Category Archives: Uganda

Imperial Bank Uganda Buyout

While the fate of Imperial Bank in Kenya is yet to be known, it seems to have been concluded in Uganda, where Imperial Bank had a Ugandan subsidiary  with 5 branches, in which the Kenyan bank held 59% of the shares.

Today, in a series of tweets, the Bank of Uganda ‏(@BOU_Official), announced that a new majority shareholder, Exim Bank of Tanzania had bought out the shares, and renamed the bank as Exim Bank Uganda, and with a new board of directors.

They were thus lifting the statutory  management and expect the bank operations  to ‘continue normally.’  No word yet on how much was paid, or who the payment was made to, and if there’s any reaction by the  former majority owners of the bank (Imperial Kenya).

The Business Daily story notes that :

The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) on Tuesday disclosed that Imperial Bank Kenya’s 58.6% stake in its Ugandan subsidiary was sold to Exim Bank for $6.8 million (692.4 million).

The Sh316.5 million balance between the sale price and the amount to be remitted to the Kenyan unit will be used to cover transaction costs and liabilities of the Ugandan operation. The Kenya Deposit Insurance Corporation (KDIC), the receiver manager of the collapsed Imperial Bank Kenya, will receive the amount.

Kenya Agri Exports to the EU take a Hit?

An ad in the September 22 Nation newspaper  has a statement by the European Union addressed to exporters from the East African Community on changes to the tariff regime starting on October 1 owing to the failure of the two sides to sign an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA)

There was also an article in the same paper showing that a draft has been agreed to, and that a final EPA may be signed and effected in time, but others say it is too late for this.

The new rates, while still subsidized compared to what other nation suppliers pay to export to the EU, are still a blow considering that some exports will no longer be duty-free.

EU Agri

EU newspaper ad

While some like tea, coffee beans & carnations will remain duty-free, Kenyan exporters will pay subsidized rates  of 4.5% on tilapia exports (compared to a normal EU rate of 8%), 2.5% for roast coffee (not 7.5%), 10.9% for mixed vegetables (not 14.4%), and 5% for roses and cut flowers (not 8.5%) between November and May – which includes the crucial Valentine’s Day period when some flower farms can earn half their revenue.

This caps what has been a tough year for Kenya’s  exports of tourism, tea and coffee which have all been adversely affected, and now this.  The recently released Economic Survey 2014 showed total exports declined by 3% from Kshs 518 billion in 2012 to Kshs 502 billion in 2013 (as per the Devolution Cabinet Secretary).

Kenya will  qualify for the preferential (GSP) tariffs, while Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Tanzania are currently considered under “least developed countries” and most of their exports to the EU will qualify for a unilateral 0% tariff.

 

Guide to Kampala

A guest post by a visitor to the exotic land of Museveni and Matoke!

There are several airlines flying daily to Entebbe (the international airport is an hour’s drive from Kampala) and these include Fly540 and Kenya Airways which cost about $250 and $300 respectively for a round trip. There is also Air Uganda which just celebrated its fourth anniversary this month.

Getting There: Entebbe Airport was fantastic, well organized, manned, signed, and even though we landed at midnight, it put JKIA to shame. The best thing I like about it was that there were no forms to fill!. The taxi was $35, but I think we got taken for a “ride” – we were approached by the official airport taxi guy and shown those rates, but were sat in another taxi and he didn’t even give us a receipt! Maybe we were easy targets as the last people leaving the airport that night.

Getting Around: Most locals walk and take matatus and boda bodas. Boda bodas are popular because the traffic is so horrendous. We got around in a car provided by our clients, and our driver was the owner of a car hire company that our clients use often. He drove a Rav4 and said it costs about 60,000 Ugandan shillings per day to rent, which is about $25. I’m guessing this does not include the cost of fuel.

Kampala was very secure, I walked around in the evenings too , and there were army and police guards everywhere. However, many have really bad attitudes and are clearly on power trips. Also, I didn’t venture into the kind of places that might be more prone to crime.

Hotels: Serena was overbooked and bumped us! So we paid $150 at Imperial Royale for a single B&B, which is just behind Serena. The hotel was nice, spacious and clean, but they didn’t have hand towels which was weird. I didn’t have time to shop around and ask about other hotel rates. There were a few power cuts every day I was there, but I didn’t pay attention because I was in places where they had generators.

Communications: I roamed with my Safaricom (linked to MTN Uganda), and the reception was terrible. Incoming text messages came in days late and I went hours with no reception at all. My colleague got a local number while he was there and it wasn’t better at all. I’m not sure about the costs. Internet speeds at the hotel we stayed at and at the offices and even with a 3G Orange SIM card in an iPad were slow.

I used English because I mostly interacted with professionals, but I took a small taxi and the driver spoke to me in Swahili. The local English newspaper was a joke! – clearly censored heavily by Museveni’s cronies and full of shallow stories.

Bars & Restaurants: The local dish is MATOKE, MATOKE, MATOKE! People eat Matoke for all 3 meals! There is a dish called Luwombo Lumbwana (I think) that is delicious – it is chicken, fish, or beef wrapped in Matoke leaves (surprise, surprise!) and slow-cooked with groundnut sauce. The groundnut sauce is also served with most meals and it quite delicious and healthy. I didn’t have the opportunity to drink a beer.

I was surprised that they spoke a lot about Museveni. Most people complain about the kind of things we complain about (in Kenya) – roads, corruption and unemployment. However, I think Ugandans are tired of fighting and war, so although they complain, they have resigned themselves to the fate exerted by the rich and powerful. This might explain why Uganda didn’t join the Arab uprising wave after Museveni stole the election.

Sight-Seeing: I think Gorilla trekking is getting popular. There is a small hotel called Casia Lodge that someone recommended highly, as a gorgeous place. It’s alright and the view is nice, not stunning. Kampala is a green city and the lake is huge, so all the fixings of a nice view, I guess.

Biggest Surprise: Sooooo….there is an interesting place called Honey’s Pub near Pride Theater, if I remember correctly. Now, I don’t know how to even begin describing what I saw there! Some Ugandan tribes have girls who, from an early age, certain parts of their bodies are stretched. A lot. More than you can imagine. I’m not talking about breasts. It was freaky! So many of them become exotic dancers (which you and I both know is just a euphemism for “strippers”). It was definitely something a lot of businessmen, especially from Europe, were keen on seeing and were floored by!

Uganda Moment: Expat, CHOGM, Laico, Nirvana

I made a trip to Kampala Uganda last week, which was very short but very relaxing two days. Unfortunately, it was an all-conference (business) trip over two days that left very little time for sight-seeing compared to the last time I was in Uganda, in 2007, but quick in-and-out airport – hotel – conference – hotel – airport with chats with taxi drivers and few locals is how a lot of non-residents form decisions about a country. The town looks better; much spruced up, cleaner, and greener.

  • Election fever: from kids humming his song at the beach ‘Yes, Ssebo!’, to his posters all over town, President Museveni is in election mode, and while it appears early now for campaigns for an election next February (all the candidates, are on the nightly news at rallies), one local remarked that perhaps the president with ‘unlimited’ budget hoped to exhaust his opponents financially by election time.
  • Mobile Issues: Just what is Safaricom roaming? At JKIA I enquired about roaming tariffs in Uganda and was told to leave my line as is. But there, the charges were astronomical, about Kshs 30 to send an SMS and Kshs. 50 to receive a call! Fortunately, I was able to top up with M-pesa. Also, in different parts of town, the roaming partner would change from MTN, Orange, to Warid etc, and sometimes my remaining balance would change.
  • Also as you walk around Nairobi and take it for granted that Internet is everywhere on your phone, the same is not true in Uganda where there was no internet (at least for roamers) and buying a SIM card just for the internet was not worth the effort; so I’d be offline all day till I got back to the hotel in the evening which had a guest wi-fi. a must for any modern hotel
  • CHOGM: There’s a Uganda parliament report on the 2007 Commonwealth heads of government summit (CHOGM) on how money was diverted to build roads to private hotels and apartments, BMW’s and missing blackberry with actions recommend be taken against the vice president and various ministers. Serena and Utalii College are the only Kenyan connection I saw.
  • I went to a bank hall and shock on me was that there is no bullet-proof glass separating cash tellers from customers, and you exchange money over the counter as you would with documents at a customer service desk in Kenya (ok – security guards are armed and everyone goes through a metal detector at the bank door).
  • Finally,  the most telling moment on the trip, was a half-hour at a public beach in Entebbe on the shore of Lake Victoria. This was about a kilometer from the Laico Hotel (yes there’s also a hotel in Uganda controversially transferred and renamed the Laico, not just in Nairobi) and I sat on a beach with our taxi driver and had a Pepsi drink. It was a very peaceful moment, and one you’d be hard-pressed to enjoy in Kenya where every few minutes a hawker will approach you selling fish, music, mobile phones, clothes etc – or in Mombasa at Serena beach, for every walk 20 meters you walk/jog on the beach a young man steps forward to offer you a boat ride. That’s not how it should be.

Swift River 101

On June 16 at the iHub in Nairobi, a talk was given by Jon Gosier the director of Swift River which I first heard of Swift River following its use with Ushahidi following the Haiti earthquake early in 2010 when crisis rescue & response teams faced a challenges of processing 200,000 SMS messages a day. So the question was how do you filter that information to get help to the people (i.e. earthquake victim) who need it?

Jon said Swift River is an open source platform that uses algorithms and crowd sourcing to filter and validate information. He gave a quote from the book the ‘The Long Tail about with such vast amounts of data in the world, there is need for filters to filter. Swift River helps by pulling out data and he mentioned some of the tools used. In his guide titled Swift River in plain English Jon lists the arms of Swift River which include:

• SiLCC pulls keywords from any Text (including SMS and Twitter) and automatically sorts related text ( a natural language processor)
• SULSa automatically detects location of incoming content/reports
• SiCDS automatically filters out duplicate content (re-tweets, blogs, text messages)
• Reverberations detects how influential/popular content is online
• RiverID allows Swift users to carry their Swift score and reputation with them across the web

All these enable an organization facing a challenge of too much data to among other things, pick out what’s important, save time, suppress noise, filter & curate the information. This is more so at time of urgency or crisis

Swift River can also be used by newsroom to manage & curate very large information in a crisis, for online brand monitoring, or for election monitoring. It runs on a free and open source platform. It’s still in development, with more features & improvements being added to the beta (now at Version 0.2.1 Batuque) over the rest of the year by the development team who are based in Uganda.