O Yes! I do that Too.
In the homeland, where unemployment rates are up the roof, even the few who are employed get to shoulder a financial burden much bigger than their salaries can handle. To beat this, you have to learn the “hustle” trade. In the end, we are reduced to the proverbial Jacks of All Trades, But Masters of None.
The Jack-of-All-Trades-but-masters-of-none comparison can seem like a bad thing — that’s what I thought too, until I realized that on the contrary, specialization can as well become more of a liability than an asset in cases like our own.
Recently, I had an appointment with a friend who works in the telecommunications sector. He is a sucker for perfect timekeeping! In Kampala, where almost everyone uses “African Time” as an excuse for being late, it is a rarity, and a good one, to find someone who keeps time to a fault like this guy. On this particular day, he calls me about 5 minutes to our appointment time. I was already at the venue knowing that he gets jittery when he is made to wait. He is panting, over the phone. “Man, I am afraid we have to reschedule”… before explaining how the agricultural produce deal he was chasing had just gone bad and now he was on a motorcycle taxi (We call them boda boda), trying to salvage all that he could of the money he had already invested in. It was meanwhile working hours and he was purportedly on duty as far as I could tell. Our meeting was about an assignment we were working on together — which was in another field altogether, something to do with business intelligence. We quickly rescheduled our appointment and I was soon on phone with someone else as if there had been no interruption, talking to a guy who had told me earlier he was looking for an apartment for his guests arriving the following day!
In his book Born A Crime, Trevor Noah gives a perfect description of Hustling.
“Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet — tweets, Facebook posts, lists — you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year. ”
The unemployment rates in Uganda are dire to say the least. Very conservative estimates put the figures at more than 65%. But perhaps what we rarely investigate are the rates to do with underemployment, or short term gigs, or those that lie somewhere in between. The in-between would be the kind like one an acquaintance has had for close to 10 years. When he finally left that workplace a few months ago, he mentioned jokingly about how after all these years, he was — “walking out like a mafia”. On probing, what he meant was that he had no gratuity, no benefits, nothing whatsoever. Apart from the mandatory security fund which he can only access after he makes 55 years of age, he has been living hand to mouth for the better part of a decade.
At a café I frequent whenever I am doing my own fair share of hustling, I have struck a rapport with the manager. When we started talking, he was quick to add… “By the way, I also sell Insurance” — handing me a different business card from the one he had given me the first time we met, and going on to tell me about everything insurance.
Thinking about it, maybe no one needs any master of any trade in my side of the world. So instead of waiting for an adequate position in the area of your specialization to open up, you might as well learn a few more trades along the way. And if anybody says they need something done, just be ready to tell them quickly, before they look someplace else…
“O Yes! I do that too.”
