Uganda can do it like Finland

Finland’s Maria Lohela, Nationalist MP and leader of the Finnish delegation to the Inter-Parliamentary Union conference in Kampala, subscribes to the idea that Uganda can certainly follow Finland’s development trajectory rather than rely on Donor Aid.

Over a lively private lunch at the Sheraton Kampala Hotel this week, Maria – it’s hard to call her Lohela with her bright blue eyes – stayed clear of donor-speak as she sought to understand her host country better.

“We visited this project run by the Lutheran World Federation yesterday and saw former child soldiers who were being rehabilitated. It was sad but I didn’t feel that sympathetic sadness, I felt that it was good to see that something was being done. And it should be the people here doing it, not foreigners,” she said.

I was a little surprised, but pleasantly.

When I visited Finland last year with a group of African journalists, we hammered home a consistent message around how countries develop.

An official from the Finnish Foreign Affairs Ministry told us the history of the nation and proudly stated that Finland had refused to take aid to pay their war reparations.

“This made us work hard and built innovation in Finland. Every citizen knew they had a duty to work and use their energy and creativity to build Finland back. We did it with pride and paid back all the money,” he said – and they even hosted the 1952 Olympics while paying those reparations!

This in a middle of a presentation about Finland’s development aid projects in Africa.

I was quick to jump in with, “If that worked for Finland so well, why do you think Africa needs development aid?”

At lunch last week with Maria Lohela, I didn’t need to stress the point.

“I think Uganda can do a lot on its own,” she said, “I have only been here for about a week but I can see that there is a lot of potential here. Ugandans are very hospitable people, the country is beautiful and I see that the agriculture here is great. Actually, Tourism and Agriculture can be key sources of your development.”

She hit the nail on the head many more times during our lunch discussion, and I was impressed with her again – just as I had been when I first met her in Helsinki last year.

That time I had just discovered that Finland had given women full political rights – both voting rights and the right to stand for elections, as far back as 1906 – and they have taken that very seriously ever since. Out of the delegation of eight Finns in Kampala for the IPU, half were women, and Maria was leader of the delegation, never mind her possibly being the youngest member.

That, I told her, was a good point of conversation with the Ugandan politicians she would be meeting, and even better for the Ethiopian delegation who sat next to Finland for alphabetical reasons.

But I wasn’t interested in talk-politics – and neither was she, it turned out.

By chance, I selected a lunch table next to two chatty young ladies who looked up a little surprised when Maria and her team joined me. When we stood up for soup, one of the young ladies asked me if this were a Finnish delegation, and then introduced herself as an employee of FINPRO!

The ensuing conversation and spate of introductions was fun.

FINPRO is a 93-year old Finnish consulting initiative whose objective is to help Finnish companies find success when they go out into the world.

This was the kind of intervention, I had told the Finns in Helsinki, that countries such as Uganda needed – not development organizations building toilets and school blocks.

The more Nokias, Rovio Mobiles, Raisios, Olvis and Atrias that come to countries like Uganda to partner and invest with local companies, transfer skills, the faster and more absolute development here will be.

The more Finnish people buying products made in Uganda, the better for all of us.

And the sooner developed countries stop looking at countries like Uganda through the lenses of war and poverty, the better equipped they will be to take advantage of what we have to offer while creating real development opportunities here.

“That is why I am trying to understand things here, because it looks clear to me that things can be improved with the right approach. I like that message to be well understood,” she said.

mugisha: the breakfast thwarter

The efficiency of a man can be extremely annoying if that man is juxtaposed with the type of fellow that I have become accustomed to dealing with in everyday Kampala.

The type of fellow I have become accustomed to dealing with in everyday Kampala, let’s call him Mugisha, does things that you would only believe happen in books of fiction or highly imaginative blogs.

Mugisha will most probably have originated from some place in Western Uganda between twenty and thirty years ago, and has now found himself in the capital city of Uganda trying to eke out a living. It does not matter whether in between his origins and the present day he went to school for any period of time or not, or whether he picked up any useful information regarding such matters as time management, frugality, the reality of scarce resources, and the impact of stupidity on the rest of society in general.

This is why, for example, I could send Mugisha to fetch me a breakfast snack consisting of one kebab and two pieces of cassava from the nearest take-away in and around lower Kololo, and Mugisha will return an hour later with eight samosas – all of the beef variety, and as cold as my office desk.

The lengthy, angry and extremely well-voiced tirade I subject Mugisha to after I have unwrapped the black kaveera to reveal its depressing contents will certainly make its mark on the fellow – but he will not pick up on all the pertinent details of the lesson.

I know this to be a fact because a few days later, I did send Mugisha for a different meal just in case he had a disorder that makes it hard for him to walk into a take-away offering the pre-mentioned kebab and cassava.

To be absolutely sure, I called up Endiro Coffee, whose menu is well positioned in my office for a morning such as the one I had that day, and placed my order with care. All that Mugisha had to do, going by my arrangements, was to hand over a piece of paper with my neat handwriting on it confirming the breakfast order I made, and follow that quickly with another piece of paper issued by the Government of Uganda and signed by the great, bearded Emmanuel Tumusiime-Mutebile.

This last piece of paper represented my last bit of pocket money for the week, going by my domestic budget estimates and the fiscal policy we are currently running. But I had to have a good, solid breakfast because I had an extremely hard day ahead.

With instructions written down and a map to boot, I believed that the collection and delivery of my breakfast could have been accomplished by a dog suffering a spot of myopia.

Mugisha, on the other hand, returned a couple of hours later from a trip that should have taken him a maximum of twenty minutes if he had walked with a small stone in each shoe.

I could have excused that, since sometimes pleasure delayed is pleasure doubled.

Excusing him for turning up with nothing but the very same piece of paper I had given him was impossible, so he was near his death even at around the time he raised his hand and started speaking.

I was patient enough to hear him right up to the point when he raised his second hand as he was saying, in his thick accent:

“I have looked everywhere but I can’t find that place. I asked the bodas, the specials, the policemen and even the rolex people. Nobody knew it. I crossed the road and asked the people in the shops, and even them they didn’t know it. Then I thought about the place where they sell mchomo. I went there but they were not there. The people near there said they only come in the evenings. But now it is morning. I think they come at around five or six there…”

I tolerated the details to this extremely irrelevant point and beyond, all the while not having slain the man – even though I realised that he had taken a right turn at a crucial point in the story where I was directing him INSTEAD of a left turn, and also that he had not bothered to consult the quick map I had drawn on the piece of paper that had the Endiro Coffee name (Endiro Coffee) number, my number, the breakfast that I had ordered, and the map.

“…then I went down the road where I knew they had a hotel with good breakfast things. But they didn’t have these ones on the paper, and they said no-one had called them. In fact, the woman said she did not have airtime so how could you have called her? I told her that since you are the one who called she did not need to have airtime. Anyway, she did not have these things on the paper. By that time I was tired and I could not walk back, so I got a boda…”

And it was here that he raised his second hand to return NOT the money I gave him, but the money I gave him LESS his boda-boda fare from somewhere in Bukoto back to the office.

The options before me as I rose out of my chair ranged from the simple fist-smash right into the centre of his forehead, to a complicated drop kick that would have required me to first move a metre or so to the right in order to jump onto the wall on my left and bounce off of it with my left leg in order to swing my right foot right into the general area where Mugisha’s thick head connects to the rest of his body.

Any Court of Law would have looked the other way and let me go for a real breakfast.

The judge would have certainly considered the fact that this fool of a man would have been entirely to blame for his death.

“Surely,” even an average judge would have posited, “the late Mr. Mugisha would have been reminded at the last ‘hotel’ where he debated with the proprietor over the use of the phone to place an order, that he himself could have made use of his own phone to call you to confirm the name and location of said Endiro Coffee.”

“It only seems fitting,” the judge would have concluded in annoyed frustration – perhaps having himself missed a nice breakfast himself that very morning due to some similar intellectual stumbling by a Mugisha called Bwire or Okello, “that a distastefully doltish fellow such as your Mr. Mugisha has been permanently removed from the sending-for-breakfast society and will never again serve up boiled eggs for tea-and-biscuit meetings in a cold, tightly-packed boardroom at 4:00pm.”

The above judgement, however, was postponed because just as I finished rising but seconds before choosing my preferred method of disposing of said breakfast-thwarting idiot, a female colleague walked in with a brown paper bag.

“Did you order for breakfast from Endiro?”

Spluttering, I affirmed this without taking my eyes off the paper bag.

“Here,” she said, “They said they have been waiting for hours and they couldn’t cancel the order since they had to cook it afresh for you after you called. You are lucky I passed there to buy my early lunch.”

I broke fast, since life had worked it out for me to do so at some point during the day. And I realised once again that a highly-anticipated breakfast can be miserable when consumed cold and later than planned.

But not as miserable as Mugisha the recently-unemployed breakfast thwarter.

abuse sabbatical

Reblogged from scare-a-hero:

I am on Day Eleven of this sabbatical and nobody is enjoying it…except, perhaps, people and companies who pay me to do stuff. And maybe my wife.

It all started Twelve Days ago when I set off for this birthday party…Actually, if I were to be strict about this I would say that it started the day I took my first drink, because I recall quite vividly the story I did about Uganda’s Acoholics Anonymous and its champion, who told an incredulous me that the path to alcoholism starts with one’s first drink.

Read more… 847 more words

my office door

Brand, spanking, non-working new!

See this cheap door handle? Notice the design right at the top there? I first saw these door handles in 1997 when I moved into a muzigo in Bugolobi. They could have existed earlier but I was at university and, before that, either home or boarding school – all of which were old buildings with old, near-antique fittings and fixtures. My days in that muzigo in Bugolobi are understandably hazy, but I clearly recall the angst with which I’d approach my door handle every night after the nightly post-work alcoholic interlude. I always had my key in hand about ten whole minutes before getting to the door itself, and would start thinking of the different ways in which it had confounded me on previous nights. Occasionally, when I least expected it, the key would turn on the first try and the handle would bend downwards, and the door would swing open. For hours after that I would be emotionally unsettled at the experience, and the ensuing lack of sufficient sleep always made my hangovers even more complicated the next day. But I didn’t suffer too much – most times I would get to the door and then begin finger gymnastics with my lock and key. I would ‘surprise’ the lock by slamming the key into it and turning suddenly; or I’d gently slip it in while humming a tune and pretending I wasn’t there, then turn ever so slightly in the hope that the lock would be distracted and forget to seize up. Sometimes I’d get to the door talking at the top of my voice about how murderous my current mood was, hoping that the damn lock and its door would burst open in fear. These ‘tactics’ rarely worked. And I suffered for years. Fast forward to the day I moved into this office, some years ago. When I saw the lock, my eyes flickered a little bit like this guy: I actually hoped, the first time I inserted the key into the office door, that it would be different from the other one… I was wasting time.

The damn lock bullied me just as its cousin in the muzigo had done all those years ago.

I played along for three straight days before giving up and assigning my man in the office – Dalton – the added responsibility of ‘Doorman’ with strict instructions to ‘be at the door and open it as soon as I approach the office building’.

After about four days, he also showed signs of waning – which I noticed because his shoulders slumped a little every time he approached the door. Suspecting that he was getting ready to abdicate, I threatened to insert a clause in his contract around the management of the lock, and he straightened his back on realizing that the damn door was becoming a threat to his entering into an eighth year of uninterrupted service.

In the course of his being doorman, we became good friends, mostly because we found ourselves spending lots of time standing at my door as he fidgeted with the key and lock trying to get it to open up. Small talk frequently ensued, sometimes threatening to burst out into lengthy discourses on the meaning of life.

But most of all, we developed a joint, deep-seated hatred for the lock and it’s door.

Fast forward to October last year, when I decided that enough was enough and issued fresh instructions: (“Get rid of this damn lock!”) which I repeated every four days or so with increased sternness till the holidays broke out and the spirit of Christmas made everything mellow.

Until last Monday.

Returning to the office from a frazzling customer meeting, I inserted key into lock while running a lengthy phone call and finished a long discussion on the merits and demerits of a proposal I was pushing through to some client, when I realised that I had been turning the key to no end for about two whole minutes.

The lock appeared to have given way!

A little excited that this was probably it’s last day, I summoned Dalton at the top of my voice and pointed him to the offending lock.

Without a word, though I could see his disappointment at having to deal with this even though I had gotten to the door before him, he jumped right in and began turning the key.

I watched him and became hypnotized until it hit me that another two minutes had gone by with him turning the key non-stop in one direction.

“Stop!” I shouted, a little excitedly at the prospect that this was finally over.

He stopped.

And looked at me.

“So?” I asked him.

“The door has refused to open,” he responded.

Dalton does this a lot. He finds no irony or mirth in standing there and expressing the obvious as if he has made a mind-blowing discovery. At this point, for example, he had made no consideration that I had been standing there watching him try to open the door for two whole minutes, or that I had already tried for about the same time and failed to unlock the door. He also wouldn’t have appreciated a wisecrack response such as, “The door cannot refuse because it is inanimate…”

He did, though, appreciate a stern look that he was quite familiar with which said, “It’s your job to find solutions, not to state problems. If I can’t get into that office then you are not doing your job, which means that you won’t be entitled to a salary – which I technically cannot even write a cheque for since all the necessary paraphernalia for this are on the other side of that door.”

That look, though, only penetrated after another two or so minutes. And my only clue that it had penetrated was his jumping up suddenly and saying, “Let me get a carpenter.”

Fair enough.

I took refuge in the boardroom and emerged an hour later to find the good fellow patiently waiting for the carpenter, at which point I realised that he might be … “Wait…what is the carpenter coming to do?”

“To fix the lock.”

Controlling my temper considerably, I launched into a discussion around the amount of angst that the damn lock had caused to both him and me, and concluded my submission by politely asking him if he really wanted someone to repair the wretched thing and therefore keep our misery going for a while longer.

I managed to persuade him.

Like the Terminator on a fresh mission, he headed straight for the Administration and Accounts people, and within minutes he was out the gate.

Off to buy a new lock.

I retreated to the board room, my mind at peace. My heart was racing just a little bit faster in anticipation that I would soon be walking into my office cubicle with a minimum of fuss and far less stress than ever before. I pried the old key off my key ring and actually laughed at it straight in the face.

Three hours later, Dalton was the board room door.

“Sir. I have finished!”

The smile on his face brightened up the day further, and I marched behind him ramrod towards the door and our brand new, hassle-free, quick opening, modernistic, double-action door lock:

(See picture above)

*Dalton was not harmed in the recount of this tale.

innovation

thinking out of the paper packaging box in which the original table would have had to be shipped in

This morning Shane sent me this photograph with the caption, “These guys won’t sit back and wish for things they can’t have”, and I immediately thought to myself: “Innovation”, and then defined the word in my mind as “Making use of what you have to get what you want.”

I was impressed with myself – anyone who wants to make use of that quote, please ensure you attribute it to me – Simon Kaheru, February 10, 2012.

As you go about your work, think about these guys above.

If we were a more organised society, the government people in charge of innovation (would that be the Ministry of Technology and Industry or something – which we don’t have…or the Uganda National Institute of Science and Technology?) would run up to that village, take those kids up and insert them into some programme that will make them great inventors.

It is kids like these above who are going to come up with a once-and-for-all solution to the potholes in Kampala – or the answer to all the nonsensical problems we suffer on a daily across the country.

Discussing this on another forum, Guma declared himself to be too shy to make his comments public, but suggested that the problem with the above is that the government might not be willing to take the kids and their ideas up.

I think otherwise – the objective is not for the government itself to pay but for us (the private sector and whatnot) to make use of them.

If this mud and wattle table gets seen by more people, for example, somebody should think of setting up a chain of such tables while somebody else makes balls out of some local material…

Then, the money that has been rolling out in $s to import those tables you see by the roadside will instead stay here and get used to do more serious things or perhaps get channelled into buying tractors and more useful equipment than pool tables.

Meanwhile, hotels will begin to crop up in Moroto with mud and wattle furniture because these kids have shown us it is possible…and it will be listed as one of the world’s great places to visit because of the novelty of sitting on a mud bench as one sips stuff like Ugandan grown and brewed tea.

abuse sabbatical

I am on Day Eleven of this sabbatical and nobody is enjoying it…except, perhaps, people and companies who pay me to do stuff. And maybe my wife.

It all started Twelve Days ago when I set off for this birthday party…Actually, if I were to be strict about this I would say that it started the day I took my first drink, because I recall quite vividly the story I did about Uganda’s Acoholics Anonymous and its champion, who told an incredulous me that the path to alcoholism starts with one’s first drink.

That was way back when I was just beginning to extricate myself from life as a university student. Being in university, a pal of mine (Stephen M^l3ma) said, was “three years of seriously mismanaging one’s life”.

But let’s start at about eleven days ago. That Saturday evening, I went out to a party quite innocently, with full wifely permission to have a ball. I am sure of this because we were scheduled to go together till some medical doctor took it into her head to advise my better half that taking it easy would be the best plan for that Saturday evening.

The sky was growing dark as I drove out of the gate – not because dusk was approaching, but because the weather seemed to be turning. Remember, this was ten days ago, when the sun was hovering at about the level of most ventilator windows in Uganda. Remember, eh? Those days just recently here when we would be drinking water by the gallon and feeling it evaporate through the nostrils even before it got to the epiglottis? Eh? When piggeries had taken on a distinct smell of bacon in a clay pan?

The storm that was impending as I drove out of my corner of Kampala was impressive. To be honest, the manner in which the lightning blazed across the skies that night appeared to be a hint from the Almighty that I should really be turning back to the safety of home, but my judgement was clouded by the deafening thunder that followed, so I drove on blithely into the party night and succumbed to the excitement brought on by the long-anticipated rains. Let me just say now that I strongly suspect that after that weekend there must have been cows, pigs, goats and other such tasty animals that became so excited by the rain that they slung themselves onto mchomo grills to celebrate.

I did the alcoholic equivalent.

The downpour was only the beginning of my downfall, both of which continued when I got to the party venue and found that the rain had forced the DJ and mchomo guy to take up occupancy in the tent that had been planned for guests.

Being a small residential party, the plan appeared to be for the small 50-seater tent to provide cover just in case the sun persisted beyond 2100hrs, as it sometimes seemed to in those days. This small tent, we discovered after twenty minutes of rain, can actually fit 80 people under it alongside a large BBQ grill, a DJ and his equipment, and one or two of his speakers. And a table for the rest of the food. Plus all the other people who run out of their cars into the rain, cross a parking lot, and race up the grass into the same damn small tent.

Cold, wet, dishevelled and squashed between machinery, smoky well-marinated meats, loud machinery and other cold, wet beings, I focussed on warming up the good old traditional way when a party presented itself. It took a while before I began to confuse the lightning for fireworks, and after managing to suppress the urge to go, “Yeah!” the third time, a streak of lightning shot down the side of Kololo Hill, I decided to sober up a little and changed drinks.

My condition at the time, what with the continuous exposure to heat since the start of the year, the sudden onset of rain and the presence of alcohol exacerbated by the absence of guests this wet and cold night, was not good.

Under normal circumstances, changing drinks would have involved the introduction of water or soda or even fruit juice. These were not normal circumstances, and it wasn’t long before I lost the plot entirely.

To cut a long story short, I believe I was ejected from a night club shortly before the sun came up, and made it home without incident as far as memory serves.

I awoke at 1000hrs to find the good lady of the home sitting by my bedside ready to cook me a hearty breakfast punctuated by painkillers and fresh juice.

But not before she politely informed me that I had stopped drinking for a month.

I was too messed up to think about what I was agreeing to – and the reality hit me the next Wednesday as my throat started thinking about the coming Friday.

But I have stuck to the so-called ‘agreement’ these eleven days past and must say they have been pretty good so far. The house help can’t stand me, because now I have my superpowers back and keep pointing out dust on the wall at the bottom of the compound…at 2000hrs; and can hear them not turning the tap off in time to avoid letting a few dr0ps go to waste up at the boys’ quarters.

But I am on an abuse sabbatical and I will stay here no matter how much anyone complains.

For the next eighteen days.

Unless my wife decides to politely update me one morning.

the house that we built – chapter one

It’s been about five months since I’ve been here effectively and I am happy to report that I have not killed a single artisan or manual labourer.

Yet.

Actually, it’s been more like two years that this has been going on, and in that time the only casualty that I can report has been my confidence in the Ugandan labourer. This goes for many of the fellows in between my misguided former askari-turned-handyman (mentioned in an earlier blog involving an early morn boda-boda accident) and a fellow called Ronald Kasozi who is currently holding up my usage of the spanking new dining room table.

Speaking of Kasozi, I strongly recommend the use of the furniture that this guy makes. It is fantastic! This is the humble fellow who made the tables and chairs at Endiro Coffee, so ask no questions about his proficiency.

I am sure that, like me, you also have a strong dislike for those dining room chairs that are lined up in places like Nsambya, all sticky and disgusting to the touch like they’ve been varnished with a mixture of superglue, honey and some loose strands of hair from a waitress in Kalerwe (I don’t eat there, but just imagine…!). We spent weeks upon weeks going round looking for dining room chairs to go with the beautiful table we’d bought from our Wood Guy, Alan Jamani (you will certainly hear more about him later).

It was only after I’d been to Endiro for my fiftieth time that it struck me that I should get the same damn chairs they had.

I considered it too rude to suggest to them that they sell me six of the chairs, so I asked if they’d mind sharing the carpenter’s contact with me.

“No problem,” Gloria said, scrawling the number down on a post-it.

Long story short, Ronald Kasozi readily made himself available and we made our way to the house so he could assess the task.

I’ve worked out over the years that the best way to get these artisans to meet your expectations is by showing them the standards you stick to and challenging them to measure up.

That’s the best way – but it doesn’t always work, as the story of plumber Simon Matheka will illustrate later on.

So after a tour designed to set my expectations, I pressed Ushs200,000 into Ronald Kasozi’s hands and sent him on his way, while he deposited, in return, fervent promises of delivery within seven or eight days.

Foolishly optimistic, I told the family we would be sitting down together to dinner within three weeks – building in inefficiency buffers within reasonable measure.

I can’t explain why I did that.

The last fifteen years or so of my life have been spent in learning how to manage expectations, and if I had been thinking right that evening I would have declared that we would be sitting down together to dinner within seventy to eighty days.

Ten days later, Ronald Kasozi wasn’t ready, and he politely informed me so when I called him in mild irritation since I had guests coming over for the afternoon and would have been pleased to sit down at table with them.

“Give me until Tuesday,” he said.

Naturally, that day being a Saturday, I thought he meant the Tuesday coming, and called him on the Wednesday morning only to discover that he actually had meant Saturday.

When I called him on the Sunday morning, he said again, “Early this week, sir.”

We have danced this bakisimba for two and a half months and tomorrow, the

Dancing like crazy - here, there, everywhere...

last day he promises that for sure he will have the chairs ready, I will be driving over to his workshop in Bweyogerere, somewhere opposite the Total petrol station.

I will be heading there to conduct some preventive murder measures.

My calculation is that rather than sit back and wait for him to fail to deliver on Friday evening, then thrust myself into a murderous rage, I will camp out at his workshop and supervise his completion of the six chairs so that I don’t have to kill him.

Oh, by the way, last week I bought six dining room chairs from Game.

Made in China.