July 12, 2024 – Prime Time Communications

Out to Lunch

#OutToLunch: How Kikuubo can transition from trading to manufacturing

By Denis Jjuuko A few weeks ago, I was invited for a meeting in Jinja, which is about 80km away from Kampala. In order to make a small saving, I decided to drive with a friend who was also attending the same meeting. Our meeting was scheduled for 10.00am. We decided to leave Kampala at 7.00am in order to make it to Jinja in time. We thought that two hours were enough to cover the distance. Because my friend lives around Bweyogerere and it was early morning, we didn’t anticipate any difficulty in being in Jinja well ahead of the scheduled time. We decided to use the main Kampala-Jinja Road instead of the one through Kayunga that I normally prefer. Afterall, my anticipation was that we would be driving against traffic as the majority of people who live in Mukono would be coming into Kampala. The traffic was instead bumper to bumper in Namanve and Sseeta and we thought that once we go beyond Mukono town, we would be able to move faster. We continued our drive and along the way we started realizing that we could not make the trip by the scheduled time. We arrived in Jinja about 15 minutes late. I remembered this while watching clips from a meeting between the president and the traders who are protesting the tax system. The president advised them to become manufacturers instead of importers of finished products. If you are a regular reader of this column, you would know my position on manufacturing. I am an advocate because there aren’t many countries that developed without focusing on manufacturing. Through manufacturing, countries are able to employ large numbers of the working age population. Manufacturing ensures sustainable jobs with predictable regular income, a prerequisite for economic growth and wealth accumulation. When people have a regular predictable income, and not depending on chance, they can be able to invest in long term projects such as housing. Banks can offer low interest long term e.g., 30-year mortgages. Business people would invest in sectors for long-term knowing there are people who will be able to afford their products or services. When the majority of people’s incomes depend on prayer and the intercession of the holy spirit, investors keep away. The people can’t save. You can’t save what you don’t have. Banks, instead of lending money for business, they focus on lending to the government. They are nearly sure of being paid back than when they lend to businesses who don’t have an assured market. Anyway, if Uganda is to become a manufacturing hub as the president wants it to be, there are certain things that government must put in place. One of them is the highway not only to Jinja but to the Kenyan border. There are plans to build the Kampala-Jinja Expressway but they remain largely plans todate. If you are a regular user of the road beyond Jinja, you know that jam builds up between Kakira and Iganga (Kakira and Jinja is smooth because it is a four lane road). Maybe the Kampala Jinja Expressway should become Kampala-Iganga or even Malaba Expressway. If people are spending 3-4 hours to cover a distance of about 80km, like we did for the Jinja meeting, it will become costly for manufacturers as this is the main route for their raw materials and finished products (to the port of Mombasa). But even if the road was wide and smooth, road transport is expensive for manufacturers. Railway transport provides solutions but plans about the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) became a mirage. Yet at one stage we had a railway line that almost connected all the major parts of the country. We also have Lake Victoria; it can solve some our bulky transport woes. The majority of Ugandan traders start after dropping out of primary or secondary school. They learn trading and after a few years of frugality and tenacity, they make it big. They will never invest in stuff that are not tangible such as research and development (R&D) which is key if any country is to become a hub. What most traders know is that if you pay this amount of money, you get this amount of goods and sell them at that amount of money. That is why EFRIS is a big issue yet maybe it shouldn’t. Government needs to appreciate their strengths and limitations and invest in R&D on their behalf, showing them which sectors or products, they can invest in as manufacturers and handhold them until when they can transition from informal traders to manufacturers. It can match them with foreign investors for joint ventures and most importantly for technology transfer and support them on issues such as corporate governance. There are already traders in Uganda who have made this transition, how did they make it? It is the story government should be telling while dangling the investment incentives traders need to make the transition. The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com

July 12, 2024

Out to Lunch

#OutToLunch: Opportunity a great pathway to professional career

By Denis Jjuuko Young lawyers have been incessantly posting on X (formerly Twitter) about the poor pay they receive once they finish their long courses at university and the Law Development Centre. Apparently, they are being paid peanuts yet they have spent nearly five years learning. They claimed that their employers “force” them to take loans to buy suits and cars to keep up appearances. Of course, nobody expects a lawyer in a round neck t-shirt and ripped jeans. Until further notice, that is for tech entrepreneurs and impresarios. Although many of the complaining tweeting counsels, as they prefer to be called these days, acknowledged to receiving regular salaries, one of their contentious issues is that once they win cases in court, the senior lawyers and partners of the law firms don’t give them a percentage of the money they have won. Some senior (read older) lawyers argued that young lawyers needed to be more concerned about their personal professional development than the money they are being paid. They should be lucky enough to have an address, a desk where they can report to experience their profession in real life and practice in the hollowed walls of judges’ chambers while enjoying perks such as WIFI and spiced black tea that some law firms offer. One day, the senior lawyers argued, their hefty pay day will come. The younglings counter argued that they don’t eat experience and wifi. The spiced tea won’t pay for their fancy apartments in Najjeera and impress the members of the fairer sex. They want money. They want to earn big even when they have little or no experience. I must admit that I have no idea how law firms operate but I have been hustling for a while. Over the years, I have realized that many young people who walk into businesses begging to be employed cease being serious about their jobs once they get employed. They get so illusioned about what they call little pay and start paying little attention. Many even leave the jobs unceremoniously only to beg for the same jobs back they were despising when they had them. Money, I learnt a long time ago, is usually little when you have it. When you don’t have that money, it ceases being little. It is unrealistic for a young person who gets employed and is assigned a project to expect to receive the same amount of pay as the partners who have been working for 30 or 40 years. Even when those partners, as young lawyers claimed, may not have done most of the work. Setting up the firms enables them to do that. Also, gross payments don’t mean there are no expenses. Otherwise, where do law firms get money to pay their young lawyers a monthly salary when there are no cases being won? Where does money to pay for rent, the despised wifi, marketing, networking and other expenses come from? Many entrepreneurs in Uganda, if you scratch beyond the surface, go through a lot to keep their business working. Many have no days off, work longer hours and under pressure to keep the businesses afloat. Many clients such as the government of Uganda take years to settle invoices for services and goods rendered. If you are regular reader of Uganda’s newspapers, you will see several pages on a daily basis of properties being auctioned by financial institutions. Many such properties belong to entrepreneurs who invested in businesses that didn’t materialize. The pressure of a person losing their home and their family being evicted from their home is enormous. It can lead to death by suicide, heart attacks or cause irreversible mental health challenges. This doesn’t mean that entrepreneurs should not renumerate their employees better. They should but there is need for young workers to be realistic of the environment in which they work. There are more people graduating today than jobs available. Demand and supply forces still exist. Our economy is too small to absorb all graduates. Our annual budget is just Shs70 trillion, approximately US$18.4 billion, not even a half of what Amazon makes in a month. And businesses are being taxed to extinction. Emerging technologies are changing the way we work. Many jobs will evolve. Work that was done by a few people may be done by one person today, who may not even be in the country where the work is being performed. Artificial intelligence bots will, for example, write a land sales agreement that needs a few edits in seconds and a buyer may prefer not to engage the services of a lawyer for this particular work. A lawyer who appreciates how artificial intelligence works will be better though. A young one who accepts pay comes with experience will live a better life.

July 12, 2024

Out to Lunch

#OutToLunch: Ideas on how the corrupt can protect their loot

By Denis Jjuuko There is probably a high-ranking government official on every flight that departs from Entebbe going for some meeting, family holiday or benchmarking expedition somewhere in a country they consider developed. On arrival at the airport of their destination especially where there is no protocol official waiting for them on the tarmac, they follow every single rule, queueing up like everyone else to clear through immigration, customs and grab a taxi to their hotel. The trip from the airport to the hotel mesmerizes them, openly admiring how the country is so beautiful and organized. They engage the taxi driver in small talk about the country and the city. On arrival at the hotel, they realize that they don’t have to stock up on bottled water, the tap water is safe for human consumption without first boiling it. In the bar for some drinks, they see a young woman jogging at midnight alone. They see another walking in the street not worried of anyone giving them a scorpion kick so they can violently steal their smartphone. They have tried since their arrival to count potholes in the city and it ended up as an exercise in futility because they couldn’t find one. They shake their head and wonder how the country made it. In that moment, they promise to do something on their return to make Uganda better. For a few days, they note everything. On arrival at Entebbe, whatever they have learnt seem to evaporate from their head. They jump the queue at the airport. Jump into their SUVs and abuse every traffic rule in the book. At the next conference in Kampala, once they see journalists with cameras, they complain about the mafia, about corruption and talk about mindset. They forget that actually they occupy the offices where they can make a difference. They know that at their office desk, there is a heap of papers that need their signature but they have been too lazy to attend to them. Some have been there for months. In the meantime, suppliers are collapsing because they have not been paid for services and goods delivered. They are happy to work in a building with a leaking roof, a compound that isn’t being slashed and floor tiles that are bouncing and need refixing. Instead of working on these small things, their mind is on buying an apartment in the well-run country of their last visit. Yet that country is well run by their counterparts they just visited. The technocrats in the well run country aren’t special or even smarter than the Ugandans. Some even attended the same universities. They are just diligent. The law works as well. The price of being corrupt if caught is high so everyone tries their best to do their job. Some of the things that make these so-called developed countries are not even hard to do or too costly to implement for any government. For example, how much would it cost to identify a tree species that can be planted along Ugandan roads to make them a little beautiful? With Uganda’s climate, many of these trees wouldn’t even need watering. They can survive on their own. With all the stones we have everywhere, why is paving a road or walkway such a hard thing? You can cut the stone and shape it and a walkway is fixed for a century. Many technocrats have built hotels everywhere to tap into conferences and events. They can charge a premium if they made sure the country works. The country won’t attract international conferences when they see trending videos of thugs on boda bodas waylaying anyone with a bag in broad daylight in the middle of Kampala. They will wonder what will happen to them at night. The organizers would not bring a conference here unless they are sure that if any delegates had a medical emergency, they would be properly taken care of. If Nairobi is our referral hospital, then they will take the conference to Nairobi. The government technocrat who built a “fancy” hotel will not make money. Foreign investors won’t build their factories here and the local businessmen are too poor to do so as well. Many young people won’t have sustainable jobs. Apartments in Najjeera and Kyanja will remain empty or occupied by slay queens or six-packed boys who can’t consistently meet their rent obligations. Some may even offer to pay in kind. Our corrupt lot need to think of a time they won’t be in government and make sure the country works for everyone. That way they will protect their loot and most importantly create a generation that won’t have to be corrupt to live a good life. That way their grandchildren would retain what they have stolen today. The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com

July 12, 2024