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.