1. Never underestimate developing countries' governments' willingness to absolutely bend their people over to extract tax revenue (and then their corrupt representatives extract bribes on top of it)
2. Django's gratitude and positivity in the face of all of it is an inspiration. I suspect I and most everyone I know would be in tears and would have given up in exasperation halfway through his quest. We are so spoiled in the West.
Shouldn’t people stop helping further entrench these shady practices?
If Ugandan decision makers know the people will effectively always be underwritten to receive some bread and water… no matter what happens…
Then what exactly is stopping them from piling on more and more nonsense?
As a Brazilian with a love for electronics and DIY, I feel this pain every day.
two of them started cloning cpus designs (8080 and 68k iirc). they sold well all over the (1st and 2nd) world (still no local market). until one company did a publicity stunt lying they had a full mac clone (it was an actual mac, but they did have something else).
then apple and others pressured the US state department, which pressured the brazilian gov with tarifs on oranges (most of the new elite created in the millitary coups were now big land owners and orange was the cash crop). They were so afraid of the tarifs that they closed both factories as requested, and added the import tax as a good will gesture on top!
and many (30%) brazilians today think another military coup will sort things out
I wish we replace this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Duke_of_Caxias with a statue of a smuggler bringing computers from paraguay (they where sold two streets down this statue). It is much more heroic and positive outcome symbol to the country than some old military nobody on a horse.
And if you bypass their abuse, you're a "smuggler", shamed on by the press.
We are the beneficiaries of the imperialism that leads to places like Uganda being dragged into a global marketplace to then be exploited.
Django's gratitude isn't noble, it's sad. Look at the quality of life difference between him and the average Brit whose nation held his as a protectorate until the 60s - the only industrialize tolerated for nearly a century being cotton and coffee cash crop export infrastructure.
It's still commodity dependent this day, and imbalanced power structures established by the colonial government means that there's a prize of total national power for anyone who can take over the government, leading to near endless conflict.
How long will the white man be blamed for every single thing happening in Africa today? Will a century be enough? 200 years? More?
Aren't Africans adults with agency who are ultimately responsible for the state of their countries?
Read more about the history of the continent.
The ones that do it though are all religious institutions so their goals are more social/moral rather than economic or geopolitical.
Until now, items below 150eur (bought by private citizens) were not a subject to customs, and some time ago not even for VAT if below 22eur. From july 1st, it's becoming painful, in slovenia for example, 3eur per TARIC code + customs fee + vat.
So, for example you go on alixpress, you buy a silicone phone case for 1eur, a screen protector/foil for 1eur, a phone "sock" for 1eur and a stylus for 1 eur (+whatever shipping, often free).
A few years ago, you'd pay 4eur and get the package. Then they implemented IOSS, so aliexpress has to report the 4eur order to EU, and they charge you 22% VAT on that, so you'd pay 4.88eur directly to aliexpress and they'd pay the tax. Ok, a bit more expensive but doable, unless you want to go outside of eu and order the stuff there and just bring it in with you.
And now? Since they're 4 different items, that's 4 TARIC codes, and that's 3eur per each separate item, so that makes 4eur for items themselves, 4x3eur for customs (16eur together with the item price), then you pay VAT on the full price (including customs!), that makes it 19.52eur + whatever the post office decides to charge for "processing" (used to be ~4-5euros, but usually avoided by aliexpress shippers).
So, instead of 4euros, you'll pay 20-25euros for the same thing, the government taking 20 euros of tax on 4euros of items (even less total worth, aliexpress + chinese shipping has to earn their share too).
I mean sure, they want you to buy locally from dropshippers, but it's still cheaper than that, or from amazon, which will probably be the biggest winner here, and it's not even a european company.
Shipping things overseas is such a convoluted process. My wife wanted to send a company Christmas gift bundle (literally just company merch and some candy) to two Filipino employees. One of the workers says that only DHL reliability delivers to her so I help my wife with getting a shipping label. Holy shit, I'm just sending a tshirt, mug, and some pens. Why do I need to list out the contents and their international categories like I'm trying to send a shipping container full of rifles? Also addresses for people living in villages in PI are weird, the address was relative to the town hall. Luckily the other person lived in a gated community with a more familiar address formatting. Finally I figure everything out and she buys the label and pays the tariffs (more expensive than the gifts but it's too late now). Luckily there's a DHL near my work so I go to drop off the two very carefully wrapped packages. Of course she wraps both like an actual gift with cute tissue paper and of course the DHL agent has to open it and inspect it, ruining the care my wife put into the wrapping. Overall the experience was mind boggling bureaucratic. Sending via USPS would likely have been a bit easier but the warning of unreliable local mail was concerning. The next year, she just had the CEO send them an extra bonus instead.
However, there's definitely a sunk cost aspect to the operation. After the first failure to send it through Australia Post, I became determined that Django was going to have that MacBook.
It is also quite sad that the western NGOs, which all have their own very functional and heavily subsidised delivery channels, keep it to themselves, instead of making it available to the general public and businesses of the countries. Their monopolies on efficient import is weird and counter productive.
For every dozen people mailing in a laptop, there'll be someone mailing in guns. They don't want that liability. It would damage their ability to do what they do.
It reminded me of when I was a student. I used to repair laptops and resell them. Going through cancer in my family these days, I understand how important it is to help people when you can. It makes you a slightly better person, at least in your own eyes.
Also makes me grateful to live in a developed nation where we can take shipping for granted.
> Before leaving, I asked him whether he even knew what was inside the package.
> He answered very casually that he had no idea and that he did not need to know.
> I then asked whether he at least knew which company had entrusted him with the delivery. He replied that it was simply "a friend" who had asked him to temporarily keep the box until someone came to collect it.
> I switched it on briefly, and that was actually the moment when the hardware shop owner himself suddenly became excited[...] Seeing the Apple logo appear on the screen, he immediately smiled and said something along the lines of, "Ah… a MacBook is a MacBook. Apple is still Apple."
The laptop was never released from the customs. The Turkish reps were rude and expected bribe and pretended they don't understand english. After few months it was returned back to Germany. My cousins' laptop had a keyboard issue and local shops would not replace it and the HP agents on the ground also didn't want to help.
The laptop would pay a 50% fee over the (declared value + shipping cost). Couriers will mostly deal with that on send, but if sent through regular mail you need to declare and pay before you get it.
If you didn't include your tax number as part of the address (doesn't matter in which field), there's a non-zero chance that the package will be lost, held indefinitely or returned to sender.
It's great that there are people willing to help even in these conditions.
There's a lot of luck and bad luck in the story.
- even the UN (which pays 1/4 of what the EU pays) cannot ship work laptops to these countries. The either vanish or have to be shipped to very central DHL offices.
- Informal remittance from family members to their communities is exactly the same amount of all the money the country gets from external sources as Aid. e.g. Angola had USD$2bi given by EU and UN. Remitances where the same 2Bi. I don't know if there are mechanisms to keep that this way, but that was the case for all the countries i could get the number that year and the year before.
Sure, Django here is the exception, but not taxing imports would generally not benefit people like him, but the actually wealthy people who can otherwise afford the tax.
"Effectively charge a 33% tax on all foreign goods and services." Not just Macbooks. I don't know if this is the final definitive tally of the tariffs but I believe almost everything has a high tariff, so people effectively pay 33% more for the same goods plus shipping. Fair, can't really get rid of shipping, but a 33% or even a 15% penalty on tools means people get worse tools. Computers, mobile phones, cars, motorcycle helmets, medicines (if imported perhaps?), hammers, fans, showers, whatever tool you might use that is a finished good coming from another country, you pay 15-33% or whatever more, so you get a lower quality product for the money you have. I just would prefer my people get the best deal on the best tools (that we as a country don't think we need to make for security reasons) so people can improve faster. Less smog, better roads, fewer things that break...would be quite nice at all levels.
[0]: www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/uganda-import-tariffs
Its really small and I am more than happy to ship it to her, please do note that it can't run youtube or the likes but can run python and firefox and pdf browsers.
The battery is interchangable so it can be fixed.
Honestly I would be more than happy to help with these things, wishing nothing but good for her & hope she finds a decent laptop that she needs and hopefully others might chime in too but let me know if you are interested, more than happy to help :-D
I don't want to sound too noble (because I am not) but I was also thinking of going to any nearby orphanage and giving it to them. It can let them play retro games or programming and i was thinking of spending time with them teaching them terminals but I doubt the usefulness of the teaching part as I certainly have so much to learn and I am unsure if it might be the best use case of their time too or something and (this was just a thought which had come, I haven't given too much thought about it but I might have some spare time recently)
Anyways, let me know if there is any help needed, Also I am more than happy to share my servers/vps's that I have with the lady, I have two small vps's of 0.5 gb ram (each for 7$~ish per year)
Anyways this message got long but waiting for your response and have a nice day dude and feel free to mail me if you might need (any) help in (anything)
Edit-1: thinking of just making a small video to showcase to ya what my old laptop is but I think that programming is possible on it. and perhaps it might even help given its tiny and battery upgradable and something which can help her more perhaps
Also, I read other discussions, I am more than happy to help out sending this laptop but I hope somebody looks at the shipping costs as the shipping costs might be magnitude more than the cost of this laptop. Looking forward for discussion if anybody from Africa might need it but yeah, waiting for GP's response and gonna show the laptop to my dad now who had also on one occassion asked me to fix that laptop and uh, I might as well write a blog post about it too running all these apps on it. This laptop can run youtube!! but it does get quite heated tho but I find it incredible that this laptop can run youtube albeit very very slowly, I didn't expect it. It does crash the browser sometimes tho in my testing, I am gonna test it more and share it with my dad! :-D
> "At some point, one man quietly pulled me aside and suggested that if I "gave something," they could help solve the problem more easily.".
You can pay that fee/bribe and things will go smoothly.
But more generally my thought was that the western idea is that bureaucracy rules are something to be followed and, even if painful, are the path to getting the state to provide the services. In Uganda, it's better to model bureaucracy as a system that exists to enable bribes and following the rules to the letter and expecting state services is fighting the system.
If you want to get goods to someone in Uganda, don't talk to the Australian Post about the rules, talk to a Ugandan importer who knows how to actually work the system that exists in practice.
Caveats about broad brushes of course, but that's the realistic approach IMO.
Although, I'd say there is a certain charm in physical gifts.
When I was a kid in Moldova a couple of decades ago, we had a lot of Americans donating their old stuff (electronics, clothes, shoes, even furniture) thinking they're being super helpful. Just had a quick search and it seems to still be happening to a small degree. It's a nice sentiment and I'm sure it makes people feel like they're making a difference, but economically it makes no sense. The cost of processing and shipping second-hand items is probably not much lower than just giving people money to buy locally, and supporting local businesses while you're at it.
Sort of unrelated, but the funny thing was these donations were often distributed by American missionaries who were using them as a pretext to hand out bibles (or rather just the New Testament). In Moldova, which by some metrics is the most Christian country on the planet after the Vatican. And the bibles were usually in English, a language almost none of us spoke.
Not to say that's necessarily the case for Uganda, but if the OP blog is any indication, they could have bought several second hand laptops for what it cost to ship one.
But otherwise you are right. Not only is it not economical, a lot of stuff that is sent to Africa is junk, and that's exactly the reason why Uganda generally does not allow importing of second hand products. On the other hand, i believe second hand imports are the only way to make laptops available at that price range. I don't know how that works though. Maybe they make exceptions for importers that they verify are not importing junk?
They're also extraordinarily good engineers so idk wtf is going on in Uganda. A lot of folks from there come work in Taiwan, I guess the pay and quality of life is better here.
There are charities that move used electronics to developing countries in bulk somehow.