From Uganda Corespondent Arinaitwe Rugyendo…
Recently, I was invited by Makerere University Business School (MUBS) to speak to their completing students.
It is a requirement for MUBS’ mentorship programme to invite business practitioners from town to speak and inspire its business students.
The venue was House 4 where I found about 1000 students waiting and others listening-in from the outside through the windows.
I had been instructed to speak to them about the possibility of starting their own businesses after school and what it takes to create their own jobs.
Using my own experience at Red Pepper, I told them the long story of a newspaper we started with just less than One million shillings some nine years ago but has since grown strong.
The students were eager to listen to one of their own speak because they had been briefed that at the time we founded this newspaper in 2001, I was pretty the same age as most of them. The authorities therefore felt it was important for me to speak about how we did it as a way of inspiring their students who are leaving school in three weeks time with no possibility of immediate employment.
Drawing from both local and international examples, I concluded that the problem of unemployment in Uganda is not because the jobs are not available. It is largely a question of attitude and the failure on the part of our mentors and political leaders to focus the young people’s minds on looking for opportunities and identifying every problem as an opportunity for offering a business solution and therefore a chance at job creation.
I observed that it is for instance a question of attitude realignment if you have many graduate doctors crying for jobs. It should take a deliberate mentorship programme by patriotic political leaders to sensitize them on the fact that as doctors, they are ‘mobile clinics’ whose services patients are waiting to pay for from anywhere. This would be one way of creating their own jobs.
The story of vivid examples from which the students picked business ideas was very long and by close of the session, most of them had been converted to my gospel of entrepreneurship not because they didn’t have the ideas. It was because, like several unemployed young people elsewhere in Uganda, there is nobody to talk to them. There is virtually no one to show them the way which I did!
But the most intriguing part of the session was question time. Students asked a number of questions raging from how to start a business to start-up capital. The frustration on their faces told volumes of how the crisis of unemployment in Uganda has reached almost immeasurable proportions. The young people clearly lack people who should be showing them where opportunities for cheap credit are and which business ideas can make sense.
And no wonder then that current statistics show that for about 390,000 students who finish tertiary education each year, there are only about 8,000 jobs to them to fight for.
During my address, a friend, Mr. Kakembo, who works in the Tax Investigations department at Uganda Revenue Authority, told students of a harrowing experience at the tax body where for every job advertised requiring about four people to fill, there are nearly 2,500 applications to it. The situation has even gotten worse to the extent that across the city, employers are bombarded with job requests from young people requesting to be allowed to ‘just do anything.’ They no longer value their qualifications.
Uganda is certainly sitting on a time bomb because unemployment is no longer an individual case problem. It is a massively public issue because the structure of opportunities has collapsed and the politicians do not seem to have a clue.
Instead, they go on sloganeering, telling the hapless students to go and create jobs. They never tell them anything significant about how to raise start up capital. The cheeky ones blame the degree programmes offered in some universities which they say have little relevance to the employment situation in the country, yet, the very system they serve runs a National Council for Higher Education which is charged with licensing universities and their programmes whose relevance surely cannot be blamed on the graduates.
Apart from the patriotism seminars, civic education programmes and the political education courses at Kyankwanzi and other areas, there are no job creation think tanks in the country and the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs has never gathered job seekers anywhere in Uganda and showed them where opportunities for investment and start-up capital acquisition are located.
Instead, the unemployed young people are being asked to go, register and vote, which is why I am not surprised that the Electoral Commission has complained of a frustratingly low turn up at the various voter verification centres across the country.
What then can be the possible way forward?
I strongly feel that all political parties competing for power in the next election should, as a first step, focus on removing obstacles to job creation and accessibility.
Reducing the retirement age at the moment is something that would send well accomplished Ugandans into self employment, giving way to a size able number of jobs in the public sector to the young people.
A person who retires at the age 50 now, will utilize his gratuity more responsibly than a young graduate who is given money to start up a shop. In other words, a retiree has more meaningful start-up capital in the form of his hard-earned gratuity than a fresh graduate.
This is where any political party that wants my vote, can instantly create about 50,000 jobs every year as it goes about scratching for more robust solutions.
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