WHAT I WISH I KNEW ON GRADUATION DAY

Last week and into this weekend Kampala was rocked with the merrymaking of Makerere University graduates. 

The celebrations are in order given the time, sacrifice and effort that has been expended over the previous two decades. This is the culmination of the mind bending effort it took to learn the alphabet and arithmetic tables, to mastering the ability to hold it all in medical school’s anatomy class, to finding the knack of balancing your academics with your raging hormones.

But for us the older ones we look on, smiling knowingly and biting our tongues before we can say, “You have seen nothing yet!”

Listed below in no particular order is what I wish I was told when I was leaving campus those so many years ago.

1.       The world will only pay for value

The world does not owe you a living. It will only pay for the value you can deliver. Your job for the rest of your life is to continue increasing your value. You do this by continuing to learn and from experience. Take every opportunity to learn and gain experience – sometimes even if it is from working for free. It’s not the cloths that make the man, but the man/woman who makes the clothes. Character has value. Strive to be reliable, dependable and trustworthy.

2.       Get out from under your parents wings as fast as you can

Your parents want the best for you. You must resist the urge to continue enjoying their hospitality. Move out at the earliest opportunity – even if it’s is only with your thread bare campus mattress and battered metal box (I am told those are from a pre-historic era). The sooner you leave your parents house the easier it will be to wean yourself off the DSTV premium bouquet, washing machine, free food and board.

3.       Stay fit and healthy

You are not getting any younger. To make an impression at the office or your place of work you have to stay healthy for long stretches of time. You cannot afford sick leave. Drink lots of water. Steer clear of fast food as habit. Your endurance will be tested in these early as as you set off on your career, the difference between climbing the ladder or not may just be the long hours you are able to put in – ever with a smile and never a grimace.

4.       Recognise that there is a higher purpose than yourself

Responsibility sets in. It’s no longer only about you. It’s about your partner. It’s about your family. It’s about your boss. It’s about the business you work in. It’s about your neighbourhood, your society, the nation. If you lurch your star to a higher cause than yourself you will be able to persevere longer, overcoming the speed bumps of life with a shrug and a smile.

5.       Nothing works the way it’s supposed to

Regardless of what the gurus of inspiration say nothing ever works the way it is supposed to. Plan ahead but be flexible. Be adaptable. Be ready to take a hit – many hits, change direction, revise your view of yourself and the world and keep on keeping on. 

6.       Realise that nothing of enduring significance can be created alone

The storyline of the hero who goes it alone against immense odds and comes out the other side victorious is the stuff of Hollywood and you are best advised to live it in your DVD player. Your education did not prepare you for it, but in the real world you have to work in teams to achieve anything worth talking about. This will often mean having to share the limelight, to admit your weaknesses and even rely on others more than you are comfortable.

7.       Start planning for retirement now

They say as soon as you are born, you start to die. Similarly when you start work plan your career but more importantly plan your exit. It’s not too early to start saving. Interest yourself in the skill of running a business and investing. Understand that just as it has taken you 20 years to make it thus far these skills too will take time to learn and master. Don’t be seduced by the promise of the one big deal that will sort you out for life. It never comes. Life is a series of small steps, which may grow bigger with time and experience.

And so we have come full circle. Focus on learning and gaining experience in whatever you want to achieve. You feel clever now but the world will not be fooled – not for long at least. Be on the lookout for durable sustainable progress. If a deal is too good to be true, it is.

KEEP IT UP MAKERERE

Last week Makerere University graduated 12,000 of its students over the last four days.

The university has come a long way from the under 1,000 students it used to graduate in the 1980s. 

We may turn up our noses at the quality of the graduates that continue to make their way into the workplace but that we can churn them out at this rate is a good start to eventually improving their quality.

But more encouraging than the increase out turn is Makerere’s increasing research output.

According to Makerere’s vice-chancellor professor Ddumba Sentamu the university has received about sh184b to carry out research in various areas. The research grants have come from private corporations, aid agencies and academic institutions abroad.

The research has not be done for its own sake but has provided useful findings with real time applications in our environment. Ddumba said as a result of research carried out here it has been determined that the anti-malarial drug Coartem should not be prescribed in combination with certain TB drug. When the two taken together Coartem’s efficacy is reduced significantly. Also there has been research which allows for the accurate detection of sleeping sickness parasites in the Tse tse fly. 

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

University’s are not only supposed to transmit knowledge but also add to the stock of the current knowledge available. With the speed of change in the world university’s are increasingly being judged on their latter rather than their former role.

Makerere university is currently grappling with the challenge of being a public university and the scarcity of resources that entails and funding its own activities. The reality is that for fear of failing to meet its public mandate of educating as many Ugandans as it can, the tuition fees charged cannot reflect the true cost of the service provided.

The deficit has been bridged – sporadically and half-heartedly, by government.

The new knowledge that comes out of their research efforts are valuable intellectual property, which if handled well can provide income for the institution not only from grants but from royalties and licenses long into the future.

Harvard University and gets upwards of $750m (about sh2 trillion) in research grants while Oxford University earns about £500m (about sh2trillion) annually.  Oxford University’s wholly owned, Isis Innovation Ltd in 2011 made more than sh16b in technology transfer services – essentially making the university’s research findings commercially available.

So in pushing research Makerere is on to a good a thing by many measures and beyond providing manpower for the growing needs of the nation the university can take its rightful place as the driver of the economic transformation agenda in coming years.

The aforementioned Isis Innovation Ltd not only licenses the university technology to third parties but also is involved in providing seed money for entrepreneurs looking to commercialise these ventures, a lucrative if the supported ventures become fabulously profitable. In 2005 Stanford University – Silicon Valley’s hub, made $336m (sh900b) from selling its stake in Google, for instance.

As it stands now most of Makerere’s research funding seems to come from foreign agencies, which is all very nice, but government or local corporations need to fund research into subjects that are of immediate concern to ourselves.

For example a funder in New York may finance research into the importance of sibling positioning in predicting success, which would make for interesting reading but not necessarily have far reaching impact in Uganda as a study in to medical delivery systems in our low income environment.

Makerere should be supported in its increasing emphasis on research by the government and the society at large because research feeds into innovation which will make transformation of our economy more than just a pipe dream.

OUR BUSINESSMEN NEED TO BECOME CORPORATE

Last week warring factions in South Sudan signed an agreement to cease fire following weeks of fighting during which the advantage see sawed from one side to the other.

There a lot of Ugandan businessmen are waiting with bated breath for the resolution of the conflict so they can jump back into one of the most lucrative but lawless markets in the region.

Among Kampala's chattering masses there has been criticism of government, that they aided the then rebel SPLA against the Khartoum government but Uganda has derived little commercial benefit from the world's newest nation. The feeling has been that Kenyans had jumped in and snapped up all the prime business opportunities.

The outbreak of fighting in December may have changed that perception dramatically. It came as a surprise that anything from 20,000 to a million Ugandans were actively involved in South Sudan in as diverse roles as boda boda riders to humanitarian aid workers.

We knew through anecdotes that our northern neighbours were buying up our produce while still in the fields, but we didn't know that our northern neighbours had now overtaken Kenya as our biggest trading partner accounting for than a billion dollars in exports in 2012, with some estimates suggesting that figure was set to double in 2013.

Officials estimate that continued instability in South Sudan will account for up to a percentage point of economic growth this year.

Suddenly the importance of south Sudanese is enough to make us ignore their occasional uncouth behavior.

Suddenly it doesn't matter too whether our businessmen affected are Baganda, Banyankole, Japadhola or Lugbara, they are our business people and can we evacuate them and we sympathize with the losses they have incurred.

A national interest can only be forged it seems, when we think of ourselves in relation to other nations.

You want to tread carefully on the issue of commercial interest dictating foreign policy but when you think about it, economic interests do not respect tribe or creed and are more durable than other transient differences.

It is interesting too that while happenings in south Sudan dominate our front pages they do not exercise the Kenyan popular thinking as much. The difference maybe in the way our respective commercial agents have operated in south Sudan.

While in Uganda's case it has been individual businessmen striking out on their own, trying to make speculative gains from trade. In the Kenyan case it has been more the case that huge corporate entities, banks for example, which have pitched tent in Juba. Probably explains the difference in reactions to the crisis by our respective governments.

Our businessmen may learn a thing or two from going the Kenyan way though.

In operating as companies rather than individuals they can scale up their operation to take advantage of bigger opportunities, their size would be impossible for politicians to ignore in Kampala and therefore take safe guarding commercial interests more seriously but more importantly, spread the risk of doing business among more shareholders ensuring that in the case of business failure the loss is not as disastrous to the individual businessmen.

Our businessmen can not get away from it. To take on the new competition for the region's opportunities, they need to get more organized. At very basic level they need to stop operating as individuals and go corporate.

The Vasco da Gamas and Christopher Colombus when they set out to explore for alternative routes to Asia, created corporations to support the endeavor spreading risk and ensuring that even if one mission failed they could finance others in the future that hopefully would recoup earlier losses.

Of course the challenge of operating with other partners is that it will take more intelligence, patience and sacrifice to manage shareholder expectations. There is bound to be a steep learning curve for our businesses but lessons they have no choice but to learn.

Its unlikely that south Sudan will remain unstable for long, but for a long time before proper structures are in place it will always be a high risk environment to operate in. 

Once beaten twice shy, we cannot ignore the market but our businessmen need to think more about covering he downside in future forays north.

THE FORGOTTEN CONNECTION BETWEEN AIDS AND CORRUPTION

The causes of corruption are many and affected by the peculiarities of the place and moment but a combination of stagnating university enrolment in the 1970s and 80s and the AIDS pandemic may have conspired to accelerate the theft of public funds.

In 1965 about 900 students were enrolled at Makerere University, this jumped to 2,581 in 1970 and then to 4,045 by 1980 before doubling again to about 8,000 students at the beginning of the 1990s.  Over the next decade enrolment more than tripled to just under 27,000 in all universities and before ballooning to more than 200,000 in the more than 30 universities nationwide. 

The eight year reign of Idi Amin and the contracting economy easily accounts for the slow  expansion of university enrolment in the 1970s. This continues into the 1980s when there were greater priorities than pandering to pampered students at the Makerere.

"The Amin years reduced the aspirations of the average Ugandan to that of bare survival, higher values were sacrificed at the altar of expediency and a consistent assault on the moral fibre of society was opened...

The insecurity drove many of the elite into exile, if it did not kill them first.

In the 1980s in addition to the general insecurity, the AIDS epidemic reared its head decimating more of the middle class. The young and virile students at Makerere University, which was one of the most liquid communities in Kampala at the time, was easy prey for the AIDS pandemic.

Apart from the low enrolment figures, with graduating classes of less than a 1000 students at a time upto the end of the 1980s, in hindsight a few students from the era report a difficulty in accounting for all their classmates many of whom are dead – casualties of the insecurity of the time, felled by AIDS or marooned abroad.

It is no secret that some of our wealthiest citizens today benefitted from the chaos and lack of formality that begun in the Amin era and went on into the 1980s. But many of these forwent a formal education for the streets and to their credit, were able to come out the other side better off than they went in. Some who failed to adopt to an increasingly formal economy have fallen on their swords and remain in the realm of legend.

For the young graduates coming out of Makerere in the 1990s this posed a dilemma. On one hand they admired and marvelled at the fortunes of some of these mafuta mingi, but were unable to join them in the unpredictable world of business, out of some mistaken sense of superiority or inadequacy at their ability to operate in an area that did not operate according to the text books.

On the other hand the ranks of their predecessors at the university were terribly thin and they were few people who through long and diligent service had grown sustainably wealthy, to look up to.

It did not help that the new rich in town provided no honest, credible or sustainable template for wealth accumulation. If anything they made being “sharp” and leveraging position to accumulate wealth, an acceptable endeavour.

With these three contradictions, 1990s graduates aspirations to wealth lacked proper bearing and is it any surprise that they are the ones that fill the docks of the anti-corruption court today.

Some people have written off the current generation of middle level managers as lost to the corruption bug and look forward to the next generation of university graduates – the class of the 2000s to restore some sanity to the situation, but who are their role models?

Fortunately jobs are better paying than they were in the past, allowing people a living from one job.   

This only reduces the incentives to mass prodigious amounts of wealth but it is a start.

Seeing as we can’t quarantine all our corrupt – actual and potential, some other compulsion has to come into play to stop this problem dead in its tracks.

I have my thoughts on what those maybe but we will keep that for another day.