By November 1890, very little progress had been made with the three business objectives associated with the Imperial British East Africa Co. On the coast, a limited amount of infrastructural investment was underway – in telegraph lines, harbour facilities, roads, river surveys and local steamshipping – but it had not yet stimulated new economic activity or generated much in the way of additional trade revenues from which the Company could draw an income. That would be a task of several years. Nor had the Company embarked on the programme of Indian immigration which was to be the cornerstone of its development policy for the coastal strip (the necessary change in legislation had not yet been secured.). Whether that development policy could be carried through to the point at which subsidiary enterprises – British or Indian – emerged to generate economic activity would depend upon whether, and for how long, the Company could sustain its investment drive. Ominous signs that the Company would run out of resources before that point were already present in the poor public response to the share issue of August–September 1889. In the interior, the opportunity to tap into the ivory trade of the southern Sudan (which formerly went down the Nile to Egypt) had been lost by Emin Pasha's withdrawal from Equatoria. But even if Emin had remained in place, and an overland route been opened up between Wadelai and Mombasa through the Kenya Highlands, it is by no means certain that trading by human portage over the roughly 800 miles between these two places would have been a profitable activity. The Company had not yet found a solution to its problem that most of the established and profitable trade in ivory – even in ivory from parts of the Kenya Highlands, within the British ‘sphere’ – was conducted from Arab-Swahili ports which were now in the German ‘sphere’. The opening-up of trade with Buganda, across or around Lake Victoria, offered a gleam of hope – but also prospects of large military and logistical costs. At sea, the plans to transform Mombasa into an imperial hub port, strategically poised for mercantile and naval purposes between Britain, India and South Africa, had been constrained by William Mackinnon's inability to persuade the British and Indian governments to support his vision of a network of BI liner services in the western Indian Ocean, and by the Admiralty's lack of interest in the port.