From an illegal immigrant, Ssali has built a business empire in the UK

It is a common perception that the overwhelming majority of Ugandans in the United Kingdom (UK) survive by doing odd jobs (kyeyo). Maybe there is some truth to that; maybe not. One thing that is certainly true is that Swaleh Ssali is among the few Ugandans who have successfully ventured into business in the UK.

He is the owner of the popular Nile Bar and Restaurant and Nile Supermarket, both establishments found on West Green Road, Tottenham in North London. He is also co-owner of Express Money Transfer, a money transfer and courier company, which started about a year ago and operates throughout the world with close to a £1m (sh4.4b) repatriated. This is no mean achievement for a Senior Three dropout, who ended up in London accidently.

On a recent visit to London, SEBIDDE KIRYOWA caught up with Ssali, who narrated to him how he grew from an illegal immigrant mopping the underground train stations to the successful businessman he is.

Nile Supermarket in London. Photos by Sebidde Kiryowa

Earlier life

I was born to Mr and Mrs Yahaya Ssali in Ngotoka, Bugerere, Kayunga district in 1967. My father died when I was young.

I attended Kawempe Muslim Primary School and then joined Kako Senior Secondary School in Masaka district. However, I dropped out of school in Senior Three because I was more interested in business than studies. I wanted to do business.

At that time, I had an in-law called Sekimwanyi, who imported general merchandise to Uganda from Kenya and Japan. I always admired him and I could not wait to leave school to join him. So, when I left school, I joined him. That was around 1992.

Starting out in business

They set me up with a capital of Ksh3,000 (sh90,000 today). That was not much even at the time. So, I chose to deal in Christmas cards because that was the cheapest item I could import from Kenya with that amount of money. They took care of my transport to and from Kenya and accommodation while there.

I traded in Christmas cards for about three years. Business had started picking, but many people joined the trade, adversely affecting the already slim profit margins. So, I quit the trade.

Then a friend tipped me off about a lucrative trade in raw salt from Lake Katwe in Kasese to Karamoja where it was sold to the nomadic cattle keepers. It did not turn out quite as portrayed, so I decided to get creative.

In addition to salt, I joined the fish trade. We would buy fish from Rwampanga in Nakasongola district and sell it in DR Congo through Kasese. On the way back to Uganda, with proceeds from the fish, I would then buy salt from Katwe, which I sold in Mbale and Karamoja.



Nile Bar and Restaurant hosts mainly Ugandans and serves African cuisine

Going gets tough

Unfortunately, I lost some money and went out of business. At that time, I decided to join a Kenyan friend in Kirinyaga, Embu in Kenya to cool off.

I returned to Kampala around 1995. That was in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and there was a big market for consumer products in Rwanda because their economy was in shambles.

A friend in Kampala gave me sh1m. I sank the money into buying consumer products such as maize flour, body creams and sugar, which I sold in Kigali, Rwanda.

The business was lucrative, but short-lived because soon, the Rwandan economy started getting back on its feet and they had no need for goods from Uganda. But even before that, people had flocked into the trade and made it less profitable. So I quit.

I then rented space on Ben Kiwanuka Street in Kampala and started trading in pharmaceuticals, an area that looked relatively less congested by comparison.

Business starts

While there, I met an Indian gentleman from London who was in Kampala to market a new drug for a British pharmaceuticals manufacturer. He was looking for local agents to distribute the drug in Uganda. I immediately signed up.

This deal turned my fortune around. As an agent, I earned commission off the drugs I sold, which I did not have to purchase with my own money. Business grew and I had to seek bigger and more decent premises, which I found on Luwum Street.

I registered and opened Verna Pharm and officially operated as an agent of the British company.

Another ugly blow

Unfortunately, unknown to me at the time, the Indian gentleman was not remitting the money to the British firm. Because of his dishonesty, the firm cancelled their contract with him.

Since I was fully dependent on the Indian agent, I closed shop. I could not sustain myself without the dealership; the cost of doing business was too high – rent, taxes and other bills.

This was about 1997/8. At that point, I decided to rejoin my in-laws in Kikuubo (the heartbeat of commodities trade in Kampala). These are the ones I had quit school to join back in 1992.

My in-laws had since grown big in business and moved on from importing stuff from Kenya to Japan. Like they had done to me initially, they facilitated me to go with them to Japan and import items. It was an exciting new path.

Light at the end of this tunnel

The first container I brought in from Japan had in it a cesspool emptier, a saloon car and some sports motorcycles. I made some good profit on that deal and I decided to stick around.

However, it soon proved unreliable. I did not have my own capital. Also, as a wholesaler, I lost out on profits, which the retailers, who had the patience to wait and sell the goods, eventually harvested.

At about that time (1998), my girlfriend, Madina Basirika, left Uganda for kyeyo in the UK. She continually persuaded me to join her, but I was rather apprehensive. It was a new setting and I dreaded the cold winters. But in 2000, I visited her while on a trading excursion to Japan. So, in addition to my usual Japanese visa, I acquired a UK visa as well.

Relocating to the UK

While on that visit, my girlfriend became pregnant and insisted that I stay with her. Although I had to proceed to Japan to do business, it became complicated for me to just walk away and leave her in that situation. I yielded to her pleas.

I started by working as a janitor with a cleaning company. I basically mopped in the underground train stations in order to sustain my family.

However, I was still an illegal immigrant, so, Madina, now my wife, persuaded me to give myself up to the authorities and formalise my stay. I did and that was the beginning of a process that would eventually see me get British citizenship in 2005.

But the whole time I cleaned the underground stations, I kept thinking to myself; if I channelled half the effort and energy I put into cleaning those train stations into my own business, I would make serious headway.

However, I lacked the requisite capital to set myself up in business. The processes one has to go through to start a business in the UK are also a little more complicated than back home.

Getting into business in the UK (Nile Bar)

One day, while I was on a bus in 2005, I saw a rundown restaurant run by a Pakistani in a location I thought was good enough to set up a bar/restaurant for the black immigrants and specifically the Ugandan community. At that time, there was no place this community could call their own. So, I saw an opportunity there.

I approached the owner of the shop, who told me he could sell it for £40,000 (about sh177m). I could not afford the money so I requested that I rent it instead. We agreed on £1,200 (sh5.3m) a week.

I took about three years to get back to him. Since I did not have experience running a restaurant myself, I wanted to convince him to remain in management and sublet the operations to me. He rejected the idea.

It was a difficult start and I almost gave up on the idea. That time (2008) was the beginning of the credit crunch and it was next to impossible to access funding from the banks. But I endured and used my small savings of about £9,000 (sh39.6m), which I had accumulated from my job to get started.

I started by catering for the small group of Ugandans in the neighbourhood because I understood the culture. Work was shared between basically my wife and I. We mainly prepared Uganda cuisine and hosted Ugandan functions.

In the beginning, I utilised social media and printed out leaflets, which I dropped at strategic places such as at Ugandan concerts and other such functions. Then slowly, by word of mouth, especially through commendations from customers who had eaten at the place, the wider African community started to hear about us. So, we gradually incorporated them.

Today, we are the leading host of African parties in our neighbourhood. We host politicians and other delegations from different African countries. We hold welcome parties for virtually every Ugandan artiste that performs in the UK. Organisers use this place to advertise for those events.

Besides selling food, we have different theme nights on different days of the week.

Today, the value of the business is about £200,000 (sh880m). We make about £15,000 (sh66m) a week and £60,000 (sh264m) a month. We employ four kitchen staff, four waitresses, a cleaner, three security personnel who work on days when we have live events.

Nile Supermarket

Long before I even got the opportunity to get into the restaurant/bar business, I had always wanted to set up a supermarket. I had even wanted to buy into a place called Kampala

Foods owned by a Ugandan, but the owner refused even to talk about it.

I had always watched with awe as Pakistanis and Indian businessmen sold us (Africans and Ugandans in the UK) our own foods in their supermarkets — foods they had no idea about, while our people slaved away in odd jobs (kyeyo).

This is where my resolve to get into the supermarket business came from. I wanted to be different; to be able to sell to our people things that I knew they had attachment to.

I started out by looking for a place. I landed on an Indian who ran a ‘struggling’ store in May 2013. To salvage his business, he agreed to split his supermarket into two and sublet one half to me.

However, even that was too much for me to afford, so I approached a Ugandan colleague and suggested to him that we pool resources and take up the place. But he took his time to make up his mind and the Indian told me that another interested party was taking up the place.

Shortly, I left for holiday in Uganda. But upon my return, the shop was still available. This time I decided to go it alone and took up the place.

Using proceeds from my bar business, I paid £5,000 (sh22m) for the shop upfront on goodwill. In October 2013, we started out small, revamping the shop. The first thing I did was to come back to Uganda and pack a 40ft container of Ugandan foodstuff, which I shipped to the UK to sell in my store.

Upon my return to London, the Indian asked me to also take up the other side of the supermarket with all the items he was selling in there for £30,000 (sh132m). Although I did not readily have the money, the deal was too good to let go.

So I mobilised a few savings and borrowed on top of it all in order to raise the money and take up the place. Unfortunately, most of the items were expired and I had to throw them away.

But not knowing anything about the supermarket business, it has been very challenging running the business. There is need to buy the right things and, more importantly, get the pricing right.

In 2013, we had to rebuild the cold-room and renovate the place. My goal is to create a supermarket that meets the UK standard of a supermarket for all races.

Ssali inside Nile Supermarket. He sells Ugandan foodstuffs and other African products to mainly the black community in London

Money transfer

While at the bar, I was approached by a Somali businessman who had set up a company through which Ugandans could repatriate money and other packages back home. He was looking for a partner. I thought it was a good idea, so I joined him and we started Express Money Transfer.

We did not need a lot of money for this because we work with the money clients send. We have been doing this for a little over a year now and we have handled business close to £1m (about 4.5b). We do not charge clients for the money we send; we instead work out a rate with the forex bureaus in the countries where we send the money and make a difference off that.

However, because we were not well-known at the time yet there were established brands on the market, we chose to leverage our position as a popular supermarket and sought business to work as agents of the established money transfer firms for a commission.


Today, we work as agents of Moneyland, a money transfer service to Kenya and Uganda and Ria International Money Transfer, an international money transfer service. However, in the near future, we hope to open up a forex bureau of our own.

Challenges

We pay a lot of money in wages, taxes

I am now running several businesses and it is hard to be in all places at the same time, yet it is hard to take business to the next level without personal development.

Labour is expensive in the UK. We pay a lot of money in wages.

The taxes in the UK are really high, especially the VAT we pay on our returns.

Rent is also high since London is a premium city and one of the most expensive places to live in the world. With all these costs and bearing the competition in mind, it is a hassle making a decent profit.

As a community in the UK, Ugandans are less confident in themselves as a people. We are also less supportive of our own compared to the Nigerians, Ghanaians, Indians and Pakistanis. These people have cohesion and look out for one another. That is why they prosper in business; that’s why they sell us our own food.

If only Ugandans knew that supporting our own to prosper in business means more opportunities and jobs for us as a community, they would be more loyal. This attitude tends to adversely affect us who start out businesses in the UK, hoping to ride on the support of our own to make it big.

What makes him tick

I am very determined

I am very determined. Once I set my mind on something, there is no going back. Most of the ventures I have undertaken; I did not know exactly where they would lead, but I persevered. Even when I started Nile Supermarket, there were a lot of naysayers, who predicted that I would not last beyond a few months. They said it was a tough market and the taxes were high. I am still here.

My wife has been instrumental in my success. We work as a team. I believe that is why the Indians get ahead of us in business here in the UK. They put family at the centre of business.

What others say

Madina Basirika, wife

Ssali is a patient and hard-working person. He is also a confident person, who believes in himself. I remember when we started, there were a lot of people telling him that by trying to set up a supermarket or bar in London, he was attempting the impossible. But his conviction that this was possible was stronger than their doubts. Ssali is also a kind-hearted person who loves to see others prosper. But most importantly, as a businessman, he is trustworthy.

Anita Kaija, associate

I have seen Ssali struggle through the years since he traded in Christmas cards from Kenya. What He is a hands-on person. When he owned a pharmacy, he had employees, but he always took part in the day-to-day running of the business. In the UK, he has several employees, but you will find him at tending to clients and doing several things at the supermarket. In the evenings, he goes to the bar where he will work at the counter, in the kitchen and even help with cleaning the toilets.

He is also a resilient man.

He has gone through a lot ups and downs but he never gives up.