On Monday Oct. 29th, 2007 I was exclusively supplied a report on Uganda's unfolding petroleum industry. I wrote a story that tried to be as accurate as possible while at the same time placing issues in perspective and bringing a measure of intelligence to bear on key points in that report. BUT because our media is full of mediocre and naïve editors (check a commentary on Uganda’s media on this blog), they messed up the original copy. Here’s an adaptation of an article published in Daily Monitor on Oct 30, 2007, page 4.
ELIAS BIRYABAREMA
Kampala--An independent assessment of Uganda’s burgeoning petroleum industry has cast deep doubt over its economic impact, widely trumpeted by President Museveni’s government as potentially profound.
Dr. Keith Myers who conducted research this month on the viability and possible scenarios of petroleum exploitation in Uganda has suggested in a report obtained by this blogger that Uganda’s reserves could be much more modest than has been reported.
Dr Myers is a founding partner of UK-based Richmond Energy Partners which specialises in provision of research and advice to financial investors in small petroleum companies the likes of which operate in Uganda. He’s also a member of the International Monetary Fund, IMF’s panel of fiscal experts.
His incredulity about the size Uganda’s reserves stems from what he called “a huge uncertainty” on how much oil can be recovered commercially from the Albertine Graben. Although the exploration companies—Heritage Oil Corp and Tullow Oil—have already made their reserve estimates, Dr Myers said their numbers were not “supported by data or relevant analogues.”
From the three substantive oil wells drilled so far (Mputa, Waraga and Nzizi), Tullow Oil has estimated its oil reserves of recoverable oil at between 100-250 million barrels while Heritage Oil Corp which has one well has hinted that theirs is much higher although they have not provided a solid figure.
The two companies are listed in London and Toronto and “good news,” from Uganda, Dr Myers said, automatically pushes up their market value, a fact that could entice the companies to manipulate figures of their reserves in the country.
Although he didn’t point to a possible inflation of the stated reserve figures, he said the government should conduct independent surveys and verification and produce their own reserve estimates so that data provided by the companies can be cross referenced.
Mr. Reuben Kashambuzi, the Commissioner for Petroleum Exploration and Production Department in Entebbe told Daily Monitor yesterday that the government geologists have their own estimates but that they can’t release them because that would invite legal liability. “If we announce our own estimates and they contradict theirs (exploration companies) and their share price plunges, they can sue us and we would pay them enormous amounts of money,” he said.
Even then, it was highly unlikely, he said, that the companies would engage in duplicity since it could, too, result in stock crushes once the falsehoods come to light.
Dampening the euphoria that has bubbled across the country since oil was struck at Mputa in Hoima early last year, Dr. Myers suggested that Uganda still has several years before it starts earning any petrol dollars.
“Oil development will require significant cross-border investment in export infrastructure for either crude oil or refined products,” he said. “Significant oil revenues are unlikely before 2015 at the earliest.”
He offered a range of factors for his conclusion foremost of which, he said, is the frustrating remoteness of the oil fields in Western Uganda which are 1,200 Kilometres from Mombasa, the nearest seaport. Worse still, the locality of the fields (Hoima) has no functioning transportation and utilities infrastructure, and erecting them will take time and tremendous amounts of money.
The nature of Uganda’s oil, too, is a significant setback. It’s waxy and solidifies at room temperatures which imply, he said, that the export pipeline to the coast would have to be heated, a project that will require billions of dollars.
Also, the limited size of Uganda’s market renders home refinement a futile venture, a fact that necessitates immediate need of crude export infrastructure. Uganda’s daily demand is estimated at 13,650 barrels worth of oil products a day while a commercial refinery would have to have a capacity of about 100,000 barrels per day.
Dr Myers’ research reveals that the impact of the petrol dollars on the material welfare of Ugandans might in fact be negligible, contradicting popular expectation that oil will do much in ending abject poverty which afflicts 40% of the population.
According to his calculations, if exploration proves a reserve capacity of 750-1000 million barrels and an export project is agreed on, then Uganda would be able to sustain a production rate of 100-150,000 barrels per day.
Assuming a population of 27 million people and crude price of $60 a barrel, such an output would translate into 1-2 barrels per person per year. “This would mean $36-72 in oil revenues per Ugandan per year assuming a government take of 60 percent (on every barrel of crude exported),” he said.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Friday, October 26, 2007
Sub-Saharan Africa: An Author Sees a Hopeless Future And He’s Unapologetic
ELIAS BIRYABAREMA
KAMAPALA
Kampala—Lately, as it appears, sub-Saharan African countries seem to be on the rebound. Conflagrations have been doused in much of the sub-continent and as peace takes a firm hold, economic stability has followed, bringing opportunity and better welfare to millions across the region.
The International Monetary Fund, IMF’s regional economic outlook for sub-Saharan Africa published on October 20th showed a glowing portrait of a region in the midst of an energetic transformation. Economic growth for the region, said the IMF, will average 6 percent in 2007 and 6.75 percent in 2008, which will be a remarkable rise of about nearly 2 percentage points from 2005’s five and a half percent.
“This would extend a period of very good performance,” said the IMF. “In recent years the region has seen its strongest growth and lowest inflation in more than three decades.”
Capital flows into Africa are at their highest levels since independence. Investment is flourishing—the World Investment Report said the continent attracted $36 billion in 2006, double 2004’s figure—creating jobs and boosting incomes. Export earnings for the region, too, have soared to unprecedented levels on the back of an explosive worldwide commodity boom, particularly oil.
Through the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative, MDRI, engineered by multilateral donors (WB, IMF, African Development Bank, Paris Club) and the G8, most sub-Saharan African countries have had their crushing debts cancelled and more resources are now being funnelled into long-neglected economic infrastructures.
All this has reversed decades of a downward spiral and lifted Africa onto the first rung of the ladder to economic prosperity, Right?
Not quite. At least, according to afro-pessimists.
Dr. Jacob van der Veen, an afro pessimist par excellence believes the worst is in fact yet to come. Dr. van der Veen who has travelled extensively and worked in sub-Saharan Africa sees all of the latest wave of seeming economic vitality as another of those endless episodes when Africa has suddenly become luminous, showed convincing promise and appeared ready to climb out of poverty only to for it to explode and plunge as dramatically as it had brightened.
Powered by globalisation, information and communication technological breakthroughs and mass consumption, Mr van der Veen observes in his book, What Went Wrong With Africa, that “it is clear that on average people’s lives have improved, all over the world, on every continent.”
Except Africa—to be more precise, sub-Saharan Africa. To be sure, Mr van der Veen’s book, first published in Dutch in 2002 and translated in English in 2004, brings no new compelling ideas about the tragedy of Black Africa but it’s the scale of detail he gives his diagnosis of the crisis and the shocking (almost provocative) candour of his views on the continent’s future that makes it a gripping and invigorating read.
“Even a confirmed optimist would hesitate to predict that life in Africa will get better in the years ahead.” van der Veen writes. His despair and doomsday arguments, which echo the familiar themes of Western reportage on Africa and scholarly work by several other Western authors, drew consternation and a hostile reception at a public debate in Kampala organised by Acode (a policy advocacy NGO) on Oct. 24th.
Dr. Kayunga Simba and Mr. Mwagutsya Ndebesa, from Makerere University Departments of political science and history respectively and Mr. Bernard Tabaire, Daily Monitor’s Managing Editor (Weekend Editions) accused him of regurgitating old and discredited theories that suggested that there was something peculiarly African about sub-Saharan Africa’s economic stagnation and chaotic politics.
To their pique, van der Veen, instead of seeking to clear misconceptions that may arise from his gloomy assertions, pressed forward, declaring that there was “nothing to make him optimistic about sub-Saharan Africa, not even the robust economic growth rates trumpeted by the IMF and the oil bonanza that is stirring euphoria all across the region.
A good measure of the economic dynamism that sub-Saharan Africa has picked up lately is so tenuous that even van der Veen’s critics may grudgingly admit that Africa’s perils may not be overcome as yet. Take exports, for instance. Prices for oil, metals, timber, coffee, sugar and several others are currently shooting through the roof; pouring prodigious amounts of money into the sub- Saharan African economies. But sometime, as it happens with booms, the prices will come crushing, and when that happens the same economies will start to sound distress signals, anew.
In many ways van der Veen’s book is easy to stoke indignation in Africans, particularly coming from the West which Africans generally tend to hold responsible for all their predicaments.
The litany of accusations is endless. Europe colonised us, pillaged our resources and has since continued to stymie our economic progress through economic marginalisation in the global marketplace. The West often displays astonishing ignorance on the complexities of the African society. The West does not offer much aid and while it’s ever railing against the corruption of African leaders, it’s content to keep the loot stashed in their banks by the same leaders.
Participants in the discussion pointed all this out.
And more, the thicket of hurdles that tamps down black Africa and which form the core of van der Veen’s narrative, too, are all familiar: state patronage, corruption, strong tribal loyalties, aid, decaying and ineffective institutions, violent conflict etc.
Many in the debate found it insulting—arguably for a good reason—that that a great deal of these problems had receded in many of the sub-Saharan countries, apparently signalling better times for the region. And yet van der Veen was still insisting that this was not enough to warrant any optimism.
Asked after the debate what he made of the accusations of bias and ignorance, van der Veen suggested that it was in fact such attitudes that were the greatest hindrance to the region’s development.
“I have noticed for instance that Ugandans are complacent,” he said. “They seem to say, ‘ok we were so badly off but now we’re somewhere and we’re happy with that’ which is really shocking if you really know what it takes to transform a pre-modern nation like Uganda to a modern country.”
He’s also not optimistic, he said, because he finds Ugandans and Africans generally to be too un-ambitious, complacent, slow-paced and much obsessed with blaming others for their crises instead of seizing and shaping their own destiny.
“There’s no sense of urgency among Africans. I have seen that wherever I have gone in all of sub-Saharan Africa and that will not take your countries anywhere,” he said.
KAMAPALA
Kampala—Lately, as it appears, sub-Saharan African countries seem to be on the rebound. Conflagrations have been doused in much of the sub-continent and as peace takes a firm hold, economic stability has followed, bringing opportunity and better welfare to millions across the region.
The International Monetary Fund, IMF’s regional economic outlook for sub-Saharan Africa published on October 20th showed a glowing portrait of a region in the midst of an energetic transformation. Economic growth for the region, said the IMF, will average 6 percent in 2007 and 6.75 percent in 2008, which will be a remarkable rise of about nearly 2 percentage points from 2005’s five and a half percent.
“This would extend a period of very good performance,” said the IMF. “In recent years the region has seen its strongest growth and lowest inflation in more than three decades.”
Capital flows into Africa are at their highest levels since independence. Investment is flourishing—the World Investment Report said the continent attracted $36 billion in 2006, double 2004’s figure—creating jobs and boosting incomes. Export earnings for the region, too, have soared to unprecedented levels on the back of an explosive worldwide commodity boom, particularly oil.
Through the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative, MDRI, engineered by multilateral donors (WB, IMF, African Development Bank, Paris Club) and the G8, most sub-Saharan African countries have had their crushing debts cancelled and more resources are now being funnelled into long-neglected economic infrastructures.
All this has reversed decades of a downward spiral and lifted Africa onto the first rung of the ladder to economic prosperity, Right?
Not quite. At least, according to afro-pessimists.
Dr. Jacob van der Veen, an afro pessimist par excellence believes the worst is in fact yet to come. Dr. van der Veen who has travelled extensively and worked in sub-Saharan Africa sees all of the latest wave of seeming economic vitality as another of those endless episodes when Africa has suddenly become luminous, showed convincing promise and appeared ready to climb out of poverty only to for it to explode and plunge as dramatically as it had brightened.
Powered by globalisation, information and communication technological breakthroughs and mass consumption, Mr van der Veen observes in his book, What Went Wrong With Africa, that “it is clear that on average people’s lives have improved, all over the world, on every continent.”
Except Africa—to be more precise, sub-Saharan Africa. To be sure, Mr van der Veen’s book, first published in Dutch in 2002 and translated in English in 2004, brings no new compelling ideas about the tragedy of Black Africa but it’s the scale of detail he gives his diagnosis of the crisis and the shocking (almost provocative) candour of his views on the continent’s future that makes it a gripping and invigorating read.
“Even a confirmed optimist would hesitate to predict that life in Africa will get better in the years ahead.” van der Veen writes. His despair and doomsday arguments, which echo the familiar themes of Western reportage on Africa and scholarly work by several other Western authors, drew consternation and a hostile reception at a public debate in Kampala organised by Acode (a policy advocacy NGO) on Oct. 24th.
Dr. Kayunga Simba and Mr. Mwagutsya Ndebesa, from Makerere University Departments of political science and history respectively and Mr. Bernard Tabaire, Daily Monitor’s Managing Editor (Weekend Editions) accused him of regurgitating old and discredited theories that suggested that there was something peculiarly African about sub-Saharan Africa’s economic stagnation and chaotic politics.
To their pique, van der Veen, instead of seeking to clear misconceptions that may arise from his gloomy assertions, pressed forward, declaring that there was “nothing to make him optimistic about sub-Saharan Africa, not even the robust economic growth rates trumpeted by the IMF and the oil bonanza that is stirring euphoria all across the region.
A good measure of the economic dynamism that sub-Saharan Africa has picked up lately is so tenuous that even van der Veen’s critics may grudgingly admit that Africa’s perils may not be overcome as yet. Take exports, for instance. Prices for oil, metals, timber, coffee, sugar and several others are currently shooting through the roof; pouring prodigious amounts of money into the sub- Saharan African economies. But sometime, as it happens with booms, the prices will come crushing, and when that happens the same economies will start to sound distress signals, anew.
In many ways van der Veen’s book is easy to stoke indignation in Africans, particularly coming from the West which Africans generally tend to hold responsible for all their predicaments.
The litany of accusations is endless. Europe colonised us, pillaged our resources and has since continued to stymie our economic progress through economic marginalisation in the global marketplace. The West often displays astonishing ignorance on the complexities of the African society. The West does not offer much aid and while it’s ever railing against the corruption of African leaders, it’s content to keep the loot stashed in their banks by the same leaders.
Participants in the discussion pointed all this out.
And more, the thicket of hurdles that tamps down black Africa and which form the core of van der Veen’s narrative, too, are all familiar: state patronage, corruption, strong tribal loyalties, aid, decaying and ineffective institutions, violent conflict etc.
Many in the debate found it insulting—arguably for a good reason—that that a great deal of these problems had receded in many of the sub-Saharan countries, apparently signalling better times for the region. And yet van der Veen was still insisting that this was not enough to warrant any optimism.
Asked after the debate what he made of the accusations of bias and ignorance, van der Veen suggested that it was in fact such attitudes that were the greatest hindrance to the region’s development.
“I have noticed for instance that Ugandans are complacent,” he said. “They seem to say, ‘ok we were so badly off but now we’re somewhere and we’re happy with that’ which is really shocking if you really know what it takes to transform a pre-modern nation like Uganda to a modern country.”
He’s also not optimistic, he said, because he finds Ugandans and Africans generally to be too un-ambitious, complacent, slow-paced and much obsessed with blaming others for their crises instead of seizing and shaping their own destiny.
“There’s no sense of urgency among Africans. I have seen that wherever I have gone in all of sub-Saharan Africa and that will not take your countries anywhere,” he said.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Oil: The Americans Are Coming, And With Them, Trouble Galore
ELIAS BIRYABAREMA
Kampala—In December 2000, the National Intelligence Council, a think-tank within United States’ CIA declared in a report that sub-Saharan Africa, “will play an increasing role in global energy markets,” according to John Ghazvinian in his 2007 book, Untapped, The Scramble For Africa’s Oil.
That observation set off a train of broad commercial and diplomatic maneuvering that has seen the US move decisively to counter China’s tightening grip on Africa’s energy resources.
The latest in this effort is a covert scheme designed to entrench US interests in Uganda’s burgeoning petroleum industry.
On 22nd Oct, the United States Trade and Development Agency, USTDA, announced that it had procured a U.S. consultant, RKR Enterprises, to begin exploring Uganda’s emerging petroleum and gas industry and advise on where the US may, “grant assistance.”
Often, the language used in such press statements, in keeping with the subtlety and complexity of Western diplomacy, is innocent enough.
“Potential actions that could result from the mission (the project),” said USTDA’s statement, “include technical assistance programs, feasibility studies, training activities, and/or orientation visits.”
Fair enough, you thought!
Not quite.
Implicit in the “technical assistance,” “capacity building,” “training activities,” and similar other phrases is a simple and urgent goal of guaranteeing a constant flow of resources (oil, minerals etc) from the aid recipient to the donor nation in question.
All the discoveries combined, Uganda now can (tentatively, because it’s at an exploratory level) produce about 32,000 barrels of oil per day, bopd. Exploration is continuing and the two frontline companies—Tullow Oil of UK and Heritage Corp of Canada—have hinted they will strike far greater reserves toward the northern tip of Lake Albert in Western in Uganda. Expectation is soaring, too, over the exploratory fields stretching far out toward West Nile.
Taken together thus, these developments illuminate the US’s real intentions in the sudden offer of “technical assistance,” to Uganda’s petroleum sector even before anyone has asked.
Its move is consonant with a recent wave of diplomatic overtures extended by China, India and other Asian nations all eager to carve out their share of the unfolding petroleum bounty.
Currently, competition is intensifying among the world’s major powers (US, China, India and EU) for the dwindling world petroleum resources. China has particularly upset the world’s energy balance as its demand for oil to fuel its industrial juggernaut has grown at a terrifying speed. Lately it has scrambled to redirect more of the flow of Africa’s oil towards itself, prompting a swift EU and American response in form of sweetened deals for greater economic cooperation and a boost in direct aid.
So what’s the upshot of all this and what really should concern an average Ugandan?
Well, start to get worried when the US gets entwined in Uganda’s unfolding oil politics. Eager to extract as much oil supply as possible, the US will basically leave Museveni to rule Ugandans as he pleases, as long as he doesn’t interfere with its petroleum interests.
With US diplomatic largess to underwrite his grip on power, a beefy treasury to purchase loyalty and purchase arms to brutalize opponents, Ugandans can expect to suffer under Museveni’s insanity for the next decade.
Kampala—In December 2000, the National Intelligence Council, a think-tank within United States’ CIA declared in a report that sub-Saharan Africa, “will play an increasing role in global energy markets,” according to John Ghazvinian in his 2007 book, Untapped, The Scramble For Africa’s Oil.
That observation set off a train of broad commercial and diplomatic maneuvering that has seen the US move decisively to counter China’s tightening grip on Africa’s energy resources.
The latest in this effort is a covert scheme designed to entrench US interests in Uganda’s burgeoning petroleum industry.
On 22nd Oct, the United States Trade and Development Agency, USTDA, announced that it had procured a U.S. consultant, RKR Enterprises, to begin exploring Uganda’s emerging petroleum and gas industry and advise on where the US may, “grant assistance.”
Often, the language used in such press statements, in keeping with the subtlety and complexity of Western diplomacy, is innocent enough.
“Potential actions that could result from the mission (the project),” said USTDA’s statement, “include technical assistance programs, feasibility studies, training activities, and/or orientation visits.”
Fair enough, you thought!
Not quite.
Implicit in the “technical assistance,” “capacity building,” “training activities,” and similar other phrases is a simple and urgent goal of guaranteeing a constant flow of resources (oil, minerals etc) from the aid recipient to the donor nation in question.
All the discoveries combined, Uganda now can (tentatively, because it’s at an exploratory level) produce about 32,000 barrels of oil per day, bopd. Exploration is continuing and the two frontline companies—Tullow Oil of UK and Heritage Corp of Canada—have hinted they will strike far greater reserves toward the northern tip of Lake Albert in Western in Uganda. Expectation is soaring, too, over the exploratory fields stretching far out toward West Nile.
Taken together thus, these developments illuminate the US’s real intentions in the sudden offer of “technical assistance,” to Uganda’s petroleum sector even before anyone has asked.
Its move is consonant with a recent wave of diplomatic overtures extended by China, India and other Asian nations all eager to carve out their share of the unfolding petroleum bounty.
Currently, competition is intensifying among the world’s major powers (US, China, India and EU) for the dwindling world petroleum resources. China has particularly upset the world’s energy balance as its demand for oil to fuel its industrial juggernaut has grown at a terrifying speed. Lately it has scrambled to redirect more of the flow of Africa’s oil towards itself, prompting a swift EU and American response in form of sweetened deals for greater economic cooperation and a boost in direct aid.
So what’s the upshot of all this and what really should concern an average Ugandan?
Well, start to get worried when the US gets entwined in Uganda’s unfolding oil politics. Eager to extract as much oil supply as possible, the US will basically leave Museveni to rule Ugandans as he pleases, as long as he doesn’t interfere with its petroleum interests.
With US diplomatic largess to underwrite his grip on power, a beefy treasury to purchase loyalty and purchase arms to brutalize opponents, Ugandans can expect to suffer under Museveni’s insanity for the next decade.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Jamwa & NSSF: Lots of Haze.
ELIAS BIRYABAREMA
Kampala--On October 4th, NSSF’s new management, flanked by the Board held a press briefing to apprise Ugandans on what has been going on since they assumed office and to lay out their vision for the Fund in the next five years.
It was a timely opportunity that the new Managing Director, Mr David Chandi Jamwa could have exploited to regain the trust and confidence of Ugandan workers and assure them that the brazen waste and mismanagement of their little savings had stopped.
But nothing of the sort transpired.
Instead, Mr. Jamwa, gruff-voiced and menacingly muscular, fired off to a false start, launching into a venomous and overreaching assault on all of NSSF’s critics and commentators. Then he got wild and insulted those who have suggested lowering of the age at which a person can legally access his/her savings to 40 from the current 55 years: describing them as, “verging on lunacy.”
Such a combative and arrogant approach is unwise and unhelpful for a leadership that is seeking to turn around the image and operations of an organisation as prone to scandal as NSSF. Mr. Jamwa doesn’t have a monopoly of ideas on how NSSF should be run. And he must be liberal enough to accommodate and benefit from the on going feisty public debate on how Uganda’s pensions sector can be cleaned up and graduated to a higher level of efficiency.
At the conference, NSSF announced that it would increase the rate of return on workers’ savings from the current 7% (which is below Uganda’s average inflation) to 12 percent over a period of five years. This was, NSSF said, “to stop the destruction and loss of value” of workers’ savings that has been the hallmark of the Fund for the last decade or so. In that sense Mr. Jamwa was in effect agreeing with NSSF’s critics who have advised that the nation’s pensions sector be opened up to competition so that workers can earn a market rate on their savings.
A rose by any other name smells just as sweet. Even if NSSF paid its members a 12% interest, a monopoly by any another name is a monopoly and it is bad. There’s no way workers can know whether they’re receiving the best benefits from NSSF: only the market can determine that. In any case, if NSSF is now intelligently run and efficient as Mr. Jamwa is declaring why then is he frightened by the idea of an open and competitive marketplace?
Something else, too, about Mr. Jamwa appeared to provide an unsettling clue into his leadership. When a hack inquired into the persisting mystery surrounding the Shs. 8 billion sunk into the infamous Nsimbe Housing Estate, Mr Jamwa declared that there was, “now value lost in Nsimbe.”
Throughout 2004 and 2005, it was reported widely that NSSF had purchased a chunk of land at Shs.8 billion, which was double the prevailing market price.
As the scam’s full breadth came to light, the then NSSF’s MD, Mr. Leonard Mpuma and the entire Board chaired by Mr. Onegi Obel were suspended. Both of them are currently undergoing trial for that fraud.
Now, in addition to the colossal loss ( estimated at Shs 4 billion) that NSSF incurred in the bloated cost of land; the Shs. 8 billion has been at best underutilised and at worst lying idle in the last two years—something of a no-brainer, I thought.
Yet here was Mr. Jamwa, unblinking, straight-faced, telling journalists and Ugandans that NSSF had not lost a coin in Nsimbe! There was little to conclude from this episode other than it being a pointer to the level of honesty and transparency that we should expect from the new powers at Workers House.
A good measure of the cynicism from workers and media directed at NSSF would seem justified.
Sometime in 2005, NSSF, in endless press statements told us that they had installed some new and costly software with an amazing range of abilities. It was developed by South Africa’s Face Technologies. Once fully functional, we were told, the software was supposed to end many of the deficiencies and delays in handling members’ data and processing of claims. Foremost among the benefits was that members were supposed to track their balances online and that a typical claim would now be processed in a maximum of two weeks, instead of months as was the case.
The software was also to help in cleaning up and better tracking of records and so reduce bogus or under valuing of savings.
We duly reported all this to Ugandans.
Two years down the road, that software, it appears, has not solved any of the woes besetting NSSF. The only beneficiary is FT which earned a premium on that bogus project.
Through all this, the sum picture emerging from Mr. Jamwa’s few months of leadership at NSSF, is not one of great hope. Nevertheless, he still has a chance to steer this behemoth to a better direction and leave behind a better record.
Kampala--On October 4th, NSSF’s new management, flanked by the Board held a press briefing to apprise Ugandans on what has been going on since they assumed office and to lay out their vision for the Fund in the next five years.
It was a timely opportunity that the new Managing Director, Mr David Chandi Jamwa could have exploited to regain the trust and confidence of Ugandan workers and assure them that the brazen waste and mismanagement of their little savings had stopped.
But nothing of the sort transpired.
Instead, Mr. Jamwa, gruff-voiced and menacingly muscular, fired off to a false start, launching into a venomous and overreaching assault on all of NSSF’s critics and commentators. Then he got wild and insulted those who have suggested lowering of the age at which a person can legally access his/her savings to 40 from the current 55 years: describing them as, “verging on lunacy.”
Such a combative and arrogant approach is unwise and unhelpful for a leadership that is seeking to turn around the image and operations of an organisation as prone to scandal as NSSF. Mr. Jamwa doesn’t have a monopoly of ideas on how NSSF should be run. And he must be liberal enough to accommodate and benefit from the on going feisty public debate on how Uganda’s pensions sector can be cleaned up and graduated to a higher level of efficiency.
At the conference, NSSF announced that it would increase the rate of return on workers’ savings from the current 7% (which is below Uganda’s average inflation) to 12 percent over a period of five years. This was, NSSF said, “to stop the destruction and loss of value” of workers’ savings that has been the hallmark of the Fund for the last decade or so. In that sense Mr. Jamwa was in effect agreeing with NSSF’s critics who have advised that the nation’s pensions sector be opened up to competition so that workers can earn a market rate on their savings.
A rose by any other name smells just as sweet. Even if NSSF paid its members a 12% interest, a monopoly by any another name is a monopoly and it is bad. There’s no way workers can know whether they’re receiving the best benefits from NSSF: only the market can determine that. In any case, if NSSF is now intelligently run and efficient as Mr. Jamwa is declaring why then is he frightened by the idea of an open and competitive marketplace?
Something else, too, about Mr. Jamwa appeared to provide an unsettling clue into his leadership. When a hack inquired into the persisting mystery surrounding the Shs. 8 billion sunk into the infamous Nsimbe Housing Estate, Mr Jamwa declared that there was, “now value lost in Nsimbe.”
Throughout 2004 and 2005, it was reported widely that NSSF had purchased a chunk of land at Shs.8 billion, which was double the prevailing market price.
As the scam’s full breadth came to light, the then NSSF’s MD, Mr. Leonard Mpuma and the entire Board chaired by Mr. Onegi Obel were suspended. Both of them are currently undergoing trial for that fraud.
Now, in addition to the colossal loss ( estimated at Shs 4 billion) that NSSF incurred in the bloated cost of land; the Shs. 8 billion has been at best underutilised and at worst lying idle in the last two years—something of a no-brainer, I thought.
Yet here was Mr. Jamwa, unblinking, straight-faced, telling journalists and Ugandans that NSSF had not lost a coin in Nsimbe! There was little to conclude from this episode other than it being a pointer to the level of honesty and transparency that we should expect from the new powers at Workers House.
A good measure of the cynicism from workers and media directed at NSSF would seem justified.
Sometime in 2005, NSSF, in endless press statements told us that they had installed some new and costly software with an amazing range of abilities. It was developed by South Africa’s Face Technologies. Once fully functional, we were told, the software was supposed to end many of the deficiencies and delays in handling members’ data and processing of claims. Foremost among the benefits was that members were supposed to track their balances online and that a typical claim would now be processed in a maximum of two weeks, instead of months as was the case.
The software was also to help in cleaning up and better tracking of records and so reduce bogus or under valuing of savings.
We duly reported all this to Ugandans.
Two years down the road, that software, it appears, has not solved any of the woes besetting NSSF. The only beneficiary is FT which earned a premium on that bogus project.
Through all this, the sum picture emerging from Mr. Jamwa’s few months of leadership at NSSF, is not one of great hope. Nevertheless, he still has a chance to steer this behemoth to a better direction and leave behind a better record.
Ugandans Are Zombies: Look What’s In The Newspapers!
ELIAS BIRYABAREMA
Kampala--A question is often asked: why are Ugandans a passive people? Endless embezzlement scandals. Endless headlines, all that is swallowed up and life goes on. Not a finger raised. Gruesome torture by state agents is exposed, human rights are trampled, peaceful democracy rallies brutally broken up: Ugandans are unruffled.
History zooms past us. We watch it. We look the other way.
What is it about us that tethers us to our stations, makes us docile and disables our spirit to protest injustice and squarer up to our adversaries?
The answer to that question is in the sort of newspapers that we consume daily. The media is supposed to report on the world around us, place us in a firmer understanding of it and urge us to work to make it better, right? Well, if that’s the case then Uganda’s newspapers have misfired all along and are way off the mark!
Working in the media, I am supplied a free copy of a daily newspaper. However on weekends, I, without fail, buy myself copies of Daily Monitor and other papers when my budget can allow.
If I had a thousand shillings in my pocket for the day and I was presented with a stark choice of a lunch meal and a newspaper, I am not sure I would not agree to starve and feed my mind instead. That’s how deep I love newspapers: I live and depend on them, they nourish and keep me going. And that has nothing to do with my media work, were I a doctor, I would still be just as fanatical about stuff of news. Every day when I wake up I yearn and seek to have a tighter grasp of my world and how it shapes my destiny and what I can do to influence the course of things for a better future both for me and mankind.
This is pretty much the routine of every average citizen. Every day people wake up, curious, yearning, and eager to know what happened yesterday and what to make of it, how it will affect their lives and their world. Every sunrise should bring new knowledge, by sunset every one aspires to know more than he did when pulled out of his bed.
Newspapers have a duty to satisfy a big part of this human yearning.
And yet it has become almost impossible to find any insightful news or intelligent commentary in our newspapers these days.
The result: a placid, malleable society.
Don’t blame Ugandans for letting President Museveni do whatever he wishes with this nation. Blame the wimpy newsmen and our mediocre elite who spew out incoherent and spineless commentary on our OP-ED pages which, instead of enlightening, leaves readers confused and foolish.
Everyday, you pick up a copy of Daily Monitor, New Vision or Weekly Observer, pore over page upon page, cover to cover, and feel an astonishing emptiness about these papers.
Important news is never given any clear meaning or perspective that goes beyond the echo-chamber-style reproduction of what subjects tell reporters. That humdrum and mindless way of reporting news has completely buried useful journalism in this country and with it, society.
Annoyed and disappointed, you rifle past newspages and race on to the OP-ED space where you expect to stumble upon a decent and well reasoned commentary and what meets your eyes: poorly written opinions with clumsy arguments on uninspiring subjects.
There was a particularly ridiculous piece in one of our dailies on Oct 18th by a PhD academic at Makerere University, Mr. Augustus Nuwagaba. Good governance, he laboured, is essential for poverty eradication!
An average primary seven pupil would tell you that.
It was the most thoughtless and prosaic assertion I have read in recent years. I sensed he wanted to show how Museveni’s disastrous government was nudging Ugandans into destitution. But because he couldn’t summon enough courage to say what he really meant, his piece ended up a dull and derisive read.
Upon reading it you got an exact sense of the sort of arguments and opinions that should clearly never be entertained in Ugandan newspapers’ precious OP-ED space. There’s absolutely nothing
new to learn from there, no fresh ideas to invigorate any one’s mind.
The other problem that ails Kampala’s newsmen and commentators is the sheer cowardice that infects everything that they serve us every morning. Newspapers exist to report the truth and help people understand that truth. For that to happen, news must be reported in clearest, boldest, the most point black and candid language possible. But with Kampala papers’ zealousness to please and be polite to everybody, no one ever gets a grasp of what’s right and what’s wrong and no paper has seemed willing to help. The same grovelling and politically-correct language shows up in all the opinions printed daily.
So, if we may ask again: why are Ugandans an indifferent lot? It is because of the newspapers they buy and read every morning.
Kampala--A question is often asked: why are Ugandans a passive people? Endless embezzlement scandals. Endless headlines, all that is swallowed up and life goes on. Not a finger raised. Gruesome torture by state agents is exposed, human rights are trampled, peaceful democracy rallies brutally broken up: Ugandans are unruffled.
History zooms past us. We watch it. We look the other way.
What is it about us that tethers us to our stations, makes us docile and disables our spirit to protest injustice and squarer up to our adversaries?
The answer to that question is in the sort of newspapers that we consume daily. The media is supposed to report on the world around us, place us in a firmer understanding of it and urge us to work to make it better, right? Well, if that’s the case then Uganda’s newspapers have misfired all along and are way off the mark!
Working in the media, I am supplied a free copy of a daily newspaper. However on weekends, I, without fail, buy myself copies of Daily Monitor and other papers when my budget can allow.
If I had a thousand shillings in my pocket for the day and I was presented with a stark choice of a lunch meal and a newspaper, I am not sure I would not agree to starve and feed my mind instead. That’s how deep I love newspapers: I live and depend on them, they nourish and keep me going. And that has nothing to do with my media work, were I a doctor, I would still be just as fanatical about stuff of news. Every day when I wake up I yearn and seek to have a tighter grasp of my world and how it shapes my destiny and what I can do to influence the course of things for a better future both for me and mankind.
This is pretty much the routine of every average citizen. Every day people wake up, curious, yearning, and eager to know what happened yesterday and what to make of it, how it will affect their lives and their world. Every sunrise should bring new knowledge, by sunset every one aspires to know more than he did when pulled out of his bed.
Newspapers have a duty to satisfy a big part of this human yearning.
And yet it has become almost impossible to find any insightful news or intelligent commentary in our newspapers these days.
The result: a placid, malleable society.
Don’t blame Ugandans for letting President Museveni do whatever he wishes with this nation. Blame the wimpy newsmen and our mediocre elite who spew out incoherent and spineless commentary on our OP-ED pages which, instead of enlightening, leaves readers confused and foolish.
Everyday, you pick up a copy of Daily Monitor, New Vision or Weekly Observer, pore over page upon page, cover to cover, and feel an astonishing emptiness about these papers.
Important news is never given any clear meaning or perspective that goes beyond the echo-chamber-style reproduction of what subjects tell reporters. That humdrum and mindless way of reporting news has completely buried useful journalism in this country and with it, society.
Annoyed and disappointed, you rifle past newspages and race on to the OP-ED space where you expect to stumble upon a decent and well reasoned commentary and what meets your eyes: poorly written opinions with clumsy arguments on uninspiring subjects.
There was a particularly ridiculous piece in one of our dailies on Oct 18th by a PhD academic at Makerere University, Mr. Augustus Nuwagaba. Good governance, he laboured, is essential for poverty eradication!
An average primary seven pupil would tell you that.
It was the most thoughtless and prosaic assertion I have read in recent years. I sensed he wanted to show how Museveni’s disastrous government was nudging Ugandans into destitution. But because he couldn’t summon enough courage to say what he really meant, his piece ended up a dull and derisive read.
Upon reading it you got an exact sense of the sort of arguments and opinions that should clearly never be entertained in Ugandan newspapers’ precious OP-ED space. There’s absolutely nothing
new to learn from there, no fresh ideas to invigorate any one’s mind.
The other problem that ails Kampala’s newsmen and commentators is the sheer cowardice that infects everything that they serve us every morning. Newspapers exist to report the truth and help people understand that truth. For that to happen, news must be reported in clearest, boldest, the most point black and candid language possible. But with Kampala papers’ zealousness to please and be polite to everybody, no one ever gets a grasp of what’s right and what’s wrong and no paper has seemed willing to help. The same grovelling and politically-correct language shows up in all the opinions printed daily.
So, if we may ask again: why are Ugandans an indifferent lot? It is because of the newspapers they buy and read every morning.
In South Africa: A Tribute To Apartheid Architects
In South Africa: A Tribute To Apartheid Architects.
ELIAS BIRYABAREMA
Grahamstown.
On 21st March 1960, a brutal clash erupted in South Africa’s Black township of Sharpeville between a crowd of about 5000 Blacks protesting arbitrary pass laws and the apartheid Police hell-bent on snuffing out native agitation.
69 protesters were murdered by the police before the unrest was quelled: a massacre that stunned the world and became the defining face of the Anglo-Dutch White supremacist regime in South Africa.
From then on, the resentment that had been bubbling across Africa and the world at large toward Whites for their repression and segregation of Black people took on a new grim intensity. Whites, as viewed through the Sharpeville bloodbath, became to the world a face of; evil, horror, extremism, savagery, monstrosity, inhumanity, vile, cruelty etc.
In the three South African novels I encountered in my early life—In The Fog of The Seasons’ End (Alex La Guma), Mine Boy (Peter Abrahams) and Cry, the Beloved Country (Alan Paton)—this is the standard theme, the quintessential face of White South African rulers.
In classroom lessons, endless books, songs, drama, media, speeches about Apartheid all across Africa and beyond we were drenched in this grotesque image of Whites as a merciless and greedy bunch that fled the discomfiting temperate climes and impoverished lives in Europe to come, subjugate and brutalise Blacks so they can revel in Africa’s subtropical paradise.
As I knew then and know now, all of this is true. True to the last bit.
But something else, too, is true, in fact much truer than all the foregoing.
And when it dawned on me it immediately started to influence my entire perception of the generations of White people than run South Africa for nearly a century before Blacks assumed power after the collapse of apartheid in 1994.
On the night of September 9th this year, I landed at Oliver Thambo International Airport in Johannesburg en route to Grahamstown, a tiny city in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
Almost instantly thousands questions started to puzzle my mind. Oliver Thambo—super-sophisticated, monstrously vast, hyperactive—is just about any of Europe’s flagship airports: Schiphol in Amsterdam, Brussels, Heathrow etc. In otherwords as soon as you land at Oliver Thambo, what is the image that immediately strikes one: a clean, advanced, efficient republic that is clearly incongruous with that that we know about Africa and Africans—a basic inability to build firm and modern nations.
Well, the answer to that contradiction, like the observation itself, is basically simple and well known: South Africa, Africa’s richest republic was built by those same people that were portrayed all around the world as extremist thugs and savages.
This pretty much is known.
But then comes the riddle that is still unsolved in my mind: how did these extremist Whites—operating in a hostile continental political environment; harassed and sabotaged by a determined Black liberation struggle; hated and economically isolated by the world—build an awesome and advanced nation that is South Africa?
How can it be possible? How did these crazy and maniacal racists still manage to overcome this maelstrom of odds and successfully transplant a European civilisation onto to a continent that has to this day stupefied all mankind?
This is the riddle that every African should attempt to crack.
We all consider apartheid to be one of history’s greatest crimes against humanity, black humanity. And those who perpetuated it in South Africa will forever remain in the world’s Hall of the Infamous, characters and regimes better forgotten by mankind.
That much is deserved.
But then we Africans and the world should be counter accused of having committed the gravest crime ever to a people (Anglo-Dutch supremacists): a failure to acknowledge them as the architects and builders of Black Africa’s greatest republic ever. In retrospect, I think it is equally criminal for all those teachers, singers, writers, dramatists, speechwriters and the media to have deliberately omitted telling us that those same White racists had given to our continent that that everyone of us had never achieved (and never could)—a great nation.
To me this is what is important and what should have been stressed in class. This is what my teacher should have asked me to find out: how come Kenya’s Jomo Kenyata and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere could not transform their nations even though both have seacoasts, and have never witnessed military upheaval or any of the crises that beset White South Africa for decades?
We’re routinely told that corruption is the single evil responsible for Africa’s underdevelopment. But socialist and modest Nyerere has a wide reputation of a honest and fairly clean government. And yet years of dogged attempts at nation building left a cripple of a nation that is Tanzania today while besieged and isolated Whites down south rapidly turned around an impoverished settlement into a howling, wealthy nation.
How could my teacher miss to tell me this?
Besides their indignation at the horrors suffered under White rule: Black South Africans should eternally be grateful to their Anglo-Dutch conquerors for having bequeathed them the greatest and proudest heritage ever to Black mankind—a modern nation.
Had South Africa, with its vast mineral endowment, had a similar colonial history to that of many African nations where European colonialists suddenly succumbed to naïve nationalist forces and abandoned power, there’s a high likelihood that it would have turned out a D.R. Congo, Mali or Malawi—a backwater trapped at the bottom of human civilisation.
ELIAS BIRYABAREMA
Grahamstown.
On 21st March 1960, a brutal clash erupted in South Africa’s Black township of Sharpeville between a crowd of about 5000 Blacks protesting arbitrary pass laws and the apartheid Police hell-bent on snuffing out native agitation.
69 protesters were murdered by the police before the unrest was quelled: a massacre that stunned the world and became the defining face of the Anglo-Dutch White supremacist regime in South Africa.
From then on, the resentment that had been bubbling across Africa and the world at large toward Whites for their repression and segregation of Black people took on a new grim intensity. Whites, as viewed through the Sharpeville bloodbath, became to the world a face of; evil, horror, extremism, savagery, monstrosity, inhumanity, vile, cruelty etc.
In the three South African novels I encountered in my early life—In The Fog of The Seasons’ End (Alex La Guma), Mine Boy (Peter Abrahams) and Cry, the Beloved Country (Alan Paton)—this is the standard theme, the quintessential face of White South African rulers.
In classroom lessons, endless books, songs, drama, media, speeches about Apartheid all across Africa and beyond we were drenched in this grotesque image of Whites as a merciless and greedy bunch that fled the discomfiting temperate climes and impoverished lives in Europe to come, subjugate and brutalise Blacks so they can revel in Africa’s subtropical paradise.
As I knew then and know now, all of this is true. True to the last bit.
But something else, too, is true, in fact much truer than all the foregoing.
And when it dawned on me it immediately started to influence my entire perception of the generations of White people than run South Africa for nearly a century before Blacks assumed power after the collapse of apartheid in 1994.
On the night of September 9th this year, I landed at Oliver Thambo International Airport in Johannesburg en route to Grahamstown, a tiny city in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.
Almost instantly thousands questions started to puzzle my mind. Oliver Thambo—super-sophisticated, monstrously vast, hyperactive—is just about any of Europe’s flagship airports: Schiphol in Amsterdam, Brussels, Heathrow etc. In otherwords as soon as you land at Oliver Thambo, what is the image that immediately strikes one: a clean, advanced, efficient republic that is clearly incongruous with that that we know about Africa and Africans—a basic inability to build firm and modern nations.
Well, the answer to that contradiction, like the observation itself, is basically simple and well known: South Africa, Africa’s richest republic was built by those same people that were portrayed all around the world as extremist thugs and savages.
This pretty much is known.
But then comes the riddle that is still unsolved in my mind: how did these extremist Whites—operating in a hostile continental political environment; harassed and sabotaged by a determined Black liberation struggle; hated and economically isolated by the world—build an awesome and advanced nation that is South Africa?
How can it be possible? How did these crazy and maniacal racists still manage to overcome this maelstrom of odds and successfully transplant a European civilisation onto to a continent that has to this day stupefied all mankind?
This is the riddle that every African should attempt to crack.
We all consider apartheid to be one of history’s greatest crimes against humanity, black humanity. And those who perpetuated it in South Africa will forever remain in the world’s Hall of the Infamous, characters and regimes better forgotten by mankind.
That much is deserved.
But then we Africans and the world should be counter accused of having committed the gravest crime ever to a people (Anglo-Dutch supremacists): a failure to acknowledge them as the architects and builders of Black Africa’s greatest republic ever. In retrospect, I think it is equally criminal for all those teachers, singers, writers, dramatists, speechwriters and the media to have deliberately omitted telling us that those same White racists had given to our continent that that everyone of us had never achieved (and never could)—a great nation.
To me this is what is important and what should have been stressed in class. This is what my teacher should have asked me to find out: how come Kenya’s Jomo Kenyata and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere could not transform their nations even though both have seacoasts, and have never witnessed military upheaval or any of the crises that beset White South Africa for decades?
We’re routinely told that corruption is the single evil responsible for Africa’s underdevelopment. But socialist and modest Nyerere has a wide reputation of a honest and fairly clean government. And yet years of dogged attempts at nation building left a cripple of a nation that is Tanzania today while besieged and isolated Whites down south rapidly turned around an impoverished settlement into a howling, wealthy nation.
How could my teacher miss to tell me this?
Besides their indignation at the horrors suffered under White rule: Black South Africans should eternally be grateful to their Anglo-Dutch conquerors for having bequeathed them the greatest and proudest heritage ever to Black mankind—a modern nation.
Had South Africa, with its vast mineral endowment, had a similar colonial history to that of many African nations where European colonialists suddenly succumbed to naïve nationalist forces and abandoned power, there’s a high likelihood that it would have turned out a D.R. Congo, Mali or Malawi—a backwater trapped at the bottom of human civilisation.
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