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Showing posts from January, 2010

When help is (un)kindness

It is an open secret that, 4 years after the 2006 election, the idea of prosperity for all Ugandans has had anything but questionable impact on the wellbeing of poor Ugandans. Now poverty is a serious problem in Uganda, no wonder the people in government thought of the idea of prosperity for all. According to a recent poverty study, one out of every three households in Uganda is absolutely poor meaning they live on less than Shs 60,000 per month. The politicians have been telling us for several months now, that one practical approach the government has taken to make prosperity for all a reality is to choose a model farmer from each village and fund their enterprise to the tune of Shs 6 million and then use the success of this farmer to spur the rest of the village to climb out of poverty. When I visited my village a year ago, I found that the area still did not have a model farmer who had benefited from the prosperity for all money. That is the time I held a discussion with an aunt w

What to make of the NIC IPO

Uganda’s largest insurance firm, National Insurance Corporation Limited, is offering close to 40 percent of its shares to the public at a cost of Shs 45 per share. The IPO which opened on December 31 is closing on February 5 but with hardly two weeks to the close there isn’t the usual interest and excitement that marked east African IPOs of 2008 and 2009. There are four factors that could account for the cool public reception to the IPO, namely: i. Slow publicity. Although the IPO officially opened on December 31, 2009 the prospectus was not available to the public until about January 6, 2010. This meant investors did not have any information to base their decision on for a whole week. It was again another week after the prospectus came out before any brokerage firm issued its analysis of the IPO. In the meantime the only publicity some of us saw was the newspaper articles from the privatisation unit. ii. The MUASA factor. The Makerere University Academic Staff Association (MUASA) has