{UAH} EXTORTION: THE REAL REASON FOREIGN COMPANIES ARE FLEEING UGANDA.

EXTORTION: THE REAL REASON FOREIGN COMPANIES ARE FLEEING UGANDA.

I am writing this on behalf of all the foreign investors who are leaving, have left, or a still clinging to doing business in Uganda despite all the troubles they face. Foreign businessmen and women who find themselves in a situation where they have been muzzled, cannot speak out because they risk seeing their investment go to dust, and therefore remain silent about the true reason behind their failure to be successful in the Ugandan market. While the so-called economics analysts and experts can be found in the local media claiming that issues like market share, purchasing power or per capita income are the reason for foreign companies to leave the country, it is clear that these local experts actually don't really get it. Especially in tiny country with a 48 million population.

The grim unspoken realities of a foreigner doing business in Uganda are way beyond the economics taught in any school.

Reknown Daily Monitor newspaper researcher Timothy Kalyegira went on social media and asked: "Shoprite, Game, Pep Stores, Etihad Airways, Nakumatt, GulfAir, Uchumi, Steers, British Airways, Shell, Barclays, Nando's, Tuskys, Orange, now Africell - all leaving the Ugandan market since 2012. Are all these international, regional brands failures or is Uganda's economy weak?"

I wanted to respond to Timothy but then i realized that the 141 characters that Twitter limits us to, would not be sufficient to meaningfully unearth the real problem.

So let me undress this evil as simply and as clearly here: The one leading reason why foreign businesses and multinationals are leaving the country is because the leadership of this country and its cronies, everyone who thinks he or she is a somebody owning this country, is scrambling every single day to extort money from these foreign investors. S demanding cash on a monthly basis, and each one cooking up whatever amount they want from the investor. This heinous harassment is relentless, and many times has turned dangerous to the lives of investors when both parties disagree. Once it reaches that stage, the business has to shut down, and the investor has to leave.

In my view this is what almost caused the exit of MTN a couple of years ago, but the extortionist covered it as implementing a government policy to make MTN pay more taxes, ànd then adding the Rwanda-Uganda feud in the mix to cover their tracks by getting several MTN managers deported. It had all the hallmarks of a failed extortion attempt that turned sour.

Meanwhile, in the last three decades, I estimate that about ten thousand honest business investors have arrived in Uganda and immediately run away simply because of this extortion behaviour. It is at all levels. Everyone is asking for something. Others are positioning themselves as God Fathers to whom a huge illegal monthly amount has to be paid for no reason whatsoever. A true mafia enterprise indeed.

Foreign investors endure too much local greed by so-called "senior government officials" at levels unseen previously in the entire history of this country.

Many investors have packed their bags and left even before setting up shop in the country, and they flew off vowing never to set foot in Uganda again ever. That is how bad the situation really is.

Uganda Bureau or Registration Services and Uganda Bureau of Statistics should provide an estimate of frustrated investors who have left the country in this way, and how much foreign investment the Ugandan economy has missed in this way. Because no matter how loud government advertizes the policy of attracting foreign investment to the country, no matter how eloquent they sound at foreign summits and business symposiums, they themselves are the very individuals who then turn around and undermine their own policy by their own backdoor greed. They have been doing so for decades, and want this secret and it's giganomous proportions kept under wraps. There is no way any honest businessman can invest in Uganda and/or do business in/from Uganda under such a hyena governance environment. It is only international crooks and money launderers with black budgets for kickbacks and buying influence who can maintain a Foreign investment business façade in this country.

I am stating this publicly because nobody seems to be nailing it as the source of the problem, or understanding the true humongous scale, in billions of dollars, of this heinous parasitic phenomenon. Civil society, the monetary and financial policy watchdogs and economics experts must start doing research and putting estumates to this pandemic: Extortion.

Allow me to conclude by saying that had this behaviour not been this pervasive, I estimate that Uganda would today be at least four times more developed than it is right now. Measuring all what Uganda has missed because of this greed is the best way to see how really big the problem really is.

But those involved in this extortion scam want you to believe that the economy you see now is the best anyone could have ever achieved for Uganda. They are even giving themselves mysterious global awards for it. I could not believe my eyes when transparency international gave an anti-corruption award to a Ugandan who had ostensibly just been found guilty in the US of receiving a million dollars in exchange for giving oil contracts to a particular foreign company.

If even a reputable global NGO like Transparency International is in the game, then what hope is there for Africa, it's economy,  and the future of its empoverished peoples?

While we are still on the oil industry, imagine all the extortion phone calls that a company like the French multinational Total should be enduring on a daily basis as we speak, after clinching the extremely lucrative oil exploration and pipeline contracts. What about the American giant General Electric that supposedly won the contract for building Uganda's oil refinery. All the leeches must be swarming the bosses of these companies to suck every drop of blood they can from these companies coffers. Remember that a Russian corporation had initially won the refinery contract, but abandoned it and mysteriously fled the country as if the Taliban were coming.

For these huge companies to quit because staying does not make business sense, given the huge profits they ordinarily make, then imagine the extortion amounts that would make all these companies consider the entire Uganda adventure a mathematical net loss.

Our corrupt elites function under a secret ideology that arrogantly believes being corrupt and "eating" government funds is the smartest thing in the world, and that anyone who doesn't do it is stupid.

In reality you have to be abit dumb to believe that corruption is the smartest thing a human being can ever do or be. Forgive me for being this blunt but such thinking is in fact the designated intellectual level of apes and monkeys if Darwin's theory of evolution is anything to go by. Otherwise primates would be living in cities and travelling to the moon by now just like their advanced, more compassionate and more responsible cousins, human beings, who built great civilizations mostly through ingenuity, innovation and problem solving in all fields of human endeavour.

I am posting this on a Social media platform called Facebook. A company which is real living-God evidence that a little meaningful ingenuity is financially way smarter than all these corrupt thieves combined.

By Daniel

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