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

GOOD BUSINESS SENSE WILL HELP OUR AGRICULTURE

The recent drought has at once alerted us to our deficiencies in our agriculture production and reawakened a drive to revitalise the sector. How is it that a country with half the arable land in the region has people suffering starvation? How is that our crops dried up in the fields when a fifth of our land mass is under water? And on a macro level how is it that the 70 percent of our people who rely on the land directly for a living, account for 30 percent of our economic output or GDP? Given our natural endowments in land, weather and manpower it is obvious that we are performing well below our potential. Reversing this trend of affairs should be the concern of everybody in the country. A lot of the debate has revolved around increasing production, value addition and market access locally and internationally. And rightly so. Taking one example the Uganda Coffee Development Authority says that the average yield per hectare is half a ton of coffee. But meanwhile with...
Post a Comment
Read more

OIL: WE NEED TO GET OUR ACT TOGETHER… YESTERDAY

(Published February, 2017) We are on the cusp of an important period in the history of this country and whether we can derive maximum advantage from this will depend on our capacity to put aside petty rivalries and come together as the business community. Over the next three years at least $20b or almost the size of the entire economy will be spent in readying us for first oil. This money will be spent on building infrastructure in the oil bearing areas of western Uganda, on our side of the oil pipeline to the Tanzanian port of Tanga, on the oil refinery and any number of things that will be needed to support oil production. About $3b (sh11trillion) was spent during the exploration phase of which less than three in every ten shillings   or about sh3trillion went to local contractors and suppliers. But this happened over eight years. This despite our local disorganisation and ignorance of the industry and its dynamics. However we should not be content with t...
Post a Comment
Read more

LET THE UN BASE SAGA BE A LESSON TO US

I have watched with much interest as the issues of the UN base in Entebbe have played out in recent days. At the beginning of the month it was reported that the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres, had signed off on a new structure, The Global Services Delivery model, that it was suggested would see Uganda losing the Regional Service Center in Entebbe (RCSE) to Nairobi. Under the new model the UN would have three key centers in Hungary, Kenya and Mexico. In response to a letter by President Yoweri Museveni, Guterres assured him that the RCSE would remain in Entebbe. Though some functions will be relocated to Nairobi in the short term, in the middle to long term he sees the role of RCSE expanding and growing in importance. The new development takes effect from 1 st July this year. According to their website the RCSE serves more than 20,000 personnel on the continent, does administration and communications support for thousands more around the world and has an...
Post a Comment
Read more

NOT ONLY THE HARDWARE BUT THE SOFTWARE TOO

In the middle of September the United Nations released its annual Human Development Indicator (HDI). This index serves as an indicator of the quality of life of a country’s people by measuring the health, education, inequality, poverty and security standards. Aside from the statistical measures of development like GDP growth, this is obviously a better measure of how people are actually doing. In this year’s HDI report Uganda was ranked 162 out of 189 countries with a HDI score of 0.516. The index goes from zero to one, the nearer you are to one the better. Our score puts us in the low human development category. But as bad as that sounds we have been worse. In 1990, the earliest year that these figures were compiled our score was 0.311 even the UN recognises that we have improved 66 percent in the last three decades. According to the UN figures life expectancy has risen to 60.2 years   from 45.5 in 1990; expected years of schooling has doubled to 11.6 fr...
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

KEEP UP PRESSURE ON CORRUPTION

There has been a flurry of activity surrounding corruption in recent weeks, with a few public officials caught red handed taking bribes. The public deprived of services because of a few greedy individuals are understandably gleeful.  However they are also those who are a bit sceptical, wondering whether this campaign will last or will peter out along the way. It is heartening to see that President Yoweri Museveni has put his full weight behind the latest attempt and provides a positive signal to all parties concerned. He should be supported by every well-meaning Ugandan so that this drive does not fizzle out in a few weeks. I choose to be optimistic about this anti-corruption drive, because rolling back the endemic that corruption has become, is one of the first steps we need to take towards attaining middle income status as a nation and for any other meaningful development we hope to see in the future. We see it in our daily lives. Beyond the moralit...
Post a Comment
Read more