MTN’s forced listing, and censoring songs and plays: A new ‘Aminism’?

What you need to know:

Patronage needs. Someone was trying to convince me that as the rest of the economy gets more run down, and Museveni’s “retirement” draws closer with each year, some loyalists are looking for their “pensions”. There is no more enough money in the Treasury to service their patronage needs

In recent days, President Museveni and other leaders have upped their call for South African mobile giant MTN (Uganda) to list its shares on the stock exchange “so Ugandans can share in the wealth” the company is creating.
To some, the problem is that MTN is taking most of its profits outside the country. That, actually, is how it should be – the profits go to shareholders, wherever they are - and that is what it means to “attract foreign investment”.
There is a certain attraction of redistributing the profits of foreign companies to the citizens, yes, but there are right and wrong ways to do it. For example, Ugandans would find it strange – if not outright ludicrous - if Kenya, which buys electricity from us, tomorrow pressured Umeme to list on the Nairobi Stock Exchange so that Kenyans can enjoy a share of its revenues.
The sense of injustice and exploitation some feel in Uganda is, therefore, born of the fact that there are no Ugandan companies out there in the world making big money and bringing it back home.
In African countries that have their firms trading around the continent raking in the big bucks and taking it home (South Africa with its dozens of businesses; Kenya with its banks, breweries, and lately technology companies, for example), the sense of being cheated by foreign companies isn’t so sharp.
In fact in recent times, Kenya has even scrapped the law requiring foreign companies operating in the country to have Kenyans as a proportion of its board of directors.
So, what is the right way to deal with foreign companies is not to respond to the FOMO (the insecurity or fear of missing out on something or an opportunity). Long-term, it is to have policies that enable your companies grow outside your borders. Right now, the Ugandans who are doing that are not very glamorous – they are the farmers. They have brought big trade surpluses with countries like Rwanda and Kenya.
The second, which the government is doing currently with MTN, is negotiating a fair fee for the licence. But above all, is to require that firms shall list, depending on certain criteria, or based on the sector, BEFORE you licence them to do business in your country.
MTN Uganda chairman Charles Mbire was correct on this when he was quoted suggesting that all multinationals should list, not just MTN. Why MTN and not the Chinese construction firms? Why not TOTAL or the foreign banks?
Right now, we are cherry picking. MTN is not the only foreign telco – it just happens to be the most successful one. Listing then becomes some kind of punishment for success. But even with that, one could still see the case for an MTN. Except that, something else happened that should be cause for pause.
The government announced that it was ready with a law that would require musicians to submit their lyrics, playwrights their play scripts, and filmmakers their scripts, for approval before production! In addition, musicians would need permission to travel to perform abroad.
This is serious stuff. The short-term aim of this return to old Africa, clearly, is to deal with radical musician and MP Robert Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine, who has become a giant bee under President Museveni’s hat. Long-term, as opposition grows, it is to control the use of all creative content as a vehicle for anti-regime political commentary – something that Ugandan artistes have become very good at.
But mostly, controlling the leading telco through getting establishment business people who have the money to snap up the majority of listed shares, allows the government – should it need to - to seize the main pipe through which content to and from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, etc, is distributed – mobile Internet. In the process, it can privilege pro-regime content, while suppressing the critical ones. It is why MTN would be a target for a forced IPO, not TOTAL.
Someone was trying to convince me that as the rest of the economy gets more run down, and Museveni’s “retirement” draws closer with each year, some loyalists are looking for their “pensions”. There is no more enough money in the Treasury to service their patronage needs.
Therefore, we are in a “neo-Amin” phase, akin to the 1972 expulsion of Ugandan Asians and the grabbing of their property by Idi Amin and his henchmen. Except this time, it is by a sophisticated means of forced listing. He thinks other successful foreign companies might be next.
That would be folly multiplied many times. A version of that is already happening in neighbouring Tanzania, and the people who have been most spooked by President John Magufuli’s similar actions, are Tanzanian business people.
They have taken their money and run with it to Dubai and Nairobi.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is the publisher of Africa data. visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site. Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3