These boda boda will lead us into financial redemption

Boda bodas, are a million businesses that neither rob public funds nor charge market prices.

Photo credit: Joseph Nyagah | Nation Media Group

In the just ended Festive season, Uganda’s Anglican Archbishop Stephen Kazimba had one strong message for husbands: stop DNA paternity tests; you are not greater than Joseph who accepted Mary knowing she was already pregnant, and raised her son called Jesus so well.

Next season the prelate might propose World Stepdads’ Day and also urge wives to accept ‘outside’ children. Who knows, maybe if Joseph had brought an “outside kid” Mary would have raised it as hers.

You might know a family whose despised child ended up redeeming the esteemed ones. Maybe there were four girls and three got married in church say, in the early 1990s, died of Aids by 2000 through no fault of theirs but the husbands’, and the fourth, a party girl who neither married nor got infected, raised and educated her nieces and nephews to independence and prosperity.

Or it was a boy ‘born outside’ and brought into the main family where he lived more as a slave than a son, did well in school as his pampered half-siblings messed, and end up as the clan saviour.

A keen observation today discerns some slow, baby steps by Uganda’s despised stepsons to redeem our financially illiterate society maybe in a decade.

They are called boda boda, hitherto known for reckless road conduct and foul mouths. You might miss it but it is there – boda boda are becoming more sophisticated than most Ugandan entrepreneurs. This sounds outrageous so here is the perspective.

First the numbers: most estimates say active boda boda operators in Uganda are one million, meaning over two percent of the 47 million population.

When Yoweri Museveni took office four decades ago, he used to note the absence of a significant middle class, then probably below 10,000.

Today there maybe some 50,000-100,000 rich Ugandans but a good number being parasitic through public sector corruption, mostly spending on imports consumption or money laundering through distortional real estate acquisition.

Boda bodas, on the other hand, are a million businesses that neither rob public funds nor charge market prices.

Secondly, boda boda operate virtually tax free, save for the overtaxed fuel they buy. This makes them generally profitable, the laziest probably making the equivalent of $10 a day in profit, making $300 a month, twice what most civil servants earn.

Those criticising government for “pampering foreign investors” don’t ignore the million pampered citizens who don’t repatriate profits.

Thirdly, the tax-free and easy-to-enter trade is increasingly attracting university graduates. While boda grads mostly start off as target riders seeking quick capital to get out fast and do “better” things, they tend to stay longer.

Their work ethic and organisational capacity start rubbing off onto colleagues who never finished secondary school, let alone write a dissertation. That could explain why you see less recklessness and hear less vulgar words by boda riders.

Fourth, starting in Covid-19 lockdown, boda boda branched into goods delivery — one of Museveni’s innovations that time when he used to address the nation weekly, fortnightly and announce new do’s and dont’s — and they’ve never looked back.

The $10 a day is the lowest earning, a boda who does deliveries plus passengers easily nets $50 daily, $1,500 a month or $18,000-$20,000 a year.

Fifth, the profitability has been by suppliers who offer the bikes on credit. In other words, more and more riders are riding their own bikes, with less ‘investors’ owning bikes to employ riders.

Today, suppliers collect payment in $25 weekly installments for two years. In a sense therefore suppliers of boda bikes on credit could be the biggest economic liberators of Uganda in recent years, with a million local investors enabled to set up.

Sixth, boda boda are quietly leading the public’s adoption of transport electrification. While the government initiated e-mobility by investing in design and manufacture of e-buses, it is the much maligned boda boda who have been making individual decisions to go electric, while the elite continue to import fuel guzzling cars.

Since on any day boda boda carry more passengers than four-plus wheelers in Uganda, when (and not if) they all use electricity due to the much lower cost than using petrol, the tipping point will have come – Uganda’s pollution will start reducing in absolute terms.

Buwembo is a Kampala-based journalist. Email: [email protected]