Each camp has issued a statement or two and appeared at TV or on radio to present their case to the public. If you say one thing people don’t agree with, you are on the other side. You can’t ask any questions to provide some answers or state facts. This is the social media era.
Anyway, the majority of people offering opinions on the issue had perhaps never heard of the word gratuity, a payment largely made by employers to reward people for their work. Some big organizations offer such rewards at the end of contracts of their staff or periodically such as quarterly or annually as part of the employment or retirement benefits.
Usually, such payments are percentages of annual or monthly earnings or for the entire period one has been in employment or service. Many businesses where Ugandans work today can’t afford such payments. They make so little to even afford to pay decent salaries and remain afloat.
That is why I believe that the majority of people making arguments on social media over the last week had never heard of it. Now that they have heard of gratuity yet nobody will ever pay it to them, what can young people do to get themselves gratuity or akasiimo in Luganda as it has been interpreted?
The first thing for the majority of people is to accept that they will never make much money and have everything they wish for. It doesn’t happen in America or China, the world’s biggest economies and so it will never happen here. Yet the majority of people claim that they can’t save because they don’t earn enough. They will never earn enough money.
So, if there will never earn enough money, what can they do with the little they get?
If you earn Shs 200,000 today, which is the average amount Ugandans earn, it is not certainly enough but if something happened and you start earning Shs 150,000, you would not die. Human nature would enable most people to cope and adjust to living on Shs 150,000. Maybe you will walk to work.
Maybe you would eat one snack a day. Maybe you would move to a room where you now pay half the rent that you were paying while earning Shs 200,000. The issue is that you would adjust.
The question is should you only adjust when things have changed to the worst? The simple answer is no. If you earned Shs 200,000 and lived the life of somebody earning Shs 150,000, it would mean that you have a balance of Shs 50,000 every month translating into Shs 600,000 annually. Since nobody is going to pay you gratuity ever, the Shs 600,000 saved annually can be your gratuity.
If you invested this money in a scheme that can give you at least a net interest of 10 per centannually, you would earn Shs 60,000 in the first year alone, nearly half of your monthly pay. You could actually earn it faster if you don’t wait to first save Shs 600,000 to start investing it at once.
If you invest Shs 50,000 every month, and interest is compounded daily, you would have some good return in a few short years Imagine, if you did this from age 25 when you started working to 55 when you retired. That is 30 years of dedicated saving.
Assuming your salary never increased and you remained frugal despite increasing inflation and other expenses and still saved and invested Shs 50,000 per a month, you would have Shs 109 million in 30 years if we are to go by a US government website with a compound interest app that I have used to come up with this figure.
With this money, you would have paid yourself gratuity, just like the politicians and other big people. The key to enabling yourself this huge gratuity payment is by delaying gratification and not getting involved in stuff which don’t necessarily add any value to you. Many young people are today buying data and wasting it on social media to allegedly put politicians in line.
The politicians will say lots of stuff against each other in public while sharing a glass of French sparkling wine in private. Just last week, two politicians from the region who were strangling each other about a year ago were seen somewhere in central Uganda, smiling as they took selfies with their host’s cows.
Those who were fighting on their behalf were still languishing in poverty in East Africa’s biggest slum. That doesn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t get involved in politics rather to understand that most politicians are in it for themselves and we do something for ourselves too.
djjuuko@gmail.com
The writer is a communication and visibility consultant
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