measure.

But all this paled in comparison to the growth in data revenues. That subscribers spent about 70% more on data services in 2019 than in 2018. To put this number in perspective it means that in under two years, data revenues will double again.  One can expect growth to continue strongly as barely 3.4 million or a quarter of MTN subscribers consume data services.

Those kind of growth numbers are an indication that the business in Uganda is still in its growth stages. This leap was facilitated by the increase in smart phone users who now account for one in five of MTN  13 million subscribers. And this is despite the alleged protest against the social media tax. In South Africa smart phone penetration stands at above 80%. 

But even more interesting was that revenues from fintech – a lot of which is mobile money, grew 25% to sh382b from sh304b in 2018. The previous fintech revenues grew 10.3%. Digital services also nearly doubled to sh437b last year from sh230b the previous year.

"Voice revenues are fast coming to a plateau growing a relatively slow 3.4% despite a 12.2% growth in subscribers and a high average usage per person....

The telecom operator, which is only just recovering from a tumultuous two years, in which its top managers were deported and the start-stop-start again negotiations to renew their licenses seemed to have drained the giant of its usual vibrancy, obviously still enjoys the confidence of its subscribers.

Last year MTN boss Wim Vanhellputte was deported before being reinstated as the company’s CEO. This was after the deportation of three other top managers – chief marketing officer Olivier Prentout, manager sales and distribution, Annie Tabura nd, Elsa Mussolini, the head of mobile money.

No official communication has gone out from government or MTN but the finance ministry it was reported, confirmed that the South African based firm had agreed to the $100m (sh380b) license fee demanded by government and that has delayed the renewal of their license which expired in October 2018.

"People familiar with the proceedings say it is hard to justify the $100m license fee, a suggestion by an overzealous official who has since left his office...

The previous figure, $58m, which MTN seemed to have settled on with the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) had far sighted provisions to ensure the sustainability of the industry.

It will be interesting to see what happens when rival Airtel’s license negotiations come up for mention when their current license runs out.

The mobile telephony industry is still relatively new and its explosive growth in the last two decades has not allowed regulators to catch their breath.

On the one hand do you allow them unfettered growth, with the hope that the ripple effect across the industry and economy will more than compensate for the perceived money left on the table? MTN paid $5m for its Second Network Operator license when it entered the market in 1998. Expectations were low at the time.

Or do regulators try to grab as much as they can at the beginning before the operators become ungovernable behemoths, hoping too that they don’t stymie the industry’s growth and innovation in the process? This is a real concern because falling behind on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is not something we should do knowingly.

The government seems to have gone for the latter.

That being said it’s a sector, with its crucial role in the fourth industrial revolution (4IR), is set to drive economies and the Uganda economy in particular in coming years.

MTN, serving as the industry bellwether we can see where the action is going to be.

Voice is going to totter along, the technologically challenged supporting that revenue stream. Industry experts had predicted years ago that one day it will be an add on to data services, being given away free. That day is fast approaching.

But in a country where 80% of the population is under 35, data services are going to catch up and far outpace voice revenues as this youthful population seek their information, education and entertainment online more and more. Especially as smartphones become less expensive and more widely available...

One outcome of the Corona Virus outbreak is that remote working will become more of a reality and very attractive to businessmen for whom it could mean major cost savings. The data needs for such a shift in working will be enormous.

Fintech too is going to continue growing at prodigious rates. Uganda is still far behind Kenya where mobile money is more a tool for carrying out transactions than money transfer. They have almost totally become a cashless society, their mobile phones doing all the buying and selling.

As an indicator of where the industry is going MTN’s results are a good indicator.

THE RICHEST MAN IN ZAIRE

Former Democratic Republic of Congo President Mobutu Sese Seko was said to have accumulated a massive fortune from plundering his mineral rich country’s coffers. He continued where the Belgians left off, expropriating billions of dollars while condemning his countrymen to a sub-human existence.

The way he blew his country’s fortune took on some very bizzare forms.

In Gbadolite his home town, he built an airport with a runway that could land the biggest jumbo jets. The story goes, he would drive out of home saying he was leaving for Kinshasa and head around the corner to the home of his mistress, who was the sister of his wife. She lived in the ministers’ village in Gbadolite.

After a reasonable time he would tell the pilot to take off for Kinshasa, calculating that his wife would know he had left Gbadolite. When he wanted to go back home he would call the pilot in Kinshasa and tell him to fly back to Gbadolite.

"Money was no obstacle for “the cock who left every chicken in his wake sated”....

Soon after his overthrow another urban legend grew out of the Congolese attempts to explain Mobutu. That he was not the richest man in Zaire, as it was called during his reign.

As the story goes when he wanted money from the central bank, he would give his personal assistant a chit, on it a request for say $10,000 from the central bank. The PA would add a zero to make it $100,000 and hand it over to the governor. The governor in turn would add another zero to make it a million dollars.

So when the money was withdrawn the governor pocketed $900,000, the PA $90,000 and Mobutu would get his $10,000.

This week the payout of $600,000 instead of the requested $60,000 for Ugandan students in Wuhan, the epicenter of the Corona Virus outbreak in China, reminded me of the Mobutu tale.

The government decided last month they would not evacuate our students in the blockaded Wuhan city, but would instead send them $61,800 to tide them over the period. Somewhere between the decision and wiring the money to our embassy in China $538,200 was added to the sum and we all exchanged knowing winks at this sleight of hand.

The finance ministry realizing the “error” wrote to China ordering the officials there to refund the extra money.

This episode was disturbing for many reasons but two particularly stand out for me.

The first was that knowing the processes of getting payment out of government it is not as if this money was pulled out of drawer and handed over. There is a paper or electronic trail that has to be satisfied for this money to be paid out. Several levels of authority would be needed. So even if there was a “slip of the pen” someone would have caught along the line. Or so we think...

For us mere mortals we can only conclude that many people were in on the deal, it was not a solitary figure sneaking around the corridors, working on his own. That scenario would be too scary to contemplate.

Secondly, that us the unsuspecting masses’ natural reaction was to assume someone or some people were trying to “eat”. That our confidence in our government is so low that we did not even give it the benefit of doubt. Isn’t that why government struggles to explain itself when it wants to move on an initiative, which in their wisdom they think is good for the country from vaccinations to pest control to building a hospital.

Trust makes progress easier and smoother. Mistrust causes friction, that costs time, energy and resources to overcome. Is it no wonder that beyond the slowness of government bureaucracy we can’t get anything done in a timely manner?..

But even more worrying given the Mobutu analogy is that these kind of shenanigans obviously happen all the time. The boldness to inflate a figure by a thousand percent can only come with long practice. It makes you wonder, who is the richest man in Uganda.

THE INTERESTING CASE OF ALIKO DANGOTE

Last week Nigerian conglomerate, The Dangote Group started testing their $2b fertilizer plant in Lagos.

The plant, with the capacity to churn out three million tons of fertilizer annually is the biggest in the world and will not only sate Nigeria’s demand but also leave a lot more over for export to the region and beyond.

The plant has powerful backward and forward linkages to the Nigerian oil and agriculture sectors .

The plant is part of a $15b complex that will include 650,000 barrels a day oil refinery and extensive pipeline infrastructure from the oil fields of the Niger Delta.

Nigeria, a nation with a $450b economy and a population of about 200 million can absorb such numbers.

"As if Aliko Dangote still needed to stamp his mark on history, this project will be testament to his penchant for thinking scale. Until the next project, of course....

His company has extensive interests in cement, sugar and flour in the process turning a trading company into the largest industrial concern in West Africa and on the continent.

In explaining his wealth the critics will point out that he had a head start in life. His great grandfather Alhassan Dantata was the richest man in West Africa at the time of his death in 1955. That was useful I am sure, but it takes a special kind of individual to build a multibillion-dollar empire, more so if he doesn’t start from scratch.

They say wealth is built in one generation and squandered by the third generation, Dangote has flipped that script.

To accumulate that kind of wealth requires two essential factors, a large economy, which Nigeria is and government support.

The complex mention above is situated in the Lekki Free Zone Corridor, situated on 60,000 hectares with ambitions to a modern industrial megacity. Its development is a collaboration between the Chinese and Nigerian governments.

By locating it in the free trade zone, the Dangote group projects benefit from numerous concessions, which some critics would thumb their noses at as subsidies to a man who does not need charity.

"The issues of subsidies to big business is an emotive issue wherever you look. If done properly can stimulate economic growth and development and if not, become an avenue for political patronage and crony capitalism...

Dangote employs 11,000 people across the breadth of his empire – mostly Nigerians. A drop in the ocean in relation to Nigeria’s joblessness figures but a commendable achievement in itself.

For government and business to work together there first has to be credible business entities.  We have seen it before. Attempts to seed or prop up some connected individuals have ended in tears – for the tax payer. If you are lacking in business acumen this inadequacy is magnified by money. The more money pumped in, the bigger the disaster...

Another necessary ingredient is that the government officials need to understand business beyond the theory of their high school text books. But also that the government has a well thought out strategy to intervene in businesses. A strategy robust enough to ensure positive results while flexible enough to be adjusted to whatever sector is in need of support.

In Uganda one gets the sense that concessions are dished out to individuals rather than to industries, their output, if any goes unmeasured and there is no framework for determining what is too much or when to stop supporting an enterprise.

Governments’ slap dash attempts at supporting the private sector then fall flat on their face and they do the next worst thing, government decides to go into business on its own.

The thinking being that they shouldn’t be enriching the private sector and that the government should have all the benefits accruing to them. The promoters of such schemes slide in justifications like job creation, foreign exchange saving and technology transfer to win over the gullible politicians.

The fallacy of this thinking soon show themselves in poor project design and white elephants. Needless to say disaster falls close behind but not before a few technocrats who managed to skim off the top on every procurement.

There are very valid concerns for supporting the private sector grow to create more jobs and provide more and more goods and services. A few of the supported cases can become spectacularly successful. Two things happen then, they get more and more support, you want to keep betting on the winners and very soon they become lightening rods for criticism and their success a hot political potato for the powers that be...

It’s funny how governments don’t suffer for throwing money down the black holes of state enterprise but when a supported business or industry succeeds all the detractors come crawling out of the wood work.

Dangote’s story is a fascinating one, which should be studied in greater detail by students of development and business.

CAN EVERY UGANDAN BE PRESIDENT?

A few years ago a long term leader of an organization stepped down from his perch. At the time of his departure he had been at the organization for coming to two decades, to the point that in the eyes of the public the organization was him and he was the organization.

There was an initial panic about the company’s prospects. The competitors even threw parties thinking they would now overhaul the market leader, seeing as the head of the snake had been loped off.

They say if you want God to laugh tell him your plans. As fate would have it his replacement was a total disaster, lacking in strategic thinking, operational competence and an atrocious judge of talent. That the competition failed to win any market share,  was an indictment on them.

But “the disaster’s” short tenure – Thank God for that, demystified the position, which people had long thought was customized for the original leader.

Is that what is happening in Uganda today?

"I was shocked to read that there are 24 people gunning to be CEO of Uganda at the next election...

Every Ugandan citizen of sound mind, appropriate qualifications and age has a right to be president of the country. And standing for the presidency should not be left to those who have a realistic chance of success. But that being said, is it possible that we can have 24 alternative views of how to run this little African nation?

Abraham Lincoln said if he was given six hours to chop down a tree he would spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.

I can count on my index finger the number of potential candidates who have been preparing to run for presidency in 2021. And I am not talking about over the last 12 months but over the last few decades at least. They have been actively involved in politics, their visibility is better than average and they have some credible believers in their cause.

Then there are others who clearly are trying to take the country’s ethos of Okuliira omukavuyo (smash and grab) a bit too far.

I am convinced these types have watched too many movies, where the underdog comes to a gunfight with a disposable knife, builds a groaning, cringing, broken pile out of the badies, with nary a scratch or bruise on his person. And the disposable knife too, still intact.

"What would be one’s motive of getting on the ballot when you have no chance of making an impression, which is not a crime, but not even making an effort to run a credible race?...

Can it be the money? Each presidential nominees is entitled to sh20m to aid in the campaigns after paying a nomination fee of eight million shillings.

Can it be the fame? Each candidate is supposed to at least canvass two thirds of Uganda’s 100-plus districts, which can rocket their visibility from zero to 100 over four months set aside for campaigns.

As earlier said we may be a nothing country in the greater scheme of things, but surely contesting for the highest position in the land should be taken more seriously.

Alleviating those same issues of poverty, disease and hopelessness should be top of every candidates agenda. The differentiator maybe how each candidate hopes to achieve this. Upsetting President Yoweri Museveni can be part of the strategy but not the strategy. Knowing our fickle public it maybe the best strategy to personalize the election but can you seat through 23 candidates badmouthing Museveni before you nod off?

It occurred to me that President Yoweri Museveni has the hardest campaign to run because everyone else is focused on removing him. So his may be the only issues based campaign?

Beyond the hundred signatories to the nomination from two thirds of all districts set as a condition for nomination, each candidate should have a functioning organization in those same districts. This shouldn’t be a condition of nomination but would determine whether a candidate is going along for the party or can be a serious contender.

"This also will ensure that the candidates are not only heard in Kampala, ceding the countryside to the NRM, but should have a real presence all over. Playing to the foreign press from Kampala just doesn’t cut it...

I think we deserve a more serious airing of our concerns as an electorate. Wheeling out the clowns every five years in the name of presidential elections maybe damaging the credibility of the process. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day, someone asks, “Whats the point?” and we – God forbid, contemplate scrapping presidential elections.

Maybe we should actually. Let’s have a parliamentary system like in other mature democracies, where the party with the winning majority in parliament chooses the president. It would spare us a lot of amateur theatrics that threaten to make the presidential race a farce.

IT STARTS AND ENDS WITH JOBS

Last week the World Bank released their Jobs Report on Uganda. It had some very enlightening findings, many sobering and clearly we cannot continue with business as usual given the potential crisis looming ahead.

"If the management of the economy is about improving the living standards of a population, then you can’t get away from a discussion about jobs – the quantity and quality of jobs....

The current state of jobs flatters to deceive. The report says that 77% of the population aged between 15 and 64 is employed, which is high compared to the average for low income countries, which stands at about 70%.

However, the quality of jobs is falling as people are working longer hours for less pay.

This is not hard to explain as 64% of Ugandans are employed in agriculture. Our agricultural practices are rudimentary, our farm yields are among the lowest on the continent and we then lose almost half of our produce after the harvest.

To add salt to injury, as an economy we are still stuck in the rut, producing raw materials for export. We not only get a fraction of the finished good but it also means we do not control the price that we sell at.

As if that is not enough we are a young population, the second youngest population in the world with a median age of 15.9 years. What this means, that for the next few years or decades there will be more people joining the workforce than leaving it, which means the speed of creating jobs has to be accelerated.

According to the Jobs Report the economy must create up to thrice as many jobs than it did between 1992 and 2006 in order to keep up.

As it is now more than 500,000 people enter the job market annually and this number is expected to double again within a decade or so.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that millions of youth without a job or incomes, will be forced into crime and other anti-social behavior, and it is not a stretch of imagination to see that national stability will come under threat.

So what to do?

The World Bank has some recommendations.

For starters they counsel that macroeconomic fundamentals have to be just right.  Galloping inflation, lack of economic growth and an exchange rate out of control will not allow for any of the initiatives needed to tackle the problem to take root....

Develop agro-processing industries and facilitate their exports, promote Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), create an environment that will encourage more investment by big firms and support domestic firms to transition to medium and larger entities. 

Given these, it makes sense that any real transformation will have to start with the agriculture value chain, seeing as seven in every ten Ugandans derives a livelihood form the land. Not only should we increase farm yields, but can we also improve marketing, incentives the set up of agro processing firms and promote exports abroad.

At the bare minimum farm gate prices will rise but also employment will be created when the value chains are better developed.

However, I think the real game changer would be to facilitate small companies to grow into larger entities...

The world over the biggest employers in any economy are the small and medium enterprises. 

However, the biggest case of business failure comes from these same sectors. On closer scrutiny its not that there are no markets for their products or they have run out of raw materials or the Ugandan economy is a particularly harsh environment to do business, most business failure is because the people running the business don’t have the capacity to run a business.

The promoters of these failed business, don’t know how to raise capital, don’t know how or neglect to do market research, fail to forge the relationships that will grow and sustain the business, don’t or can’t be bothered to strategise for their business.

Doing business is a skill that is learnt over time, however we can help our businessmen with training and other capacity building initiatives to help them along. We are the most entrepreneurial country in the world, which means that in our case there is a necessity for most of us to start a business. Well-tailored training will ensure we can go beyond the initial excitement for business and build bigger businesses.

Indigenous business owners are more beneficial to local economies than businesses taking orders from far off headquarters. Out of a responsibility to their local communities they are more likely to find ways to make the business work than hack the payroll and they give more back to the community in social causes.

It follows therefore that bigger indigenous concerns will magnify these benefits.

The government programs to dish out money to the youth are more a hit or miss operation, based on the flawed analysis that our entrepreneurs biggest challenge is lack of finance.

A more systematic attempt to build our entrepreneurs’ business skills, some hand holding to ensure they grow beyond the teething pains and a proactive program to create market access for them home and abroad are urgently needed.

I put little faith in the already bigger firms hiring more and more people, as our current circumstances demand. After all the bigger firms are becoming more automated and therefore not hiring as fast as we want.

The SME sector’s growth will more likely create the needed jobs.

THE FATE OF PEARL DAIRY AND WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT THE EAST AFRICAN COMMUNITY

It can be frustrating even down right infuriating when you are in the midst of a historic movement. Progress or regression doesn’t happen in a straight line. You take two steps forward and one step back. Sometimes it’s worse, you take two steps forward and four steps back.

I have heard it said that we will take the class until we learn the lesson. And may I add, even if you think you have skipped the class and gone on, invariably one day you will come all the way back to take the class, so you can learn the lesson.

At the time of writing this the Presidents of Uganda and Rwanda are getting set for a border meeting at Katuna, which we all hope will lead to the reopening of the border and the free movement of goods and people.

Rwanda shut down the border a year ago ostensibly over the maltreatment of its people in Uganda.

"When our grandchildren will be reading history this border closure may occupy only a line in the greater scheme of things. Hopefully it will not have scuttled the greater goal of creating a single regional market....

There are more disturbing movements that affect Ugandan progress but also don’t bode well for the future of the EAC.

Ugandan sugar is having to jump through hoops to find its way into the Kenyan and Tanzanian markets. We are the only country in the community that is producing a surplus. Three decades of rehabilitation and expansion of our sugar firms has brought us to this happy situation.

In our eastern neighbour the sugar industry is all but dead, with the major sugar producing regions in western Kenya, brought to its knees by a combination of bad policy and the growing strength of sugar importing cartels. Uganda’s sugar industry, I fear is under attack from similar forces.

Our neighbours cannot believe that we can produce so much sugar as we are exporting to them. They have sent delegations (per diems all around) here to verify our capacity to produce. They have not found any foul play but have gone back and kept quiet allowing the charade to continue.

Our grain is being shipped across the border raw. Attempts to export maize flour have suffered uncalled for speed bumps and roadblocks. The message is clear, send us your raw materials but not your finished products. And we all know who benefits from such an arrangement.

More recently our milk producers, Pearl Dairies, the maker s of Lato milk, came up against some strange “official” resistance to their exports to Kenya. Their warehouses were raided and their stock impounded at the end of last year. Kenyan authorities unofficially charged that they were counterfeit supplies, strange because Pearl Diaries were not the ones complaining. But maybe that was because it was their milk.

But one can see what has happened. Last year Uganda exported in excess of 110 million liters of milk to Kenya, which helped for the first time since anyone remembers, to turn the balance of trade in our favour. This was particularly surprising because the previous year we had only exported about 20 million liters to our eastern cousins.

In the space of two and half years, by the end of last year, Pearl Dairy controlled about a quarter of the Kenyan milk market. That must have rustled a few feathers, especially that Pearl Dairies with their 800,000-liter day processing capacity in Ntungamo was not about to let up.

Then the stories begun again. Uganda is getting milk from Australia landing it in Kinshasa, trucking it through South Sudan before it comes to Kampala for reconstitution (adding water) and shipped to Kenya. If milk can go through that convoluted journey and still price competitively in the Kenyan market, then the Kenyan dairy industry has only themselves to blame.

Strangely, or not, other exporters of milk to Kenya from Uganda are not suffering such inconveniences or whisper campaigns.

We should be concerned.

One of the biggest selling points of the EAC on paper, is that investors can come and locate their plants wherever they choose in the region and have unfettered access to a 200 million people market.

The way it seems that’s for everybody else except Uganda.

If you have $50m to invest, like Pearl Dairies has done and want to invest in Uganda to exploit the EAC market, don’t bother.

Which is sad.

It does not take a stretch of imagination to workout that in order to fulfill its 84 million litre exports to Kenya, like they did last year, there must be hundreds of farmers in the Ntungamo area and hence thousands of their dependents in whose best interests it is to have the plant there working at full capacity. At the height of production last they inject at least sh12b into the local economy every moth.

Beyond that there are transporters, retailers, people up and down the value chain that want, no, need Pearl Dairy to remain in production.

But maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. It is no myth that Uganda’s agricultural potential is unmatched in the region. Our benign weather and arable soils mean that we are potentially the lowest cost producer of anything agricultural.

"Kenyan industry, which took advantage of the chaos of the 1970s and 80s, kept us a captive market for everything from toilet paper to sauce pans are fast waking up to an uncomfortable reality....

The lesson of the EAC obviously is that government needs to investigate in its negotiating capacity.  It can’t be for individual companies to be negotiating for market access, this is the business and role of governments.

Especially in our case where we have been the foremost champions of the creation of the EAC.

BUSINESSES NEED TO FOCUS ON THE VISION THING

Last week American car company Tesla saw its share price hit $500, a record for the company. With that price the company’s market valuation rose to about $100b (more than three times the size of the Ugandan economy).

The 30 percent jump in share price since the beginning of the year, means Tesla is now bigger than establishment companies Ford or GM, which were the biggest car makers in the US. Tesla will be 17 years old this year.

These are impressive figures by any measure.

The company wins a lot of attention thanks in no small measure to founder South African born American businessman Elon Musk, who is not averse to getting his foot in his mouth every so often.

It was created with a desire to bring an electric high performance vehicle to market. Up to that point car manufacturers struggled with the low capacity of available batteries, which would not allow high mileages.

After many missed targets, Tesla it seems, has found its groove and is set to take advantage of the first mover advantage – sort of, to dominate this new sector.

But what is it that drives entrepreneurs like Musk, to take on establishment companies, disrupt the status quo and come out the other side triumphant?

Last week we serialized the book , “Double your money” the very engaging memoirs of our very own Aga Sekalala Snr. As a businessman, he is unique in that his enterprises have not only survived, but thrived over the last four decades and sometimes under very harrowing circumstances...

When he first went into business for himself with a fuel station off parliament avenue, there were hundreds or even thousands of other businessmen who started with him. Most have left no impression on our lives or memories.

To endure like he has, has not been easy. I think the book understates Sekalala’s struggle, but its possibly a function of the old man’s mentality to not dwell on the past, but to get on with the job at hand. My impression was that the simplicity and unpretentiousness of the man belie a spirit, which while ready to adapt to changing times is encased in an iron will determined to bend circumstance to his bidding. So how did he do it?

The problem when we come in contact with these giants of commerce and industry is to see only the finished product. But the physical is the manifestation of the intangible – the vision, the strategy, the discipline of execution, the company culture.

I think everything starts with the vision. The vision of the founder or managers of an enterprise will determine how big the endeavour can be.

In the first half of the last century a small boy determined to go to school, because he liked how smart the teachers looked. He thought he would be a teacher. Then his ambition grew when he saw the county chief who in addition to being smart, rode a bicycle. The only bicycle for miles around his village. Then he decided he had to go to university, because the one university student he had seen was not only smart, but had an air of confidence and worldliness he wanted for himself.

His contemporaries who didn’t upgrade their ambitions or the vision of where they saw themselves in the future, ended up reaching their limits quickly and falling by the way side.

From the analogy a vision not only has to be bigger than the individual or company but also has to speak to the emotion of the holder. It’s the emotion that welds the vision to the psyche, taking over the owner’s life and driving achievement as if by magic...

Under such circumstances the subconscious can hold the dream long after the individual thinks he has forgotten about it.

That is why you can visit a company and it is humming along like a fine tune race car, but there is no evidence of a vision or mission or values statements pinned up on the wall. But the vision can be discerned from the work ethic, what values the company lives by and the achievements over time.

A deep dive into the mind of the founder or the company’s boss may help.

And this is at the root of why we are one of the most entrepreneurial countries but not one of the biggest economies of the world.

We are predominantly necessity entrepreneurs, setting up business to sustain our families. This is not a crime but it limits how big the business can grow, how much it can produce, how many jobs it can create, how much tax it can pay. Because they stay small the first shock – economic, family or otherwise, they experience lives the little chance of survival.

To start a business to feed yourself is not a crime. Most companies start that way. The trick to the creation of long term value for the owners and the communities in which they operate is to make the transition to opportunity entrepreneurs.

As opposed to the necessity entrepreneurs these are driven by opportunities they can take advantage of, are keen to build systems in order to scale up and maximize the chosen opportunity.

"It is near impossible to grow without systems and structure. But to invest in building these requires a long term perspective that does not reside in a necessity entrepreneur...

Elon Musk’s dreams were driven by science fiction and his determination to explore space. His vision is bigger than electric cars, but in the process he is drugging the automobile industry kicking and screaming to places it did not envisage.

Many years ago when Mzee Sekalala was exploring getting into fish farming, and narrating the challenges he was encountering, I wondered why he was even bothering there was still plenty of growth in the lines he was pursuing – poultry, vanilla and animal feeds.

His response, “If I hadn’t gone into chicken which chicken would you be eating today?”

Enough said!