AUTHOR: Ben Matsiko Kahunga. PHOTO/FILE/COURTESY
Our meeting had become more of a periodic ritual. The last time I visited him was when I picked Kikokomoto, the back-to-school sabot that was the flagship brand in his portfolio.
And so, it was three weeks ago when I went to order more of these for the school-going lads. Arriving at his factory, it took me upwards of half an hour of up-close gazing and mind clearing, to come to terms with what lay before me. There they were. Looking smart in their branded polo shirts, rim hats and arm bangles, a motley crew of a score of lads and girls, mid- twenties on average. Lined up in groups of five, each was receiving the day’s stock and tools of work: assorted discarded shoes from Europe and America. After signing the stores documents, each team jumped into their branded sales van (the type we called dudu in the early nineties). These are the mobile selling shops.
They took off, each to its assigned market territory around Kampala. The two sales managers who remain indoors handle orders from upcountry towns, both walk-ins and shipment by courier. Yes. It has come to pass. Kamugisha has succumbed to STD. He has thrown away all his mind-clouding faith in 'BUBU’ and has gone full STD: Speculation, trading and dealing. He had held onto his ka-workshop producing world-class shoes made in Uganda. Slowly but steadily, mitumba started hitting him hard. He persisted for some time, even taking the post-Covid hits. School orders started dwindling. Even the fashion-savvy ladies of the stiletto class became a trickle.
Yet family and social demands were growing. He breathed hard and caved-in. He went mitumba full-throttle. As we settle down in his posh corporate-level office upstairs, he talks a language radically different from the one he talked a few years back. He has refocused and shed all that held him into what he believed he shared with many. Yet, he realised, he had been left alone when everybody boarded the STD ship. He thus had to jump onto it belated and reorganiSe his business, including re-training and re-branding his sales team. While his sales teams handle the speculation and trading around Kampala in their vans, his own preoccupation are the ‘deals’.
These are the cash cow of the business. Deals here means special bulk orders for re-export within the region. The goods in this category are purposely-sourced from high-end ‘pre-owned’ goods stores. They undergo a ‘reconditioning’ treat that includes fumigation and scenting, new laces, pairs repacked and lots shipped in pallets. They are poles apart from the general assorted type for ‘ordinary’ selling. South Sudan and north-eastern DRC are the most lucrative export markets. And he is growing rich. He has graduated from his work-house of a G-Touring into a posh Lexus. The only Kikomoto I saw is among the mementoes of his brands adorning the office walls, alongside Rugaaju the light-tan safari boot and Kagabo black-white stiletto.
Asking him about his BUBU commitment, he reminded me of our classmate's dilemma during our adult school days: she worked for a foreign company here, importing final products, declaring them raw materials. The documentation and all, fell under her docket. In a class discussion of business ethics, she told us her story and then asked 'ethics tunaazilya'…she would not eat ethics, given her family responsibilities. No one had answered her. Neither did ask Kamugisha again about BUBU. Yet it is not Kamugisha who is the loser.
It is a long line of stakeholders on the value chain before and after his workshop. One particular category of losers are the pupils under his ‘school-shoes’ programme. Under this, his company supplied affordable quality shoes to select deserving schools subsidised by the premium price on his branded shoes new shoes sold. The schools still receive the subsidised shoes, but this time from the imported ‘assorted’ type. The skilled craftsmen he had invested in lost jobs, with only three remaining to do ‘pre-sales quality assurance’ of the assorted portfolio. Kamugisha is not alone. Uganda is the net loser.
