Author: Alan Tacca. PHOTO/FILE
National Resistance Movement (NRM) rule has brought many Ugandan women to prominence. Indeed, if President Museveni were to “go to Heaven” today as he suggested he is due, a woman would step in his shoes; at least in theory.
Doing things that men do, women in privileged political positions have pocketed a lot of money. Clean money and dirty money. And when it is dirty money, but the now accepted NRM principle of generously sharing it with her village folk is observed, the big woman can claim a right to continued privilege.
However, there are also women, not necessarily Ugandans or politicians, in the private sector, whose luck is amazing. Take Ms Pinetti of the mysterious hospital being built in Lubowa, on whose story hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ shillings have been lavished. You cannot refuse to admire the lady; how she navigates the territory where pushers of accountability prowl and always come out on top, flashing more billions. Not far behind Pinetti must be Ms Amina Hersi of Atiak Sugar factory.
Evolution may be transforming her cash cow into a white elephant, but as long as the beast still exhibits recognisable bovine features, the cash keeps flowing. There is something very smart about playing ‘unsmart’ combined with ‘vulnerable’.
From reports like the one in Sunday Monitor last weekend, Ms Amina seems to be a novice feeling her way into big-time sugar processing. She is apparently learning on the job in a multi-billion venture involving mostly taxpayers’ money. Plus some of hers.
In her conversation with visiting MPs about her factory woes, she seems to believe that carts should go before the horses. Feasibility studies at Atiak seem to follow failure and heavy losses. Trial and error; then some reasoning; which always comes too late. Atiak reminds older people of Uganda’s sugar factories during Amin’s last days before the Indians came back to rehabilitate them.
President Museveni, who of course knows everything about investors and value addition, will probably urge lawmakers and the National Treasury to keep Atiak on life support since Ms Amina has lamented that she has mortgaged all her homes and other stuff for the sake of this socio-transforming project.
So Atiak will probably survive, even if as half dead. But there is something intriguing that the Atiak story brings out. Before turning to heavy mechanisation, Atiak’s honchos had expected herds of manual labourers in cooperative arrangements to work on tens of thousands of acres of sugarcane for the factory. The collective system failed.
According to Amina’s son, Mohamoud Abdi Ahmed, the company’s director for agriculture and planning, the farmers/labourers did not want to work. “Every farmer relied on another person to do the work, and they all relied on the cooperative to do the work. ”Wow!!! The farmers/labourers in the north must be saluted for refusing to be full-time slaves. How much are they paid?
The supposed factory decision-makers are also not doing enough brain work. They are relying on the government, nay the taxpayers, to work for them, to fill the gaps created by incompetence. The NRM anti-work code has spread.
The ‘lottery’ system, which gives money to politicians, NRM mobilisers and a few lucky individuals for no proportionate work, is strangling the spirit of patient, honest, sustained work. You can win more money by hanging around and cheering powerful politicians than you earn labouring in a sugarcane plantation. And a siphon in the Treasury can make you richer less stressfully than striving to build and operate a functional hospital or an efficient sugar factory.
