CNOOC awards Hoima and Kikuube students with USD 14,000

KIKUUBE – At least USD 14,000 (Shs.49,500,000 million) has been given out to students from Hoima, Kikuube districts and Hoima City who excelled in last year’s national examinations.

The money was given out by China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) Uganda, one of the companies involved in the exploration of oil in the Albertine Graben.

CNOOC is taking the Kingfisher oil field in Buhuka parish Kyangwali sub-county in Kikuube district onshore of Lake Albert.

Kingfisher field development area is spread over approximately 344kms in the Lake Albert Rift Basin in western Uganda.

The oil field is situated on the eastern bank of Lake Albert, which acts as a border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It was discovered by the Kingfisher-1 wildcat well in 2006.

The funding will go to 180 pupils and students from the three local governments selected by the offices of the District Education Officers (DEOs) based on the Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB) results released early this year.

This is part of a prize codenamed the CNOOC Best Performers Award, introduced in 2012 to primarily encourage better performance in Hoima, Kikuube districts and Hoima city.

The money was received by the Education department of the respective local governments who will in turn give it to the beneficiary students.

CNOOC Uganda Corporate Affairs Advisor, Alan Zhanga said, CNOOC is committed to improving education standards and building a cordial relationship with the communities in their areas of operations.

However, he challenged the communities in the region to get prepared by educating their children and engaging in production so as to be able to benefit from the oil and gas industry.

He noted that the sector is going to provide a lot of opportunities which will require skilled personnel and quality supply of goods and services.

Johnson Kusiime Baigana, the Hoima City Principal Education Officer applauded CNOOC Uganda for the support and advised the beneficiaries to use the money for the right purpose.

He explained that sometimes parents grab the money from the beneficiaries for their personal interests such as alcoholism and other domestic works.

However, he also demanded CNOOC to change the policy of awarding the students to see that even the students from the government schools benefit from the initiative.

“All these awards have gone to students from private schools because they consider students who performed 100% and sometimes all these students are from rich families, if they change this policy, Universal Primary Education (UPE) students from poor families who perform well will also have a chance of benefiting from the initiative.”

The Kikuube district Vice Chairperson, Opio Vincent commended CNOOC for the awards adding that the initiative is contributing to the district’s effort towards promoting the education sector in the area.

He however said, the education system in the district is facing several challenges such as inadequate staff quarters, class room structures and staffing among others and appealed to development partners such as CNOOC to offer support to the district to address such challenges.

Brian Kaboyo, the Hoima City Mayor, was optimistic that the awards will encourage students to double their effort in studying and this will contribute to the improvement of performance in schools.

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He added that the awards are a motivation to the students adding that the element of motivation of the learners is still lacking adding that such challenges affect the performance of students and pupils mostly in the government schools.

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East Kyoga police investigate fraud of Shs100 million

EAST KYOGA – East Kyoga Police are investigating a fraud case in which Savannah Motors, defrauded locals in Teso sub-region of more than Shs 100 million.

The East Kyoga Police Spokesman, Oscar Ageca said, more than 128 people have been recorded as the aggrieved but said they are still receiving more complaints.

“The entire Teso region is affected because they put announcements on local radios inviting people who are willing to register. We have so far opened general inquiries into this matter,” Ageca said.

It’s alleged that Savannah Motors under the purported management of one, Johnson Labati of Sune parish within Budaka district, signed client agreements with various individuals within Teso sub-region to supply them with Bajaj motorcycles upon payments of prescribed fees to Savannah Motors.

The payment method was by way of instalment by the clients of a weekly sum of Shs 62,000 or Shs 250,000 monthly.

“In the alternative, a monthly payment of Shs 250,000 until one makes a total sum of Shs.6m which sum was to allow for full ownership of the motorcycle,” Ageca explained.

According to the agreement, the clients were to pay in instalments of Shs 62,500 weekly and Shs 250,000 monthly to make a total sum of Shs 6,000,000 for one to own a motorcycle permanently.

The motorcycles were to be delivered to clients on or before October 4th,2021, but the beneficiaries were shocked to find the offices located in Soroti City at Old Mbale road, opposite Soroti Municipal Secondary school closed.

After finding the offices closed, the irate locals stormed the office of the Resident City Commissioner (RCC), Soroti City seeking clarification on the whereabouts of the Directors of Savannah Motors.

Francis Eseru, one of the victims, from Kapir sub-county in Ngora district said, he paid Shs 500,000 to the company with all the necessary credentials and was promised to get the motorcycle October 4th ,2021 but he was welcomed with three big padlocks on the doors of Savannah Motors.

He said that he tried calling the numbers in the company’s advertisement vouchers 03933248465 and 0776001597, but unfortunately, they were all not available.

Eseru, a father of three children said he got a loan from one of the village saving associations which he paid to Savana Motors as a commitment fee hoping that he would get the motorcycle as promised, little did he know that he had paid money to conmen.

Martin Akol, of Pamba ward in Soroti City West, said that most people were convinced to believe that the company was genuine since they were moving with the Chairman boda-boda riders in Soroti, Richard Ochuli.

He blamed the leaders for allowing Savana Motors to operate in the city without undertaking ground checks to find out their validity.

“I’m totally disappointed with the leaders because they are the ones who gave these Savana Motors operating licenses,” Akol said.

When contacted for a comment Richard Ochuli, the Chairperson boda-boda riders in Soroti said that the company had all the documents indicating that they were fully registered and licensed to do the business in Soroti.

“The information also reached him through the boda-boda riders who sought clarification from him about the company,” he explained.

Oculi added that he went to the company’s office where he was given the certificate of registration and the trading license issued by Soroti City West division authorities which made him believe the company was real.

Meanwhile, Regina Akello, the Acting Assistant Town Clerk, Soroti City West said, they issued a trading license to Savana Motors after they presented all the requirements needed for one to qualify to get a license to operate business in the area.

However, ASP Oscar Gregory Ageca said, the police has opened an inquiry into the matter at Soroti Central Police Station under file GEF: 29/2021.

According to Ageca, the fraudsters shall be identified and held accountable.

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“The police with sister security agencies shall continue to zealously investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of this scheme” he said.

The regional police mouthpiece revealed that the Uganda Police is committed to protecting the citizenry from being brazenly preyed on and victimized by fraud and abuse.

Ageca however urged for calm as police investigates the matter, calling on any person with information regarding the whereabouts of Labati Johnson, Bob Naganda and one only identified as Anyipo to call police Toll free lines 999 or 112 to be connected with investigators to aid in the matter’s investigation and prosecution.

This is not the first time the people of Teso sub-county are being duped by conmen .In 2019, close to Shs.1b was lost to another online company called E-coin and the same year, another company promising people motorcycles also fleeced people of millions of shillings.

Unfortunately, nobody was prosecuted over the past incidents and is the reason the current victims have little hope of recovering their hard-earned cash.

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The end of China’s runaway growth

Decades of double-digit growth have produced five problems that Chinese leader Xi Jinping hopes to correct with his “New Development Concept.” Will it work?

CHINA – Two weeks ago, the concourse outside Evergrande’s glossy headquarters in Shenzhen was thronged by homebuyers, unpaid contractors, and investors chanting what has now become a slogan of China’s debt-saddled, post-reform economy: “Give back our money.” For the past few weeks, Evergrande and its debts have been treated like a fuse for a global crisis — the Chinese “Lehman Brothers.” That analogy is flawed. Evergrande is not like Lehman, said Phil Groves, a distressed debt expert and the president of DAC Management, because Evergrande has physical assets that can be dispersed in the event of a default. “For Lehman, it took years and years and still no one actually knew what the hell they owned, what their exposure was, or how many derivatives they had,” he told me.

Loans to real estate developers are heavily collateralized precisely to hedge against such scenarios. “If Evergrande was liquidated tomorrow,” Dinny McMahon, the author of China’s Great Wall of Debt, told me, “the main lenders — the banks and the trust companies — would get all their money back.” The company, the experts predict, will likely undergo a controlled restructuring. The most likely scenario, which happened with Anbang Insurance Group, HNA Group, and Baoshang Bank, is that those of political importance will survive, foreign investors will take a hit, and top executives might face jail time.

“By allowing Evergrande to default, that is the start of a process (in) which you could only imagine that the authorities will be incredibly hands-on,” said McMahon.

Evergrande is not a trigger of calamity, but it is an externality: a sign that the engine of China’s decades-long growth has sputtered, its warning lights flashing for the world to see. Driving across China, you can tell something is not quite right: empty apartment towers fill the expanse between cities; factories lie idle, and real estate prices are prohibitively high. These are not, contrary to the image China presents, signs of a prosperous and strong nation. They are indicators of a country that is registering the weight of an over-leveraged economy.

Across China’s cities, youths are restless, angry, and involuted, with the burdens of career, parental care, and housing wearing away their hopes for the future. In rural areas, China’s migrant workers are at the edge of a tectonic transition that could leave them jobless. All the while, China’s elites like Evergrande founder Xǔ Jiāyìn 许家印 still seem to thrive on borrowing and political connections.

“Between the feeling of individual failure and the conspicuous display of national prosperity lies an unbridgeable chasm,” wrote the science-fiction writer Chén Qiūfān 陈楸帆. (Last week, Kangning Hospital, China’s largest psych ward, announced plans for an IPO in Shenzhen on the back of soaring demand for mental health services.)

Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 has made it his mission to steer a new course, but the road map for his leftward pivot is decades old. Back in 2007, the premier Wēn Jiābǎo 温家宝 had called the Chinese economy “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and ultimately unsustainable.” Five years later, the political commentator Dèng Yùwén 邓聿文 published “The Ten Grave Problems” (十大问题 shí dà wèntí), a list of 10 socioeconomic issues left behind by Wen’s administration. ​​

Those points — including inadequate economic restructuring, rampant wealth inequality, environmental degradation, and unstable supply chains — are the moral antecedents to the “Red New Deal.” Xi’s attack on big business is about power, but it is also — as seen in the image of the Evergrande concourse — a rebuke of the China that his predecessors, in concert with developers like Xu, helped forge: a country of unpaid debts, empty lofts, and thwarted dreams.

In an important speech (in Chinese) at the Fifth Plenum last fall, Xi emphasized the need to implement a “New Development Concept,” one that can separate “high-quality growth” from “unbalanced” growth. The recent flurry of crackdowns is an attempt to address the various symptoms of an economic growth model nearing its final breath. Here are five of Xi’s challenges:

  1. Debt

“Debt has become the motor at the core of Chinese growth,” wrote McMahon in China’s Great Wall of Debt. After the global financial crisis, China responded with a 4 trillion yuan ($564 billion) stimulus package — 10 times larger as a percentage of GDP than the U.S. stimulus. At the time, China’s debt-to-GDP ratio was 160 percent and local government debt stood at $1.1 trillion in 2010.

These were “still at a range that we could manage,” Wēn Jiābǎo 温家宝 told CNN, “but it is important that we appropriately handle this matter.” In 2016, China’s official debt-to-GDP ratio ballooned to 260 percent. Local government debt reached nearly $4 trillion in 2020.

“Experience shows that when a country accumulates too much debt relative to the size of its economy too quickly, a crisis typically follows,” warned McMahon.

Real estate, which constitutes 40 percent of all bank loans, epitomizes the debt problem. For decades, property developers raised debts through unregulated channels known as “shadow banking” to finance massive construction booms. Families funneled their savings into real estate to get in on the action. Speculative buyers bought up houses with abandon, leaving one-fifth of China’s total housing stock in big cities empty. But the build, build, build days have reached their natural limit. In August, 15 half-built apartment towers in the southwestern city of Kunming were reduced to rubble after developers ran out of cash and abandoned the project.

A centerpiece of Xi’s new development philosophy is an emphasis on “innovative growth drivers” and the “real economy.” As such, regulators have stepped up to rein in the shadow-banking sector, and placed caps on reckless borrowing and speculation.

The “three red lines” policy in August, which limited borrowing for property developers, had immediate consequences: Evergrande had run afoul of all three lines, and of the country’s 15 biggest developers, only one was in full compliance. But Beijing is prepared for a painful reckoning now in order to nurse the sector back to health. At a work meeting held by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) last week, regulators vowed to quit using real estate as “a short-term tool to stimulate the economy” and to “implement long-term approaches for the property market.”

  1. Corruption and rampant inequality

The PBOC announcement is welcome news for Yuen Yuen Ang, a political scientist at the University of Michigan and the author of China’s Gilded Age. A primary feature of China’s dizzying rise, she argues, is the marriage between debt-fueled growth, especially in the property sectors, and rampant inequality, a dynamic she calls “crony capitalism.” “Crony capitalism” is built on a scaffold of corruption, a venal relationship between robber baron capitalists and politicians. For decades, those connections acted like an economic steroid, incentivizing politicians to assist developer friends to execute ambitious building projects. But this also funneled wealth to China’s elites. In 2012, China’s Gini coefficient, the standard measure of income inequality, surpassed America’s.

Ang compares China’s current predicament with the end of the American Gilded Age in the late 19th century, when public backlash against corruption triggered economic and social reforms that ushered in the Progressive Era. On this rubric, Xi Jinping’s most recent calls for “common prosperity” have their roots in the anti-corruption and anti-poverty campaigns of a decade prior. “In the last two months, Western investors have abruptly awoken to Xi’s calls for ‘common prosperity,’” Ang told me. “But Xi’s socialist mission actually began in 2012, when he vowed to eliminate rural poverty and simultaneously launched the largest anti-corruption drive in the CPC’s history.” All of these, Ang says, are attempts to rectify China’s own Gilded Age.

  1. Empty factories

The decadence among China’s wealthiest coincides with a looming peril for China’s poorest. Like the departure of manufacturing jobs from the U.S., China has seen a mass exodus of low-wage manufacturing jobs to South Asian countries. China’s latest three-child policy is, in part, a corrective to the decline of surplus rural labor, which drove up wages and pushed factories to seek cheaper labor overseas.

In the past decade, hundreds of thousands of jobs from conglomerates such as Apple, Nike, and Samsung migrated from China to Vietnam, whose workers are generally seven years younger, on average, and twice as cheap.

Labor-market mismatches are not uncommon among developing countries, and many economies, including South Korea, Taiwan, and Ireland, have navigated them in the past, a problem known as the “middle-income trap.”

Scott Rozelle, a professor at Stanford and the author of Invisible China, argues that a common feature of the “middle-income trap” is the disparity between the fast pace of economic growth and the slow buildup of education: In 2015, 70 percent of China’s working-age adults were high school dropouts. Whether migrant workers have the skills to help China transition from a manufacturing hub to a high-income economy depends on bringing those numbers down. For Rozelle, China’s migrant worker predicament amounts to a crisis in human capital: “The key to avoiding the trap is for the top levels of government to give priority to rapidly expanding education for the entire population,” he writes.

In the early 2000s, China’s leaders took action. In 2006, the government made public schooling free and mandatory from grades one through nine for every child in the country.

By 2010, middle school attendance was nearly universal, compared with only 60 percent 20 years earlier. In 2017, Xi Jinping pledged to go a notch further, launching a national effort (in Chinese) to universalize high school education by 2020. The “New Development Concept” does not explicitly address education, but recent regulations of the private education sector appear to be imperfect attempts at expanding public education access.

  1. Supply chain instability

Although China brought its initial outbreak of COVID-19 under control as early as last March, its manufacturers continue to bear the costs of the pandemic’s disruption to global shipping.

In a visit to factories in Zhejiang last year, Xi remarked on how “many companies were forced to suspend operations” and made his call for a new development model. “I realized just how much things had changed,” he said in his speech at the Fifth Plenum. “The environments and conditions that had facilitated large-scale imports and exports were no longer in place.”

As a major manufacturing hub for the world, China is especially vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. Rising tensions with the U.S., along with subsequent tariffs and export bans, have also created a new global environment where many key technology components can suddenly become difficult to procure.

At the May 2020 Politburo meeting [in Chinese], China’s leaders formulated the strategy of “dual circulation” (双循环), which is evidently another component of the New Development Concept. The strategy aims to bolster domestic demand in order to allow China’s economy to be more self-sufficient and resilient to external turbulence by extension.

  1. The environment

To glimpse the environmental costs of China’s decades-long growth, one only need a visit to Baogang Tailings Dam in Inner Mongolia, widely dubbed the “world’s dystopian lake” due to its role as a waste bin for China’s rare earths industry, which makes up about 80 percent of the world market.

From 1990 to 1997, the cancer mortality rate in the surrounding mining districts rose 50 percent and the three leading causes of death in the area were cancer, unspecified poisoning and accidents, and infant mortality. Air pollution, water pollution, and mismanaged packaging waste pose significant health risks to Chinese citizens and have historically been a source of social unrest.

As a result, “green development” is now a core component of Xi Jinping’s “New Development Concept.” In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 21, he promised to end funding for coal-fired power plants outside of China. Satellite imagery of the Tailings Dam in Inner Mongolia suggests the government has begun to drain it.

“When I was living in China in the early to mid-2000s, the way officials and planners talked about solutions [was] as if you had to pollute first and clean up later,” said Julie Klinger, the author of Rare Earth Frontiers. “Now cleanup time has come.” The cleanup has come for plastic waste as well: A sweeping regulation — what state media has called the “strictest plastic ban” in history — began last September, albeit with mixed results. Most of all, Xi is known for his ambitious plan to peak emissions by 2030 and go carbon neutral by 2060.

The time is now

Growth has been a paramount priority for the Communist Party since the Third Plenum of 1978, when China officially adopted Dèng Xiǎopíng’s 邓小平reform and open policy.

But as Wen and Deng Yuwen’s comments reveal, the antithetical, ultra-leftist creed never vanishes. It brews under the surface and erupts occasionally in seething, impassioned diatribes, only to retreat back into the shadows.

But as the five challenges outlined above festered, China’s prior leaders swept them under the rug with stopgap solutions. Meanwhile, the growth imperative has lost all of its original sheen. From the eradication of poverty to the triumphalism of a vanquished pandemic, China is ostensibly at its strongest point in modern history — it is, in some ways, already grown. The allure of short-term growth, that quick-fix-mentality attributable to a scrappy, up-and-coming nation, is gone.

“We are being affected by both ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ tendencies,” Deng acknowledged during his renowned Southern Tour in 1992. “But it is the ‘Left’ tendencies that have the deepest roots.”

After four decades of miraculous growth at the expense of a compromised socialism, those roots have finally borne fruit.

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Chang Che is SupChina’s Business & Technology staff writer. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Nikkei Asia, and The LA Review of Books. You can follow him on Twitter at @changxche.

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