It is 1991.
Kampala Road is paved with tarmac. The buildings lining both sides of the road are mostly single-story structures, housing modest businesses such as video libraries, black-and-white photo studios, hairdressing salons, and even dairy shops.
On one side of this road – where Mapeera House and Kampala Boulevard Building now sit – stand two buildings whose walls were blown away by explosions in the 1979 war that resulted in the overthrow of President Idi Amin, leaving openings large enough for people to walk through.
Businesses along other roads such as Nkrumah and Nasser are struggling to attract customers as the routes are riddled with gaping potholes.It takes three hours to travel a 45km distance between Kampala and Lugazi town by car – not because of traffic jams, but because of many potholes along the road.
Everyday goods are still in short supply. The once-bustling industrial towns of Mbale and Jinja are quiet as factories closed a few years earlier. Production of coffee, once a major source of foreign exchange, has significantly dropped.
Just five years ago, a band of armed Ugandans shot its way into power and is now struggling to reestablish peace nationwide and repair an economy broken by years of conflict and mismanagement.
A large part of the country is calm but, in the north, guns are still blazing, drowning out hope for peace and recovery. Hundreds of workers have been put out of work by a package of economic recovery reforms.
A banking crisis that would later bring down five indigenous financial institutions and leave some international banks limping on is unfolding.
“We started to see international banks closing branches in major towns and concentrating in Kampala,” Michael Wakabi, who was a journalist in his 20s at the time, says. “Some of these towns were former industrial towns that lost factories during Amin’s time and were now in bad shape.”
To make matters worse—at the time, Uganda is not only experiencing some of the highest poverty levels in its history, but also the highest infection levels from a strange, virulent disease – HIV/AIDS. With families losing breadwinners to the new disease and the war in the north raging on, Ugandans are unsure of the future.
“People had lost hope, and saw no need of long-term planning,” Wakabi remembers. “My father worked at Kakira Sugar Works, and I would see company trucks taking home three or five bodies of workers who had died of HIV/AIDS. The rebels were active in the north and, travelling there was dangerous.”
Out Grindlays, enter Standard Bank Group
Yet, in the same year, 1991/92, Standard Bank Group (Stanbic) acquires Grindlays Bank of East Africa and enters the Ugandan market that many companies are unwilling to venture into, seeing an opportunity to contribute to the recovery and growth of a country it was determined to make its home.
“Unless you were a long-term thinker, you would not invest in Uganda at that time,” Wakabi says. “Many companies saw no future here. But Stanbic knew things would settle and that Uganda needed financial services to recover and grow.”
