Skip to main content

CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR GRADUATION, ITS NOW TIME TO WORK….


Thousands of students will be graduating from their respective universities in coming days and months.


Makerere, our country’s oldest university will kick off its ceremonies on January 15th and the other universities will follow.

The graduates have already had a taste of the real life, having finished their studies mid last year and tried to get employed.

Many know by now that the world can be harsh and unforgiving. I hope many are tightening their belts in readiness for the struggle ahead. Some may have decided to kick the tin down the road bycontinuing with school. And others may have given up altogether.

My prayer is that there are more of the first and less of the last kind.

In talking to young people, I find that what is needed is a reorientation of their minds – a mindset change. Let me share with you certain facts to help manage their expectations of the world and how they can fulfil their potential in our context.

First of all, the world owes you nothing. It was here before you. It has seen more brilliant or hopeless people than you are, right now. It can very well do without you.

Harsh? Yes! But it’s a truth we need to internalise. You might be the hottest kid in your class, in the country. Regardless, you are entering a stage in life where practical results are everything regardless of what you did at school.

All you have learnt at school will be turned this way and that, revised or even rejected by the real world.

Think of it as a reset.

Regardless of what course you have done, the biggest skill you must make sure you leave the university with, is the ability to learn and to learn continuously.

This is important, even critical and will be the difference between whether you survive or not, or better still, whether you thrive in the years ahead of you.

The world is changing at a faster and faster pace and to keep up or stay one step ahead of these changes, your ability to learn continuously will hold you in good stead.

As a businessman who has started from the ground, I have had to learn to grow from selling sugar as a teenager to currently overseeing businesses that range from retail outlets to power generation plants to hotels to real estate developments.

They say the knowledge that has gotten you to where you are is not the same knowledge that will take you to the next level.

And I am not talking about upgrading your academic credentials only.

You need to set upon an independent program of learning about the world around you -- how it came to be the way it is and where it is going. This self-initiated quest for knowledge will come by reading
books, exploring the internet and through regular interaction with mentors.

The world demands that you become an insatiable knowledge sponge.

If this is the only thing you take away from this, my work will have been done.

As a final thought, you are young the world is literally at your feet.

You have the advantage of time. Use it well, make every day count. One important thing you will need to learn is financial literacy. This will not only help you spend your money wisely but will eventually lead to having your money work for you, which is the ultimate goal of financial literacy.

In this regard I urge you to Google -compounding, which Albert Einstein called the eighth wonder of the world. Put very basically it is building on what you have, be it knowledge or relationships ormoney. Whether you will be financially secure in your older years will depend on whether compounding works for you or against you.

One of the smartest things you can do for your future well-being is to understand and employ compounding to your benefit. The sooner you start the better.

And my very last word is that you are lucky to be alive and well, in this country, at this time. The potential of this country is largely unexploited, which means that you will be getting in at the ground floor of whatever you do. Don’t be distracted by tales of how moving to this country or the other will be better for you. The action is all here.

There is a price to pay to unlock this potential. Bucketful’s of sweat and copious amounts of faith will be needed. From my experience I can promise you that if you stick the course there will be a pot of
gold at the end of the rainbow.

Congratulations to our graduates. Celebrate your success. But not for too long, because there is work to be done.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

WE NEED A BETTER SOLUTION FOR KAMPALA TRAFFIC

I am sure I am not the only one feeling it. Kampala’s traffic is becoming increasingly unbearable. Even the removal of roundabouts around the city seem to have an opposite effect to the intended purpose of easing traffic flow in the city. Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) has an ambitious plan of flyovers, underground tunnels and railway transport, which should help the cause, I hope. The snarl ups that we are coming fast accustomed to, are not only an issue of teeth grinding inconvenience but have a real cost on our economy by hampering and increasing the cost of doing business. A recent World Bank report suggests that as an economy, we are losing about sh3trillion annually due to traffic jams. The losses come in form of delayed deliveries, higher fuel consumption and the health consequences of seating in a smoke filled environment. To put this in perspective this is the combined budget of the health, agriculture and ICT ministries in this year’s budget. Or ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A SHIFT AWAY FROM AGRICULTURE IS CRITICAL FOR UGANDA

Anyone who has half a stake in this country would be a keen observer of the economy and the direction it is taking. In the last three decades the economy has shown strong growth, only slowing to overcome bad weather, a global financial crisis or unrest in the region. Compared to when I started out in business, it has become a more liberal economy, with individual initiative being rewarded more and more. While the economy is still dominated by the informal sector, the formal sector is growing annually. But the biggest shift in the economy has to be the reduction in agriculture’s share of the economy from more than 80 percent to about 25 percent today. This has happened despite the leap in the production of everything from bananas to coffee or from milk to maize. What has happened is that more of the economy – though not nearly enough, has been taken up by industry, construction and services. This is how it should be and in fact, more work is needed in shifting t...
Post a Comment
Read more

COME HELP BEAT BACK HIV/AIDS

Uganda has made tremendous strides in containing the AIDS pandemic. For some of us who were around in the 1980s and saw the worst effects of the AIDS pandemic, the way the country has contained the disease is not what we had envisaged back then. Ignorance, stigma and lack of drugs surrounding the disease saw thousands die horrible deaths – wasting away, tortured by opportunistic diseases and being shirked by family and a society out fear.  The doomsayers were projecting a major fall in our population, a collapse of the economy and a total breakdown of social cohesion. That the country is still around and fighting back the disease successfully, could not have been envisaged in those scary days of the 1980s when the disease came into the public conscious. Thankfully rather than sweep the problem under the carpet like many of the neighbouring countries, President Yoweri Museveni led a fight back against AIDS that had at its core widespread dissemination of infor...
Post a Comment
Read more

CRYPTOCURRENCIES ARE COMING, ARE WE READY?

In the last few decades in Uganda we have seen the currency become so worthless a large part of the population resorted to barter trade – exchanging goods for goods. Then the currency stabilized and we enjoyed having money in our pockets. Our money habits continue to evolve. Increasingly we don’t need physical cash to do our business.  Debit cards, mobile money and e-banking services are pushing us fast towards a cashless society. And now we are moving into a more intangible space – cryptocurrency. "As I understand them these are digital currencies, generated using encryption techniques, that also verify fund transfers. Also that no central bank is involved in creating or regulating these currencies... The more widely known cryptocurrency, Bitcoin was launched in July 2010 and its fate has been at best back ground noise to many of us, if at all. it has registered some limited attention but mainly for   speculative gains. In recent years it has seen ju...
Post a Comment
Read more

GIVE OUR TRAFFIC POLICE A CHANCE

Last week during an investor interaction   Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) officials called on police to stop overriding traffic lights while directing traffic. KCCA argues that the traffic lights are large investment and it makes no sense for police to countermand them. In a classic case of “The importance of the river was not known till it dried up” on Friday the traffic police desisted from directing cars at the traffic lights leading to the worst traffic snarl-up in the city’s history. People were stuck in traffic jams around the city for hours and long into the night. Maybe it was the unhappy coincidence of the traditional Friday traffic and pre-Christmas excitement but without the traffic police directing traffic it was a mess. They made their point. It of course points to the bigger issue of a revamping of Kampala’s road network, which has remained   largely the same since independence but with an exponential increase in cars in the last three...
Post a Comment
Read more

FINANCING OUR ENTREPRENEURS, A CHALLENGE WE CANNOT IGNORE

In recent weeks the issues of financing for business has been in the news, in one form or the other. We have seen the challenge a past minister is facing with having to hang onto his home. The case is in court, so we can’t discuss its merits and demerits, just to say he may have fallen prey to some predatory practices, with the lender skirting dangerously on the edge of the law. Across the border in Kenya a cap on bank lending rates has been repealed. Three years ago Kenya’s parliament passed a law restricting lending rates to two percentage points above the rate at which the central bank lent money. In reaction banks pulled back their lending to businesses, depressing the economy and prompting the reversal. So now banks can “properly” price their loans, often to the discomfort of small and medium sized businesses. The two incidents are related and speak to the availability and cost of credit. In my business career I have benefitted immensely from credit. It is next...
Post a Comment
Read more