Parliament this week passed yet another supplementary budget that was brazen in its breadth and shocking in its size. Some of the line items are understandable and even reasonable, like the money allocated to fill the funding gap left by the withdrawal of American funding, especially to the health sector.
However, as Kira Municipality MP Ssemujju Ibrahim Nganda noted in a succinct yet sagacious minority report, most of the allocations do not pass the smell test of being “unavoidable and unforeseeable” or the legal and constitutional procedural bars.
Apart from noting that only 21 of the 59 Members of Parliament on the Budget Committee appended their signatures to the report circulating, your columnist has very little value to add and recommends a reading of the report itself, and Honourable Nganda’s valiant yet ultimately futile defence of the public interest.
Instead of wondering why the Electoral Commission, which had only one job to do and five years to do it in, must ask for emergency money to buy a biometric voter verification system and print ballot papers as unforeseen and unavoidable developments, let us consider the more interesting Tale of the Unsold T-shirts.
The story revolves around Fine Spinners Uganda Limited, purveyors of the finest apparel, including some by royal appointment, and who are not strangers to taxpayer bailouts.
We have no reporters in Parliament, so let’s quote from the report directly: “Fine Spinners manufactures T-shirts mainly for the export market, including the United States of America (USA). However, following the enactment of the Anti-Homosexuality Act, Fine Spinners Uganda Limited lost the huge USA market. By that time, Fine Spinners had already invested heavily in [the] manufacturing of 540,000 T-shirts for export. They therefore approached [the] Government and requested support to sell the T-shirts on the local market through Uganda Tailors Association (UTA). UTA will pay back the Government for the T-shirts over a period of 18 – 24 months.”
Hmmm.
Uganda’s removal from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) was first announced in October 2023 and became effective on January 1, 2024. If the said T-shirts were manufactured before or around October 2023, the smart thing would have been to export them quickly before the barricades came down.
If they were manufactured after January 1, 2024, with the market already closed, then that would qualify as the business equivalent of voluntary assumption of risk. One might wonder why the T-shirts are not sold to other markets or even sold directly to the local market by the manufacturer, in the same way that other producers find alternative markets for their products.
Adding a fine spin to this yarn is the revelation, Dear Reader, that Uganda’s tailors have an association. I checked and the thing doth existeth, as a non-government organisation. Cynics will wonder if any milestones are met in the association and on time, or whether each action point is met by excuses and delays.
Optimists, on the other hand, will finally heave a sigh of relief with the realisation that there is an entity to which they can now report their grievances and seek compensation for missing dresses and unfinished trousers.
What is clear to anyone who has worked with a Ugandan tailor or so much as brushed past them on a dusty urban street, feet swaying on the pedal, heads bobbing as hands deftly swing from bobbin to cloth, is that there won’t be any money coming back into the public coffers.
If a large-scale clothes maker is not able to sell half a million T-shirts and has to offload them at taxpayer expense, how are these streetside tailors expected to move them on, collect the money, pocket their margin and send back the rest? We are talking about folks who seldom remember whether their customers brought a jacket or a bedsheet for mending! It is all patched up.
We are not given any details about the style of the T-shirts and if they are still fashionable. Depending on the colour, they might have had a better chance of being picked up by a political party in this election season (insert eyebrow raised emoji). What we can agree on, for free, is that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for any tailors to return any of those T-shirts or money. If the supplementary budget, as a whole, reads like a tragedy, this anecdote is a fine example of spinning a yarn. I’ll eat my T-shirt if we get any of it back.