The last few weeks have been traumatic for citizens who still watch, read and listen to news made in Uganda for Uganda and by Ugandans. The scenes of mayhem emerging out of the Kawempe North by-election, a process to replace the deceased legislator, Mohammed Ssegirinya, shook the conscience of a nation but was neither surprising nor unexpected in a society determined to roll itself down the cliff further then hopefully return to its senses later, perchance in 20 years or so. Despite the sordid scenes from Kawempe, as happens in Kampala more often than not, a few good things also happened but were drowned out by the empty politics and theatrics of a not-exactly important election that will not, in any case, affect the price of tea in Ishaka or the farm-gate value of a kilogram of Arabica coffee in Bugisu. The mannerisms of peasant societies, quite clearly some centuries behind human civilization, are sometimes incapable of comprehension. What the fake was that wahala and brouhaha all about in Kawempe North?
Comrades and friends, we come here tonight not to rant. There’s enough of that in our city of manholes both online and in our city’s bars and pork joints. For today, let’s discuss a topic that ought to preoccupy our public discourse more. Fakes. Sub-standards. Counterfeits. And so, as the Kawempeans were electing their new Member of Parliament, a modest, respectable, soft-spoken but firm and well-meaning human rights lawyer (Elias Nalukola, how was he able to go through the sieve of NUP, a party with a penchant for the low brow?), the Anti-Counterfeit Network (ACN) was also launching Bleep (www.bleep.ug). ACN is a privately founded, Kampala-based organisation that works around combatting and raising awareness about counterfeits.
Their newly-launched app Bleep, was a good thing to happen both for us as citizens and for them as an organisation that’s been in the trenches for a decade. Progress made. This was a positive development for many reasons. Firstly, ACN is a testament of citizen agency and the potential of private initiative to organize and rally around a matter of public (and national) importance outside the infrastructure of the state and with limited foreign or donor support (interference?). I first interacted with ACN as a concept some 10 years ago when one of its founders, the indomitable senior lawyer, Mr. Fred Muwema, a man always boiling with new ideas and likes to think big and different, interested me in his efforts and asked me to join him to midwife the ACN baby. I was a student at the Makerere Law School and a bit all over the place as a 20 or-so year old urban idiot can be, so I didn’t quite focus much but regardless, Muwema and his team pressed on. How fast time flies! It is already 10 years.
ACN is an intriguing model of citizen organizing and the capacity of that approach to make a difference when private initiative, the state, the market, industry and so-called development partners, work in a mutually respectful manner as opposed to a paternalistic, parasite-host, grant seeker-grant giver model that for the most part defines civil society in the developing world. The Non-Government Organisation (NGO) leader and his team is then reduced to a paper-pusher writing proposals with cliché slogans and phrases that align with donors’ interests and having to massage the ego and insecurities of the donor (many of them pot-bellied, bald headed white males) in the name of securing a grant approval. The agency of the individual and organisation is sacrificed at the altar of drawing a fat pay cheque, affording office space rent, foreign trips, grant renewal and validation that comes with being invited for mildly tasty bites and drinks at residences of diplomats who barely have the African courtesy to offer guests seats as they have to eat, drink and indulge in hollow chit-chat, laughing at every stale joke the donor or his senior staff cracks while covering their filled mouths with the palm; all this while standing and acting more polished than one is. Ladidas galore. You just cannot fight counterfeits using an NGO approach that fits in that frame of things.
The creative approach of ACN of getting the market and industry out of their comfort zone as well as nudging government regulators to do more and think outside the four corners of stuffy offices, has potential to enable the organisation escape the NGO-donor trap (or so I hope), that has suffocated the growth of indigenous and innovative citizen-led approaches to dealing with our challenges as societies in transition. For this, the organisation deserves it roses.
But what exactly is the big deal with counterfeits and why does Bleep deserve more attention than it got at its launch? The thing about substandard and counterfeit goods and services is that no one is immunized from their impact. Even with all the security detail and apparatus, a president or minister or top 10 tax-payer company CEO who runs a countryside farm in Rukungiri or Bukedea will not escape the scourge. His or her acaricides or other farm chemicals may as well be as fake as the solar panels and batteries purchased to keep the farm lit and the milk coolers on during power black outs. Alas, entire governments get supplied fake fertilisers which they pass on to the citizen whose crop yield does not improve.
Countries like Uganda whose economic backbone is structured around agriculture are in for a rough ride with counterfeiters who distort the value chain of state and non-state interventions designed to improve the sector. The current hype around the Parish Development Model (PDM) where government seeks to close the gap in financing anti-poverty efforts of the citizen from the lowest common denominator (the village), can only succeed if the farmer who gets a million shillings to bolster their agriculture hustle can obtain genuine pesticides from the agric shop next-door. The poor farmer has no capacity to detect let alone combat counterfeit goods and so he is cheated at the point of purchase and the effects are felt in animals dying because they consumed fake chemicals or crops stunting because the fertilizer or pesticide was bogus. That farmer needs the state. He also needs the elite who can organize innitiatives like ACN to come to his rescue. He also needs the manufacturers and brand owners to play their role and not simply sit back as the market is flooded with fake products in their name. Who will bell the cat if the state is neither under pressure nor motivated by any form of incentive? Here, private citizen formations like consumer protection organisations, think tanks and the likes of ACN come into play. It should be easy, therefore, for African governments to appreciate the logic in designing these poverty alleviation programs with practical and well-thought through solutions to the nightmare of counterfeits in their program design. This means working hand-in-glove with the private sector on all fronts.
If fighting poverty were a war expedition, the commander should not only carry men and women in uniform with weapons and food to the battle field but also have health and other teams along. The Americans from Katakwi call it all-hands-on-deck. It is quite surprising therefore, that across many African countries, energies to improve agricultural productivity do not carry the same momentum and ferocity as efforts to combat counterfeits which undermine such efforts. In more ways than one, counterfeits are a national security problem and ought to be treated and approached as such.
Agriculture is only used as a case to illustrate the point but to close one’s eyes and think through the problem manifesting itself in pharmaceuticals, electronics, quality of road-building materials, etc, is to appreciate just how big this monster is.
Based on data for 2019, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that the volume of international trade in counterfeit and pirated products amounted to as much as USD 464 billion in that year, or 2.5% of world trade. This easily rounds up the economies of countries like Austria and Belgium and tens of African economies combined.
In one publication, OECD notes that, “while counterfeit and pirated goods originate from virtually all economies in all continents, China remains the primary economy of origin. Counterfeit and pirated products continue to follow complex trading routes, misusing a set of intermediary transit points. Many of these transit economies, for example Hong-Kong (China), Singapore or United Arab Emirates, are well developed, high-income economies and important hubs of international trade.”
Furthermore, “Counterfeiting and piracy threaten a large number of industries. Fakes can be found among many types of goods, including common consumer products (clothing, footwear), business-to-business products (spare parts, pesticides), and luxury items (fashion apparel, deluxe watches). Importantly, many fake goods can pose serious health, safety and environmental risks. These include fake pharmaceuticals in particular, but also food, cosmetics, toys, medical equipment and chemicals.”
Just like climate change affects different societies differently, in part due to their level of development and resource envelop size, the menace of counterfeits affects different countries differently. For the most part, in countries in the global south where the state is still building capacity and has to contend with a small resource basket, the governments have more urgent and pressing priorities to attend to and unfortunately, combating counterfeits hardly features. It is for this reason that Uganda, for instance, still has no law on counterfeit and substandard goods and services despite the economy being a major dumping ground for counterfeits. Efforts in 2015 by the trade minister to introduce an Anti-Counterfeit Goods Bill fell by the wayside. The Bill had its own gaps including disagreements on which government agency takes lead as the mandate holder. It was also shallow in its understanding, diagnosis of the problem and prescription of solutions. Luckily, through consistent lobbying from entities like ACN and manufacturers, the current parliament is processing a hybrid law thanks to MP Asuman Basalirwa’s private member bill efforts. There seems to be positive energy towards the bill both from the parliament leadership and the executive and we hope that the bill can finally be passed soonest most.
Back to Bleep
Uganda is, however, not short of laws and policies. The dynamics of implementation of the law are a different ball game. What this means, however, is that the state can only do so much. It is thin on ground as the lead agency in combatting counterfeits, Uganda National Bureau of Standards (UNBS) suffers from the usual resource constraint of public bodies. Others like National Drug Authority, our eyes and ears on the drugs market, are not exempt from the limitations of public institutions in developing countries.
Therefore, private initiatives like ACN, manufacturers and consumers are important building blocks for the pursuit for a solution to the counterfeit crisis. That is why, efforts like BLEEP, a multimedia application, “designed to empower consumers to report suspected counterfeit or substandard products, enabling verification and corrective action by regulators, brands, and other market actors,” deserve more attention from all corners of society.
According to its website (www.bleep.ug), “BLEEP fosters community engagement to uncover the deceptions and hidden risks of counterfeit goods, enhancing consumer experiences with genuine products.” I recently visited the website and was impressed by the ease of navigation for a Bleeper (one who Bleeps- read, reports a fake product by submitting a Bleep report). To the extent that manufacturers and brand owners are able to get real-time feedback from the market (consumers) on suspicious products, the consumer is empowered to tap into the digital age and have somewhere to report fake goods to entities that can do something about it. In the past, all we could do was rant on Facebook or in bars.
A note to the consumer…
It is said that most whisky brands in Kampala are adulterated although my friend, the effervescent and witty Jackie Tahakanizibwa, who chairs the Uganda Alcohol Industry Association, swears that whisky sold by and bought from companies like Uganda Breweries Ltd, are the few that bottle lovers can trust. For the most part, those of us who don’t mind a few sips on the rocks (with ice-cubes) are consuming all tribes of creative liquid ensembles passing off as Scotch whisky and increasing the risk to our livers and brains a thousand-fold. This is how deep the crisis of fakes goes. Imagine over 50% of the bars in Kampala selling fake alcohol beverages. What are we drinking, dear brethren? Imagine how many times a farmer in Akokoro or Nyabushozi has to replace their solar battery or panels and the cost of that on their family’s earnings. Imagine the lives we lose everyday to fake medicines sold in our drug shops. We are living in a fakery fool’s paradise but spending more time on gossip in bars and pork joints, let alone political theatrics in the name of political parties that hardly mean anything in the grand scheme of things while the fake masters as my friend Frank Gashumba calls them, are working day and night to flood our market with more fakes. The launch of Bleep, therefore, offers us a place to start from in this protracted war against a complex multibillion dollar industry that is threatening our livelihoods, health of generations and incomes of honest businesspeople.
To colleagues who are prone to exposure and consumption of these and more counterfeits, I highly recommend downloading the Bleep application on your Google Play (unfortunately the App-store version for I-phone users is not yet out). Let us fight back against the fakes, sub standards and counterfeit lords one bleep at a time. Bleep now. Tell a friend and family member to bleep. This is what citizen agency feels like. Something good came out of the Pearl of Africa, after all, despite all the potholes and chaos of Kawempe.
Ivan Okuda is a writer and lawyer based in Kampala.