It's raining money, must be the elections (From Kenya's Sunday Nation)
Story by SIMWOGERERE KYAZZE /Talking Point Publication Date: 05/01/2005
This is going to be a very long, exciting and expensive election season in Uganda. There is fawning over the peasants (who are the majority of voters), kissing babies and doing the ‘Ndombolo ya Solo’, the Congolese dance made famous by assembly-line musicians from Joseph Kabila country. Like their colleagues around the continent, Ugandan politicians hate and despise the peasants – but you wouldn’t guess this during election season.
In Uganda, this time next year, President Museveni would have completed his 20th year in power, and embarked on the umpteenth phase of the longest reign of a Ugandan politician. There is also a referendum on whether Ugandans should return to multiparty politics, later this year as well as presidential, parliamentary and local elections before mid-2006. Naturally, the president and his minions, as well as all their opponents, are already traversing the countryside protesting undying love for the aforementioned peasants.
Back in Kampala, another five-year ritual related to the elections has also come full circle. See, Ugandan elections, again like elsewhere on the continent, generate a lot of money and put untold inflationary pressure on the local currency.
Already, the Dollar-Ugandan Shilling exchange rate has shot from an average of $ = Sh1,710 at the beginning of the year to $ = Sh1,840, and this is not related to the war in Iraq or the scarcity of dollars. There is simply too much political money in the economy. There are political bribes to be dished out and received – a bar of soap here, a kilo of sugar there, a litre of paraffin some place else, some mabaati for the local chief, etc. The peasants learnt – the hard way – that they are on their own after the elections and much prefer to be paid upfront these days.
No tarmac roads or dispensaries for them, thank you! They seem to have got the sense that it’s WHO and World Bank officials who build things anyway, so they demand instant cash, booze and sugar before the big men and women retreat to Kampala for the next five years.
Anyway, besides the peasants, the Electoral Commission also has billions of shillings to give away to those who will print, transport and secure its ballots. They have money for those who will supply the not-so-indelible ink, those who will provide civic education to the peasants, those who will design and print its adverts and other paraphernalia, and money for the army of men and women who will do the counting and tallying of the votes. It’s very expensive business, this pretence at democracy.
This week, the Electoral Commission served up another potential digit to the inflation figures by opening bids for the supply of materials for the referendum on political systems that is to be held by year’s end. The materials are the usual stuff Uganda has failed to manufacture in 42 years of independence (ballot papers, indelible ink, ballot boxes, etc), and as such most of the bids are from abroad (with half from South Africa alone).
The real surprise however, was the disparity in the bid amount. They ranged from $205.000 (Sh16.1m) to $1.8m (Sh142.2m). Quite how two companies that do business in similar environments can have as wide a discrepancy as a million dollars is another discussion.
For today, we’ll look at how South African businesses manage to walk the Holy Grail in Uganda (and elsewhere on the continent). In the 10 years since the end of Apartheid, South African business activity has been frenzied, almost maniacal, north of the Limpopo.
A recent study shows, for example, that Shoprite Holdings has become the continent’s largest food retailer with 641 stores in 14 African countries; Eskom is generating electricity in 32 countries; MTN and Vodacom are providing cellular phone services in six and five countries respectively, while Standard Bank of South Africa is operating in 16 countries, where it is almost always the market leader. Indeed, thanks to its recent expansion into the rest of Africa, Stanbic (as it’s called in East Africa) is the continent’s largest bank.
All this has happened since 1994, meaning that South African businesses have been the big winners from Apartheid’s demise. In Kampala, groceries (chicken, apples and sausages), furniture, pay television (DStv), cellphones, financial, real estate and insurance services, basically everything, seems to come with a ‘proudly South African’ logo. Going by recent history, so will be the winning bid to supply Uganda’s election materials.
With such big business comes some hard-knock decisions. Because they have most of the best practices common in Europe and North America, South African businesses are generally well grounded in ethics and professionalism. But just as Enron, Andersen Accounting and other scandals showed us how rotten America Inc. can be, maybe we should keep the red carpet rolled for a while yet. South Africans are certainly more above-board than most Ugandan companies. But only marginally so. Consider just how corrupt Ugandan society has become over the last few years, and ask yourself how anyone could do business without buying off a string of vested political interests.
It would not be surprising, for example, that the company with the winning bid spends half the money it receives on /kitu kidogo /(bribe) to officials in the Electoral Commission, some in the parent Ministry of Justice, others in State House (where men and women with obscure titles wield enormous power) and to a class of comprador ‘lobbyists’ who demand bribes on the strength of their ability to get foreigners appointments with the big man or woman. Apparently, some people are gainfully employed, doing this.
Indeed, because they can produce the ballot papers cheaply, quickly and with better quality, South African companies only have to worry about the hyenas waiting to mark up the winning bid with their percentage.
They have no doubt learnt that to be able to do business in Uganda, one must be willing to roll up one’s sleeves and roll in the mud, and factor the bribe in as a business cost – just like buying a generator (for the incessant power-cuts), a four-wheel drive pick-up truck (for the impassable roads), or medical insurance that covers evacuation (for the frequent times there is neither blood, nor oxygen at the national referral hospital).
For business people nervous about the future of South Africa, Uganda is the new stomping ground and elections and other shenanigans just another business opportunity.
And no, Ugandan politicians have no monkey tricks to teach them.
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