PATRICK BITATURE ... TO ROAR LIKE A SIMBA

Over the weekend President Yoweri Museveni commissioned the new head office of the Uganda Revenue Authority, an imposing structure that is set to dominate the Nakawa skyline for some time to come. Congratulations are in order to URA for the construction of such an aesthetically appealing building, which I hope wills set the pace for other developments not only in the area but in Kampala and even Uganda as a whole. I know the pride that comes with having completed such a massive build for the initiators and implementors. The new 22-story structure has allowed the tax man to fold back all his offices from around the city back to the head office, a move they estimate will save them sh7b annually. Using simple math the sh140b will pay for itself in 20 years. The move is seen as precursor to a government move to build a ministerial compound in Bwebajja, where all ministries will be relocated sometime in the future. I have seen comments that such actions are evidence that...

The situation is never so dire that it can not be turned around, I don't think so, I know so! A good start is to try and look at your situation from another perspective. A trusted friend would be useful.

Thousands of students will be graduating from their respective universities in coming days and months. Makerere, our country’s oldest university will kick off its ceremonies on January 15th and the other universities will follow. The graduates have already had a taste of the real life, having finished their studies mid last year and tried to get employed. Many know by now that the world can be harsh and unforgiving. I hope many are tightening their belts in readiness for the struggle ahead. Some may have decided to kick the tin down the road by continuing with school. And others may have given up altogether. My prayer is that there are more of the first and less of the last kind. In talking to young people, I find that what is needed is a reorientation of their minds – a mindset change. Let me share with you certain facts to help manage their expectations of the world and how they can fulfil their potential in our context. First of all, the world owes you ...

Uganda has made tremendous strides in containing the AIDS pandemic. For some of us who were around in the 1980s and saw the worst effects of the AIDS pandemic, the way the country has contained the disease is not what we had envisaged back then. Ignorance, stigma and lack of drugs surrounding the disease saw thousands die horrible deaths – wasting away, tortured by opportunistic diseases and being shirked by family and a society out fear.  The doomsayers were projecting a major fall in our population, a collapse of the economy and a total breakdown of social cohesion. That the country is still around and fighting back the disease successfully, could not have been envisaged in those scary days of the 1980s when the disease came into the public conscious. Thankfully rather than sweep the problem under the carpet like many of the neighbouring countries, President Yoweri Museveni led a fight back against AIDS that had at its core widespread dissemination of infor...

Last week the Bank of Uganda raised its key Central Bank Rate (CBR) a percentage point to ten percent from nine percent. This was the first increase in more than a year, a move prompted by BOU’s projection that price increases coming around the corner. Increasing oil prices, a weaker shilling and new taxes on mobile money services were cited as reason for this anticipated increase. We know that in the last year or so there has been a cash squeeze, money has been hard to come by. While the economy has been growing this has not been spread around evenly. It was hoped that if the economy can keep growing we can all begin to feel the joy. The Bank of Uganda has helped on this front by lowering its CBR from a high of 21 percent about seven years ago when inflation hit record levels. This allowed more borrowing by the private sector which has helped keep our economy ticking. But just when the economy was beginning to gain traction BOU has slammed on the brakes. We may ...

In the middle of September the United Nations released its annual Human Development Indicator (HDI). This index serves as an indicator of the quality of life of a country’s people by measuring the health, education, inequality, poverty and security standards. Aside from the statistical measures of development like GDP growth, this is obviously a better measure of how people are actually doing. In this year’s HDI report Uganda was ranked 162 out of 189 countries with a HDI score of 0.516. The index goes from zero to one, the nearer you are to one the better. Our score puts us in the low human development category. But as bad as that sounds we have been worse. In 1990, the earliest year that these figures were compiled our score was 0.311 even the UN recognises that we have improved 66 percent in the last three decades. According to the UN figures life expectancy has risen to 60.2 years   from 45.5 in 1990; expected years of schooling has doubled to 11.6 fr...

During a recent trip to China I was shocked to find properly paved roads and first class infrastructure deep in the countryside, hundreds of kilometres away from the capital, Beijing. I rode the high-speed railway out of Beijing, doing more than 300 kilometres per hour and I can attest I have never been on anything like it anywhere in the world. Not in Europe. Not in the States. Nowhere. I was blown away and wondered why we can’t at least do a tenth of this at home. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised when I used the Entebbe Expressway from the airport. I was in Kampala in under an hour. The Entebbe road had become a nightmare. I was shaken out of my good feeling when I had to make a trip to Tororo the other day. On my way back I spent two and half hours between Mukono and Kampala, about the same time it took me from Tororo up to Mukono. Clearly there is a lot of work to be done on our transport infrastructure. The full extent we probably don’t appreciate,...

Another Ponzi scheme has come crashing down around the ears of hundreds of “investors”. Unsurprisingly. In its recent reincarnation poor Ugandans were lured into a scheme where they bought computer tablets. This entitled them to a monthly pay off, $100, and a Christmas bonus for their children. In this case the unsuspecting investors -cum -victims were being given a share certificate. Meaning you accept to take the part of the risk in this project. Which was inadvertently reducing their burden of risk and liability for the issuing company. I leave that area to smart lawyers to handle.   As is always the case with these things, it’s not quite clear where the pay-out will come from. A common characteristic of these schemes is that you might get initial payments before you starting missing a few and the stories begin. The promoters of these schemes or scams often use the money from the latest entrants to pay the older “investors” until one of two things happen. Either...

  Recently the World Bank did a survey of the power utilities on the continent. Of the 39 utilities surveyed only two, in Uganda – Umeme and in Seychelles, were able to cover their operating costs and capital expenditures – maintenance and expansion of the grid. The report went on to point out that only 19 or about half of the surveyed utilities were able to meet their everyday costs like salaries. Essentially most of our power utilities on the continent are technically bankrupt. This has far reaching ramifications for the industry as a whole. When you, the client, pays your bill, Umeme then passes money up the line to pay the transmission and generation companies. If Umeme does not collect the revenues due to it or does not price the power at an appropriate rate, the pain will be felt up and down the sector. The transmission company would not be able to maintain and extend its network and the generation company would not be able to generate efficiently or build ...

Anyone who has half a stake in this country would be a keen observer of the economy and the direction it is taking. In the last three decades the economy has shown strong growth, only slowing to overcome bad weather, a global financial crisis or unrest in the region. Compared to when I started out in business, it has become a more liberal economy, with individual initiative being rewarded more and more. While the economy is still dominated by the informal sector, the formal sector is growing annually. But the biggest shift in the economy has to be the reduction in agriculture’s share of the economy from more than 80 percent to about 25 percent today. This has happened despite the leap in the production of everything from bananas to coffee or from milk to maize. What has happened is that more of the economy – though not nearly enough, has been taken up by industry, construction and services. This is how it should be and in fact, more work is needed in shifting t...

Something is wrong when most of Ugandan business is shut out of the government procurement process. This is happening in Uganda today. Micro-, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) account for 90 percent of the private sector. These account for 65 percent of national output (GDP). On the other hand 75 percent of our now sh32trillion national budget is earmarked for public procurement but the MSMEs’ share of this action is only 15 percent. It does not take a rocket scientist to see that such numbers are behind the huge inequalities in our society and why the majority of us do not have hope of a better and brighter future. Thankfully this is not an insurmountable problem. If MSMEs had access to more opportunities accruing from the national budget the benefits to themselves and to the nation as a whole would be huge. These would include increased production which would lead to job creation, raise incomes at household levels, leading to reduced income ine...

The first rainy season seems to have passed. Not too soon for some of us. It has become standard now that with the rains come the floods and with every season these become not only more and more daunting, but spread all over Kampala. While KCCA has done a lot of work in improving drainage, we are undoing the good work with our bad habits. Everyday we dispose of tons of plastic improperly, these find their way into the existing drainage systems of this city. These cause blockages, which we go about blissfully unaware of until the rainy season begins. The rainwater not only struggles to go past existing blockages but comes along with its own load of plastics to reinforce the existing blockage. The water, which should be finding its way to Lake Victoria, swells out of the drains and finds its way onto the road, into our offices and our homes. That’s the simplified version of events.  This is before we even start examining how we are building in the wetlands ...

I have watched with much interest as the issues of the UN base in Entebbe have played out in recent days. At the beginning of the month it was reported that the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres, had signed off on a new structure, The Global Services Delivery model, that it was suggested would see Uganda losing the Regional Service Center in Entebbe (RCSE) to Nairobi. Under the new model the UN would have three key centers in Hungary, Kenya and Mexico. In response to a letter by President Yoweri Museveni, Guterres assured him that the RCSE would remain in Entebbe. Though some functions will be relocated to Nairobi in the short term, in the middle to long term he sees the role of RCSE expanding and growing in importance. The new development takes effect from 1 st July this year. According to their website the RCSE serves more than 20,000 personnel on the continent, does administration and communications support for thousands more around the world and has an...

A study carried out in 57 countries around the world established that Ugandan women are among the most entrepreneurial in the world. The 2018 Mastercard Index of Women’s Entrepreneurship released last week showed that one in three businesses or 33.8 percent of businesses in this country belong to women. Our women were third behind their counterparts in Ghana, 44.4 percent and Russia, 34.6 percent. Survey after survey has shown that Uganda is one of the most entrepreneurial counties in the world, so it should come as little surprise that our women are among the most entrepreneurial in the world.  This does not in any way take away from their own initiative and resilience in surviving our competitive business environment. Our entrepreneurialism was forced upon us by the hard times we faced as a nation in the 1970s and 1980s, when few if any salaries could carry families through the month. For the majority of us who did not have the option of leaving the country...

The country is operating on a time table that first oil will be seen in 2020. There is a lot of frenetic activity around building supporting infrastructure, getting investment approvals, ensuring local participation and any number of other things to ensure readiness the moment the oil starts gushing down the pipeline to the coast. And so we should. I was intrigued the other day to read in the Kenyan press how Kisumu County, just across Lake Victoria from us, has set upon an ambitious project to ensure egg and poultry meat self-sufficiency for the county within the next few years. Under the plan Kisumu County will train 100 farmers every month over the 12 month pilot period. The intended aim is to be able to satisfy the county’s demand for 25,000 broilers and 75,000 eggs daily. Whereas I would prefer that this was private sector driven deal, I like this plan for a number of reasons not least of all that it shows leadership by the county and secondly, it relies o...

Last week during an investor interaction   Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) officials called on police to stop overriding traffic lights while directing traffic. KCCA argues that the traffic lights are large investment and it makes no sense for police to countermand them. In a classic case of “The importance of the river was not known till it dried up” on Friday the traffic police desisted from directing cars at the traffic lights leading to the worst traffic snarl-up in the city’s history. People were stuck in traffic jams around the city for hours and long into the night. Maybe it was the unhappy coincidence of the traditional Friday traffic and pre-Christmas excitement but without the traffic police directing traffic it was a mess. They made their point. It of course points to the bigger issue of a revamping of Kampala’s road network, which has remained   largely the same since independence but with an exponential increase in cars in the last three...

I am sure I am not the only one feeling it. Kampala’s traffic is becoming increasingly unbearable. Even the removal of roundabouts around the city seem to have an opposite effect to the intended purpose of easing traffic flow in the city. Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) has an ambitious plan of flyovers, underground tunnels and railway transport, which should help the cause, I hope. The snarl ups that we are coming fast accustomed to, are not only an issue of teeth grinding inconvenience but have a real cost on our economy by hampering and increasing the cost of doing business. A recent World Bank report suggests that as an economy, we are losing about sh3trillion annually due to traffic jams. The losses come in form of delayed deliveries, higher fuel consumption and the health consequences of seating in a smoke filled environment. To put this in perspective this is the combined budget of the health, agriculture and ICT ministries in this year’s budget. Or ...

This year’s “Oil & Gas Convention & Regional Logistics Expo2017” has just concluded after three days of discussion, exploration and soul searching. First oil in Uganda is expected by 2020 and this Expo among other efforts are targeted at getting our local businessmen ready to take advantage of this historical development. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the discovery and eventual exploitation of our oil resource is one of those once in a generation events, that can transform this nation, not only on a macro level but also in our individual lives. For starters at least $20b will be spent over the next three years in infrastructure development and other things that will ensure we are ready to pipe and refine our oil. During the exploration phase about $3b was spent by the international oil companies, with on three in every ten dollars being retained here. That was an exploration phase and one hopes that we have learnt enough from that period to ...