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Out to Lunch

#OutToLunch: Favourable interest rates are good for everyone, not just government blueprint for politicians and entrepreneurs building churches

#OutToLunch: A blueprint for politicians and entrepreneurs building churches By Denis Jjuuko When it comes to religion, many times politicians, billionaire entrepreneurs, the middle class and other classes agree. At least on building magnificent houses of God. Across Uganda, many people have contributed or even single handedly built these houses of God. Fancy to a fault, majestically standing on hills with spires that compete with those seen in Hollywood movies. Many of these worship centres, particularly those single handedly built by one person or a family with their friends, are usually located in rural areas where the funders were born, walked barefoot to school before migrating to Kampala to find fortune and fame. The floors are of Italian or Spanish marble, porcelain or at worst polished terrazzo. Stained glasses with the beautiful image of the Virgin Mary complete the curvy life size windows. The pews are of the hardest wood. The world’s best sound engineers come in to install the public address system. The house of God must be fancy. Once construction is complete, they call in their Kampala friends for the grand opening. The clergy lines up at the foot of the building to welcome them. The parking lot is full of the most expensive SUVs. The parishioners walk in every prayer day fearful of stepping on the floors, sometimes so shiny that they see their own body reflections. Their best clothes can’t even be used to clean the pews. They can scratch them. For a moment, the poor are in heaven before returning to their houses where floors are screeded with cow dung. There is nothing wrong with people using their fortune and connections to build grand churches or mosques. It is their money; their appreciation of what God has helped them achieve. They no longer have some of these other problems so they can “give back” to God. The problem is whether the grandeur church is what the community really needs. Shouldn’t politicians, the rich and famous first do a needs assessment? Usually, besides the magnificent house of God stands a school with a falling roof or whose walls are being held in place by crooked timber poles. Windows are just wide openings where mild steel frames would do. Inside some of the classrooms, are anthills. Pupils sit on logs and like their homes, the cow dung is the main material used for floor screeding. Teachers look like they last had a decent meal on Christmas day. The health centre is miles away and poorly equipped. The only hope for survival whenever they fall sick is through prayer in the church built for them by the only person who was lucky enough to survive the biting poverty. Yet the funders go to India or Kenya or Germany whenever they feel any discomfort. And are not afraid to give testimony that last time they fell sick, they traveled to Europe for better management and while there, they were thankful to God for their life hence the magnificent church building. Yet the blueprint for an impactful church exists. In most cases wherever the Catholics built a church, they built a school as well and almost everywhere they set up their regional headquarters (read a diocese), they built a functional hospital. They knew that you can’t pastor the dead! They also knew that an educated population is good for them and their beliefs. Some people call it sustainability and perhaps that is why they have existed for millennia. You saw how they put on a show at Pope Francis’ funeral. Why can’t politicians and billionaire businessmen do the same? If you have Shs6 billion (nearly US$2 million) like we heard of the Ssembabule church or the one in Mitooma, why not build a church of Shs2 billion, a school of Shs2 billion and a healthy centre of Shs2 billion? You could also may be build all those with about 70% of the kitty and create an endowment fund with the remaining 30%. The annual interest from the fund could be used to operate the school and the hospital. If 30% of Shs6b is invested say in a long-term treasury bond, it could give a net return of approximately Shs255m per a year or Shs21.3m per a month, enough to subsidize a rural school and health facility. Alternatively, an income generating project could be established alongside the church building. A factory to add value for the parishioners. It could be a dairy plant or a coffee factory depending on the area. A scholarship for the needy bright students could be another alternative. That way people wouldn’t have to meet their creator ahead of time. The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com

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Out to Lunch

Out to Lunch: Giga factories could provide solutions to Africa’s job challenges

By Denis Jjuuko There used to be a TV series on the National Geographic channel that showed some of the biggest or busiest things in the world. From the busiest hotel in the world, train station to the airport. Imagine a hotel with 7,000 rooms, fully booked and all the guests eating breakfast at almost the same time or within a few hours. And then meals have to be prepared for a similar number as well as walk in clients. Think of an airport that handles more than 250,000 passengers a day. The same TV program also had a segment on mega factories sitting on hundreds of acres of land with thousands of employees producing some of the famous brands we know today. These series were some of the most fascinating things one can watch. A single factory as big as some of the suburbs of Kampala. If you are a regular reader of this column, you may have noticed my fascination with manufacturing. I think most countries develop by manufacturing stuff even though some have done so through financial services and being trading outposts. But the majority, it is manufacturing that creates the jobs and propels economic transformation. The United States, the world’s biggest economy, is desperate to have the factories back from China and elsewhere. Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, is known for manufacturing. Japan is also known for the same. Without mega factories in China, the majority of Chinese would be unemployed. Manufacturing creates sustainable decent jobs where the majority of people can work. It doesn’t require sophistication for workers to get things done because what the majority of factory workers do is repetitive. Within a few days on the job, a worker can easily be trained to press a button or fix something before the product goes to the next person on the line even for the most sophisticated products. Africa plays a decimal role in manufacturing relying on other countries to do so. A report by McKinsey says that Africa will need to create 18 million jobs a year to absorb the growing labour force until about 2035. Payment apps and all sorts of apps built around the Airbnb and Uber models that are attracting lots of funding from angel investors won’t be the only solution for Africa’s development. In fact, the majority of those apps are collapsing because they were surviving on capital being raised from Silicon Valley without enough customer base to sustain them. They should have known that unemployed people have no money to transact through the payment apps and are too broke to order for food on delivery apps. One of the things Africa can do is to build factories. They don’t have to be mega though like those in the TV series. We could build giga ones instead and get the continent ready for the battery market in preparation for a transition from fossils to electrification of mobility. Oil, as a scarce resource, made the countries where it was discovered wealthy. Countries couldn’t just manufacture oil. They had to drill it in the wells where it was discovered in commercially viable quantities. The world relied on them and they could sometimes refuse to pump or pumped more than required. As electric vehicles become the norm, those who will have invested in giga factories will become as important as the Arabs have been with their oil. Unlike oil which couldn’t be found anywhere in sufficient commercial quantities, anyone can build batteries and electrification components if they focused on them. There are more electric boda bodas in Kampala than ever and people have started importing electric and hybrid vehicles given that this financial year there is no import duty charged on such vehicles. The countries that are developing this capacity today won’t pass on the knowledge to Africans. The continent will continue to organize conferences sponsored by the west to talk and talk about the imbalance between the north and south and issue communiques after communiques like it has been the case for more than 60 years now. Nobody will transfer knowledge to the continent because some technocrats attended a conference and talked about it. Many of the raw materials required to make the batteries are here. What is required is to build our intellectual property to play a part in this industry. Building the giga factories on the continent will not only create sustainable decent jobs but also enable vertical integration of automotive and mobility businesses and wean Africa off its reliance on global supply chains that can easily be disrupted by geopolitical maneuvers or pandemics like we saw in 2020. The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com

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