ARE UGANDANS THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT THEIR PRODUCTIVITY?

Have you ever asked yourself how many Ugandans have ever thought about their productivity or have ever thought of becoming more productive than they are currently in the recent times? 

In this era of social media and digital technology very many people in Africa especially Uganda are still very slow at doing things and they are not even thinking about their output for the different things that they are doing in their life.

  We cannot move at the same pace with the people in the west simply because w e do waste a lot of time on unproductive things that will not actually add a penny into our pockets. 

We are always thinking of the easy way out and hoping that things will actually be better tomorrow but the truth of the matter is that if you do not find a reason why you should be productive today, you will be wasting some valuable amount of time and energy on things that will not improve your life in anyway.  

It is only in Uganda where you will see very many television stations broadcasting wedding ceremonies on a daily basis and every television station is talking about marriage and relationships instead of talking about business, entrepreneurship and how to make money and keep it. It is a true saying that you cannot teach an old dog new tricks. 

In Uganda, most of our youths are very busy drinking alcohol and partying almost every day and you will ask yourself what are they celebrating everyday and you cannot even get a clear answer to that question. 

We cannot blame the countries that have developed and bypassed us technologically simply because these people are nurturing their youths in a very different manner compared to the way that we actually do. These people are training their youths to be hardworking and use their time well.  

These people have good roles models for their youths. People like Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook is a very good role model for the youths in the United States among many other big time entrepreneurs. 

We have seen these youths in the western countries build great companies whose revenues even exceed the budgets of very many countries in Africa. 

The most surprising thing is that these companies were built in very few years in a time frame of almost less than a decade; they had already accumulated all that amount of wealth in their accounts. 

That is what we can call creativity at it’s best. If we had that level of creativity in Uganda, I do believe that we would either be a first world country or we would be heading there very soon.  

Instead of trying to tax social media sites like Facebook, my humble appeal to the government of Uganda is to invest resources in its youthful population so that they will be able to start building their own companies that can also generate revenue for us.

 One of the biggest problems that we have in Uganda is the mentality of self entitlement that has almost brought our economy into it’s knees. 

We have very many youths who are highly educated but these cannot get employment and instead of advising them to start their own businesses, most parents will continue telling them to look for jobs which are actually not there. 

We should stop thinking that the only thing that we can do after school is to look for a job. 

We should develop the entrepreneurship mindset among our youths and encourage them to start up their own businesses that can solve the problems of society.  If we can do that, we will be able to fight unemployment in this country. 

It saddens me so much to see very bright Ugandan youths who have completed their degrees to end up on the streets jobless. We will need the stakeholders to come in and do something about sensitisation of the youth about the value of entrepreneurship to a country and it’s people.  

When I watch news on television stations like BBC and you see how they talk about the big start-ups in their countries, it makes me feel like I should change my nationality and become one of them.

 This feeling is because in their countries, they have embraced entrepreneurship and the value of entrepreneurship is great to them even more than the politics of the day. 

If we can develop that kind of attitude within our youths and people, we will be able to achieve great things in this country and our continent Africa as a whole. 

We fail to become productive, w e shall continue being poor and we shall continue looking for taxes in areas where we are not supposed to, like social media sites.