On January 22, 2019, President Kaguta Museveni left Uganda for Davos, Switzerland where he joined other global leaders at the World Economic Forum.
At the time of his departure, the country was awash with a brief from the Uganda Police of the arrest and deportation of MTN Uganda top executives over allegations that police labelled as national security threats.
In part I of our 2-part series, we tried to question exactly what is haunting the MTN Uganda executives, and we outlined for you the possibility of the matter being linked to the President’s decisions in regards to the telecom company.
President Museveni Vs MTN Uganda
It is no longer a secret that Mr. Museveni has not seen enough good in MTN Uganda’s service to the country over the past 20 years, and is putting strict terms if the company’s license is to be renewed for another decade.
It happens to be that during the renewal process, UCC discounted the license renewal fees for MTN from $100 million originally proposed to $58 million.
This is what could have prompted President Museveni to write to the commission, inquiring “why they reduced the fees to a far less than the originally proposed amount’, and thus putting the license renewal in uncertainty.
The president has also been clearly angry with MTN’s profit repatriation, which he says is limiting the development of the country. To this, he adds the under declaration of their returns to the revenue authorities which pose a big hindrance to the economy.
Meeting with MTN Group CEO
In Switzerland, he met with MTN Group CEO, Rob Shuter to reaffirm MTN Group’s commitment to Uganda and discuss recent developments in the market.
He shared the details in a Facebook post, as below.
“In Davos, Switzerland, I met the MTN Group Chief Executive Officer, Rob Shuter, discussing with him an array of issues. I advised MTN to work towards floating shares on the Uganda Stock Exchange so that Ugandans can partly own the company.
Local ownership is important because it helps us stem capital flight which happens when the company is fully foreign owned. The question of repatriating 100% of your profits yet there is little value-addition and wealth creation for Ugandans is unfair.
It is for this reason that we are banning registration of new fully-owned foreign betting companies while the old ones will not have their licences renewed. All they do is accumulate money from Ugandans then ship it out of the country.
In my meeting with Mr Shuter, I also warned against telecoms underdeclaring calls and cheating our government of revenue. We have bought machines to track these calls but it is still important that the companies do not engage in this vice.”
