COFFEE SCAM EXPOSÉ 4
Story By: Robert Kabushenga, the former boss of vision Group Uganda.
Why & how created To do so we must explain why Nelson has closed his Coffee City outfit & Inspire Africa Café on TWED Towers. Part of the reason is he had to flee his rent obligations. Landlords have been left holding an empty can. Most importantly is that thru their bankers repossessed the coffee machines & tuktuks he bought with their money, failed to create the promised 1m youth jobs under the initiative & refused to pay back. When the cash from dried up, he now found his way to . I wrote about this yesterday. Having failed to hijack other coffee initiatives, he set up a partnership with & to set up #UGConnect ostensibly to brand Ugandan coffee in the international market. They got UGX 37bn(US$10m) provided in the budget.Questions about the wisdom of this were brushed aside because it had political clearance as a part of the budget. In fact Odrek explained in an interview that this money was part of a larger trade frontier fund to finance exports. Nelson then cobbled together a disparate group of unsuspecting coffee actors who innocently joined thinking it was a genuine initiative to fund coffee exports. He then started going to others demanding a few of UGX10m to join the consortium so as to access this export finance. The more discerning ones stayed away. In all this was sidelined as not being aligned to the President’s coffee value addition agenda. All objections to & advice against this subjective handling of public funds was shouted down in fits of political rage.
Nelson, true character then changed tack. He abandoned the larger membership of the consortium. Instead he worked with 3 trusted confidantes & they hatched a new purpose for the $10m. They changed from export finance to funding coffee hubs set up by him across the country & branding. H would later tell some sector players that he was arranging for UGX300bn for coffee export financing to be included in the national budget for FY 24/25.
Anyway, it is on the basis of the hubs & branding proposal that money was disbursed to the individual consortium members that were supposedly setting up hubs. Only his confidantes got money. The others were played & they exited the consortium. The few who managed to corner him were offered $15k for branding expenses and only on condition that they added a UGConnect logo. This was designed for the consortium, Nelson, Odrek & his PACEID outfit to account for this money by showing they were now exporting processed coffee.
Things became tight when the President now wanted proof of exports of processed coffee to the “new markets”. Nelson began to run around looking for coffee to buy on credit and export. He failed. To date, no coffee has been exported under any of their initiatives. Millions of dollars have vanished. In the meantime signatories to the consortium accounts were secretly changed.
Nelson is supposed to be the silver bullet for the coffee value addition initiative. Now we know why it will never happen. There will be no export trade fund. Farmers will never see the promised good prices. 12 m Ugandans who live off coffee will be disgruntled by the false promise. And I can predict, the thieves will get away with it.
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