India – Prime Time Communications

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

May 27, 2025

Out to Lunch

#OutToLunch: Rationalization without efficiency is an exercise in futility

OutToLunch: Rationalization without efficiency is an exercise in futility By Denis Jjuuko The rationalization of some of the government agencies back into their parent ministries has been the talk of town of the last few weeks with the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA) carrying the day. See, coffee is the lifeblood of more than two million households in the country. The government has said that that agencies being rationalized are inefficient and incompetent cost centers that bleed the national treasury doing the same work the ministries could do. That duplication is their other silent name. There seems to be no middle ground for those who propose rationalization and the same could be said of those who oppose it. But if efficiency is what government hopes to achieve through rationalization, there is a long way ahead. The work isn’t insurmountable but there is a lot that will have to be done. I think the first one is the issue of payment. We are told that staff of agencies were earning several times their colleagues in the ministries. That could be true. I sometimes see some of the CEOs of the agencies being driven around in powerful SUVs with lead or back up cars and police in black uniforms opening their doors or carrying their handbags. Somebody said that public servants in the ministries were jealousy of the executives in agencies. Maybe they were. If payment is such an issue, there is need to ensure that civil servants are paid salaries equivalent to what they would earn in the private sector and then put in place the same tough requirements in place. Regular assessments should be done and those that fail to meet them should be let go. Performance contracts should replace the method known as permanent and pensionable jobs because if anyone knows that they are assured of their job for life regardless of performance, they will do whatever they want. Performance contracts will end the culture in some government offices where people arrive in the morning, place their jacket on the back of their swivel chairs or place a second pair of their eye glasses on the desk to give the impression that they are around the building whereas they are not. Civil servants that work a few hours a day and enjoy a four-day working week should also be dealt with. Service delivery shouldn’t be just a topic of discussion in seminars and newspaper columns. It must be practiced and lived. That would require that officers are given a certain number of days to have a file in their office before they send it to the next person. Technology is available where each folder or file that goes to somebody’s office is tracked to know how long it has remained in that particular office and then asked why the file is still on their desk. That level of tracking would also reduce on the number of missing files in government offices. Efficiency would ensure that no officer has hundreds of files on their desks for months or even years or unopened emails. So free gmail and yahoo emails should be replaced with official ones that can be tracked. Time management is critical if government is to be efficient. Meetings must start and end on time. There is no reason to give somebody an appointment of 10.00am and make them wait up to 3.00pm and then inform them that you wouldn’t be able to see them or that you didn’t even come to the office. There is no reason why government should take two years to procure a contractor for an infrastructural project like a road or electricity dam and then the contractor takes years to start working and a decade to complete a project that could be done in nine months. Payments to contractors shouldn’t take the same process it would require one to go to heaven! One of the reasons we are so poor is our lack of investments in key social services like education, health and transport. Many Ugandan civil servants have to send their kids in expensive schools and then abroad for university, do annual medical checkups in India, Kenya or Turkey yet they don’t earn well enough to afford them. That leads to corruption. Because of lack of public transport, government officials must have vehicles which are expensive to buy and maintain yet they should be driving their own. Rationalization without being efficient will not improve service delivery and drive the country out of poverty. The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com

November 15, 2024

Out to Lunch

The industry of bolts and nuts and what small businesses can make on a car

By Denis Jjuuko In one of the dingy alleys of Nakasero at hitherto Kampala’s major hardware market area existed a very tiny shop that seemed to attract lots of customers. The customers, largely contractors would come with a piece of metal that they showed to the lady owner. The customers wanted the exact same part. Many times, the seller didn’t know where the part was. She was sure she had it but she didn’t know where to find it. However, she knew how to find it. This meant emptying her sacks or baskets on the ground floor and start going through hundreds of pieces of metal to find the part. As more customers came over, she would task the buyer to carefully look for what he was looking for as she attended to another customer. It was tedious but her customers never complained. They knew the modus operandi and most importantly they were sure they would find what they were looking for. The shop owner used to go to Dubai, Japan and such other places to source her wares. Most of them were old stuff, discarded from motor vehicles, towers, and machinery. Here people would use her wares as replacement parts in vehicles and even factories, construction and fixing whatever needed fixing. The materials she was selling aren’t unique at all. Simply, bolts and nuts. Yes, different sizes of bolts and nuts. As her business boomed and she became the reference point for bolts and nuts in Kampala, other people started similar shops in Shauri Yako and Kisekka markets. I don’t know whether her tiny shop still exists but there are many other shops today that sell bolts and nuts. They are usually in high demand as replacement parts for vehicles and factories, construction and for fixing lots of things. The funny thing is that the last time I checked, there was no factory making bolts and nuts in Uganda. I was once directed to one in Namanve industrial area. The warehouse was well decorated with all sorts of bolts and nuts and other materials that form the fastening industry. I realized the warehouse was a store and wholesale selling point. The owner was simply importing them from China and India. Though of course, my research may not have been thorough and was done several years ago. There could be guys making them today. I have googled several times how bolts and nuts are made and saw several videos from India and China. There was nothing sophisticated about making a bolt or nut. Largely, it involved an iron or steel bar that fed into a machine that sized it, created threads and the shape at the top. Nothing special to be honest. This story came to mind over the weekend when Kiira Motors announced that it had made eight electric buses from its temporary premises at Luweero Industries in the precinct of the UPDF barracks in Nakasongola. Like every time Kiira Motors makes such an announcement, the story that trends on social media is whether the parts were made in Uganda or not, followed by the argument that we cannot make things. But nobody manufactures a car in its entirety. It is small parts made by so many players that are put together to make a car. Same way a 5-star hotel makes a buffet. They get ingredients for the buffet from several suppliers who also get them from several farmers. It is called a value chain. Anyway, most motor vehicles have more than 30,000 parts. Buses, sometimes have as many as 70,000 parts. Many of them have to be fixed together using bolts and nuts. If our argument is that we can’t make a car, why then can’t we at least make bolts and nuts? It isn’t just bolts and nuts that we can make. There are many things that we can make on a vehicle that don’t require significant investment. Individuals asking what are we making on a vehicle can easily invest some little money in such areas — same amount they invest in a plot of land that remains idle and bringing no income in places like Kira (no pun intended). The beauty of car parts is that the majority can be used in other sectors. For example, we can make car seats but if you can make car seats, you can also make seats for technical benches at stadiums (Hoima stadium is coming up), dental clinic chairs, waiting room/reception chairs and basically any upholstering. We already have an industry here in Kisenyi where taxi seats are made. We simply need to deploy slightly better technologies. Fiber parts like face and rear. If you can make translucent sheets used for roofing shades and pergolas, you can make car fenders and bumpers. Brackets are used a lot to attach a range of car systems. All one needs is a bender and cutter to turn iron bars into such parts. Anyone making stainless steel balconies can make bus hand holds and cabin rails. Internal aluminum moldings should not be so difficult either. Cars are very sophisticated as a finished unit but many parts that make a car are not that sophisticated to make. And like I said earlier, most of these parts can be used in all sorts of industries and sectors. Instead of spending our bandwidth on the argument that we cannot make a car, what about, as small businesses, we started with those basic parts like bolts and nuts? The writer is a communication and visibility consultant. djjuuko@gmail.com

July 2, 2024