What Kenyan crooks can learn from Ugandan tricksters

Uganda’s film censorship board should come up with an additional category of movies and series that are not allowed in the country.

In fact, they should ban all programmes that teach people to be tricksters or swindlers.

Methinks the brilliant actors in Leverage, White Collar and Hustle (TV series that most Ugandans are watching)put the ‘artist’ in the title ‘con artist’. These series teach you not only to be more observant, but also how to take advantage of greedy people.

One of the rules in Hustle for instance is “Find somebody who wants something for nothing, and then give him nothing for something”.

See, in Uganda we have gone beyond ‘ghost workers’, we now have ‘ghost organisations’ that employ real people to do real jobs for a short while, until the monies hit the account and then the whole house of cards collapses.

These scams take years and sometimes months to pull off, but are very well planned and executed.

There was once a telecom firm called Sure Telecom that allegedly used a fake certificate of incorporation from the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) to set up office and even ran brand building adverts.

Things only went awry when Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) started investigating their Sh34Million tax refund. When the case finally got to a judge, the director only got a 2 year sentence which means he will be living rent free and can run a web based business with that capital.

He should have taken tips from the guy in Jinja who set up a fake bank.

Radio ads were ran asking people to open accounts and deposit Sh800 per day for a month so as to access loans to buy boda bodas and plots. These titles would thereafter be used as security to service the loans.

Suddenly unavailable

The catch was that you had to be an account holder with an active account. At the end of the month almost 100 people showed up to get loans. The employees said they had to call the boss who was suddenly unavailable.

Police swung into action only to discover that at the end of every day the collections would be sent to the boss via mobile money, and thus only dust could be found in the bank coffers.

These two were petty compared to the current scandal that has caused heads to roll at the Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA) and Housing Finance Bank. We believe all things imported are good and genuine, and if they are American they must be the best.

This is how a company purporting to be a branch of a major American corporation won the deal and started building a road. UNRA paid the initial deposit for the works to start, and then the rumour mill revealed that the ‘Americans’ had subcontracted the Sh5.8B contract to a Chinese firm who paid the directors Sh18M for insurance bonds.

fake signatures

Whistles blew left and right and when the dust finally settled, the contract figure seemed to be Sh100M short. The performance security at the bank was proved to be fake and the account that UNRA paid monies into appears to be sheltering cobwebs.

It is a story of fake signatures and finger pointing. We shall need a very big rug to sweep this under because so far various MPs and ministers are finding their names being linked to the scandal.

Crooks in Kenya can borrow a trick or two from these brilliant Ugandans.