https://www.listennotes.com/e/50e2b0041a4642a7b1faa5a3086017df

Foreign hello there. My name is Patrick, Patrick Bitature. I am here today with my daughter Natalie, Natalie Bitature. And we're going to have a candid discussion, an authentic talk, father and daughter, about uncommon perspectives. You know, kids that are born in a different generation have a certain set of views, and we, the older God, have a certain set of values and views. So where do these two meet? And this is what we're trying to talk to you about and share with you our thoughts. So today we have a very interesting discussion. We're going to begin talking about employment, because employment seems to be number one subject for most of the people. I say most of the people because in Uganda, the average age is 15.5, 15 and a half years old. That's where the median is. So the widest number of people around that age and number one priority for them is what will they do? They have studied, They've come so far. They've got a few more years to study. And then what? They see so many people being churned out of these institutions, universities, colleges, and they don't get a job. They're not sure of their future. So we'd like to share our perspectives about this. And I'll begin by inviting my daughter to explain. What do you think the problem is globally and. And then locally about employment? Because this seems to be a phenomenal problem.

Very true. It's such a big issue because young people need to work to earn a living and to start their lives. I think globally we're going through a big shift, especially since COVID in America, they're calling it the great resignation because so many people got used to working from home.

The great what?

Resignation. People are actually leaving their jobs because of working from home, but also because of the rise of the gig economy, which is people working freelance, where you're using your skills and moving from different institutions, different institution, kind of like consulting. But if you're a writer, if you're an influencer, if you're a photographer, if you're something else these days, you don't have to have a 9 to 5 job.

Slow down, slow down. You mean people are not. Are resigning their jobs to go and look for these in between what you call gigs?

Yeah, exactly. Because you can make the same amount of money and it's in your own flexibility, your own time, your own deadlines, instead of having to commute to work, be trapped in an office with all the social norms and challenges that come with that, having supervisors, pressure. Mental health has become such a huge issue in the Western world since COVID it has become so much worse. So now, because people have alternatives, they have options, people are resigning at an unprecedented rate. But of course, that's not happening here yet. Our economy is not yet at that level and we don't have people working online, so working from home. We all know what's so difficult here in Uganda especially. So the challenges I think we have here. As someone who employs a lot of people, in my job as chief of staff, I do so many interviews every single week, but there's such a gap in skills. There's so many people who are applying for jobs every day, whether they're graduates or not, and then there are so many jobs that people need to fill. But. But there's such a big gap in the kind of quality that the universities are churning out or the vocational schools. And yet when someone comes into the workplace, they don't have the skills to manage. The system is so outdated. There's no soft skills, there's no training, there's nothing that's practical or useful. It's all theoretical and technical. I can't tell you how many interviews I sit in and they'll give me their certificates. I am proficient in Excel in Word in this. They have never touched a computer. They sat in a computer class and someone explained Excel on a blackboard. As an employer, what am I supposed to do with that? It means now, the first three months, you're just training them. They don't know how to write emails, they don't know how to solve problems, they don't know how to work in a team communication. The most basic thing is such a struggle for anyone who we have to onboard and it's just a burden now that employers have to take on in Uganda because you have no choice. It's that or you're now looking for staff elsewhere, which is not right. So I feel like it's hurting our population, our young people, because they are not prepared for the workplace at all.

I can hear you, I hear you, and I resonate with that. So what are we going to do for our young people if there's a big mismatch between what we in the private sector expect as they come out of the education institutions? How are we going to bridge that gap, that skills deficit? What do you think is the solution? We can't just throw a problem out there and say there's a problem in Uganda, in Kenya, in South Africa, and we don't solve it.

You know, South Africa and Kenya don't have these problems because they have vocational schools and they have training. Ramaphosa last year, the year before said that South Africa has to be part of the fourth industrial revolution. They are training their people in IT skills, in soft skills to make sure that they're keeping up with the world. In Kenya, they opened almost 20,000 vocational schools in the last five years. We can't just keep churning out kids from Makerere or from universities here that are learning stuff that's technical and nothing that's practical. No soft skills. They need to add these things to the programs, otherwise your degree is almost useless. There's so many kids who are so desperate for jobs and they get underemployed where they're taking out jobs that have nothing to do with their degree, or they are working in hard labor jobs, yet they are educated because they can't match the skill set. It's not that the job, the degree gives you that entitlement. Like you said before, when someone graduates from university, they're entitled to a job and they feel they have the right. Their family has sacrificed so much, they've worked so hard, but they don't actually know anything, which is the problem. And now to try and explain that to them, you become the bad guy. So usually what I look for is their attitude. If you have the ability to learn, then I can take you on because you're going to have to train and the first few months will be hard. And it's hard for our team as well because you're now taking away resources from experienced staff because they have to train. But it's something that we've now ingrained across all our companies that we have to constantly be training because the schools are just not doing it. We need to fill that gap. There are some programs now, a lot of different people I know online, some of the Twitter people, like Boundless Mind, they have programs where you can send your young person 16, 18, 21, and they teach them these things. It's kind of like what we taught in Project 500K years ago, where you're teaching soft skills. Things like communication, teamwork, goal setting, how to be productive, how to be efficient, how to manage your time. These are necessary, but the culture is still not there. If I told you these things were what you had to know when you were in your 20s, it was not a priority. You guys had to get into life and work. So even trying to explain that to parents now, I don't think they'll get it. The reason your child is not getting a job is because they have no skill or all the money you spent on university and education, it's useful, it's good, but that just shows your child has discipline. They could finish, they went to the end. It doesn't show their abilities, it doesn't bring out anything in them. And that's something that has to shift because we need those resources. Otherwise our workforce is not going to be productive.

Okay, it makes sense from one perspective, but look at it the other way. Is everybody going to get a white collar job where they need to work on excel sheets? Isn't there a huge market for people who are trainable? They've proven that they are trainable because they've come through these institutions. They grasp what the teacher taught them. They can regurgitate that information in exams. Now you're putting them into an industry, you're putting them into ICT sector and with the bare minimum training, you've got an asset. So isn't this good raw material? It is not brainwashed. You don't have to unprogram it. To reprogram is just right. Raw material fresh off the cusp, then it's malleable. You can use it how you want.

I would say yes, but who wants only raw material? Who has the time to be now molding and shaping all these people? If you have a factory, yes, but then that means the private sector has to now just plan for it. Every industry, every office. We need to have training programs. Like where? Schools and universities and vocational schools. It's not that we need a population of professors. We don't need everyone to have degrees. That is not what I'm asking for. What I'm saying is we need skills. Because even with the people with the degrees, what our population needs, like you said, all these 15 year olds, every year in Uganda now we have a million people turning 18. Those 18 year olds need to work, yes, but they also need clothes, they need food, they need homes, they need everything. So. So we need carpenters, we need plumbers, we need people working in factories, we need people making clothes, we need people in agriculture. And those are all areas that don't require degrees, but they require skills. It's still training programs. And that's what's missing in a huge way in our current system. I've been to vocational schools, ones in urban areas and ones in upcountry areas. And they're trying. They'll have like mechanics or carpentry or plumbing. They're using very old methods, very old machinery, equipment. The classes are still small. There are very few computers in our country, which is really going to hold us back and These are things that we're just not doing at the scale that we need to. The vocational schools should be overtaking the universities. But we still have this idea of. I think because we pushed education so much to get the literacy rate of the country up, which is a good thing. The problem is now all families aspire to have kids with degrees. But those degrees are not going to get your child employment. These days, there's so many universities. Twenty years ago, how many universities did we have? Now see how many they are. How many of those kids are coming out. Is it 20,000 per year? We're graduating 100,000? A hundred thousand? And how many jobs are we creating? 5? 10? 20? Even with oil and gas coming, that won't even absorb one class of graduates in Uganda. What is going to happen to those other 80,000 kids? Where are they sitting at home with their parents after they sold land to get them that degree. We have to have solutions for them.

I hear you and I empathize when you look at it from that point of view. But let's flip the coin. Let's look at it from another side. If everybody was going only for technical schools in a society like the German society, maybe that would work. Where it's largely an industrial country. We are not an industrial country. We have been largely an agrarian society. We depend on farming. We are trying to move the needle. So they say the simplest way out of extreme poverty is education. A straight line education will take people out of poverty. So we pursue education with all our vigour and we go for the ivory tower. That is Makeira University and all the other 40 universities in the country. Once you have a cohort of young people like that, that are trainable, that are malleable, there is hope. It won't happen overnight. My worry is you, the young people, you think that you want to run like Europe. Today you've got a degree, you can run like the Europeans. These societies had been around for ages. They went through these cycles of change. I will not call it a revolution. It was an evolution. It went through slowly changing. And then they had a big boom. An opportunity came and they capitalized on it. First industrial revolution, second one, even the third. And they managed to keep up with it. Here we are still in the agrarian society, coming out of it, using education. Look at a country like Ethiopia. It has 100 million people. Many of them have been in the same position. Like Uganda. They were all farming. They were trained. The country invested heavily in infrastructure, in industries, and in generating electricity. Now they are moving all their People into jobs. And the state is involved in creating these jobs because they can't wait for the private sector to create the jobs fast enough. So largely the state puts in an arm and the private sector also does its bit. So that way they catalyze the process to make sure that they are creating jobs for their people. So they are investing heavily now in. In human capital. First was infrastructure, now it is human capital because they want jobs, and they're doing quite a good job of it. Now, the rest of us are still at the earlier stage, a few cycles behind them, where we have been training them first to get them to be disciplined, to be trainable, and then we get them into jobs. But how do we get them into jobs that are meaningful without an industrial base? We've got to build our industrial base so that we can produce goods for export. You've got to be able to trade, to create value, to add value to whatever you're producing. And that's why I think Uganda is at that point of infliction where the government has now put some infrastructure in place and now wants to take to invest in human capital, especially at the bottom of the pyramid, to get the money into those people's pockets so that they can start doing something. But there are a number of people who say they work so hard, they've got three or four jobs, they work extremely hard, but they don't see the results. You've got a job during the day, you've got a job at night. You are hustling between here and there and January to December and you're not making progress. Now, they're not saying that there's no employment there. The problem is there's too much employment, but there's no real value. They're not getting out of the hole. What do you have to say about that?

I think the challenge there is in the adding of the value. That's the problem. Because once you're trapped in that system, you can't let go of your job because you need that now for sustenance. Your bills, things you have to pay. But then you have a foot here, a foot there, a side business, a second job, and you become distracted. Unfortunately, the lack of focus. I think people need to become more clear. If you're in that privileged position where you have options, that's already a step up, right? You need to see what are your targets, what are your goals, what are you actually trying to achieve? Because many people want to have a job and a side business. But it's the challenge of multitasking it means you're not really anywhere full time. So what value are you really adding? Whenever I have, people have to give advice on these kinds of things. I say, what are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to leave your job and become a full time entrepreneur? Because not everyone should be an entrepreneur. It's not an easy life. And by the time you leave your job, your business should be making more than your salary. But, but how can you put in enough effort and time there to make sure that you get to that goal? But you have to be clear about what you're trying to do. Are you trying to grow in the ranks in your job and the side business is just supplementary income? Is it because you like what you're doing? Are you really looking for that money? So we have to see how to help people to focus and understand what they're trying to achieve so they add that value. Because if you start that business, you can employ people, you can create solutions, you can make more money, there's more risk, but there's also more reward.

Are you saying you're opposed to a side hustle? I thought it was good to encourage people, especially those in formal employment, to have a side hustle. Because most of the time their formal salary is simply not enough. So either you become corrupt or you have a side hustle.

Oh God, no. This one stresses me. It's so hard, like I have said, to find someone with the skill set to do their job well. Now you try to run a business at the same time, unless you are very good at your job and you are now overqualified for your job, which means you have capacity for more, that's when you have the time for a side business. That's when you have the brain power to do it. But that also means you could have grown in your career. That's why I'm saying people need to be focused. What are you really trying to achieve? Is it about the money alone? Because then you can quit your job and make more money in the business. There's very few jobs that will pay you as much as a successful business could. But the time, the effort, the dedication, the sacrifice it's going to take. Wouldn't you rather focus on your job and do very well at it? This one bugs me all the time. People who know that they can grow in their careers, but again, there's no mentorship, there's no guidance. People don't know how to ask for salary increments or to make sure they're the ones who get promoted or to put themselves first, this is one of the topics that I do so many talks about because there's so much potential. This is where we have a challenge. We have to grow on both sides. The entrepreneurs have to grow in size, in strength, in what we can do and how we can employ. But even employed people, there is no shame in being employed. Thrive at it, succeed at it. Isn't it nice to see how many great CEOs we have now? Ugandan CEOs of these big corporate companies are on lists across Africa. They are being sent abroad. They're representing us because they've grown in their career. Their ability, their thinking, their analysis, their capacity is huge because they focused, they made the most of their job. They weren't trying to do so many side hustles on the way and then wondering why they're not getting promoted.

Interesting. And I'm proud of many of you. Those Ugandans who have made it not just here in our corporate world, but also are going internationally. But they're too few.

When you compare us to Nigerians. Nigerians are everywhere, succeeding everywhere.

Nigerians are 200 million. So there's a lot more competition, internal competition and aggressive competition that you really have to eke out a living out of Nigeria.

But we're going to be 100 million in my lifetime. Are we waiting for that pressure? That's when we'll wake up and push and work harder.

Pressure is so important. Pressure is what makes diamonds. They come out of pressure. The pressure will come. It will force us to get better and better. That's how we made these steps in the last 15, 25 years. I guess to get these CEOs going to be going places. But so much for that class of people. I am more focused on the young people, those who are between 18 and 25. They need hope. They are grappling in the dark and they are not feeling a straw. They are not getting a string to hold on to, to give them hope that their tomorrow will be better than their today. How do we give these young people hope?

Do you think they should all become entrepreneurs?

Not really that all of them. Because I know it's extremely hard to be an entrepreneur, a successful entrepreneur. The good thing about entrepreneurship is it welcomes anybody and everybody. You don't have to have any qualifications. You could be a P7 dropout and you can rise to the top in entrepreneurship. All it requires is that grit, that discipline, the hard work, the tenacity, the consistency. You stay there. Look at Chukubo. The people work in Chukubo. You, many of them have hardly had any formal education. Even some of the icons in our country, the big moguls, Sudirs, Karims of this world, Murwana, Goron of Amuno, they were not formally educated, but they've come out strong, tall, they've created so many jobs. So it's not necessarily education, but it's a discipline. That's the common trait amongst all of them. And the ability to keep learning, the ability to question, to train their eyes to see the opportunity and to seize it. There's no point in training your eye to see an opportunity and then you don't seize it. You've got to be prepared. So when the opportunity comes, you've got to be ready. That's what I think. And that will help many people get into entrepreneurship. Because I don't see an environment in the third world countries, a country like Uganda, where we can create enough meaningful jobs for people to be employed. They can only be employed when we have many more entrepreneurs who will create the jobs. Now most of the jobs are created at an SME level. Small to micro, small to medium enterprise. But in Uganda we don't have many small to medium enterprises. We have micro to small businesses. And we have thousands of those micro businesses where everybody thinks they are an entrepreneur. When you have so many micro businesses that do not create enough jobs, it's him and his wife, or him and his son, him and his daughter, that doesn't cut, doesn't grow the economy fast enough. We've got to be able to move these micro businesses into SMEs. That's where you get real growth. Then from the SMEs, some will become corporates. And that's the difference what people have got to realize. When you have all these people selling muchomo, when a bus stops running around with the plantain gonja, selling that is not a business. Those are the micro businesses. Yes, they have survived. Selling chapati, selling shoes on the street at night, it's a stepping stone to something. But they've got to be able to grow and transition, to walk across the bridge from this side to the other side to SME. Then they employ five people, then you've got an SME. Once you employ five people and they're paying NSSF, then you've got an SME. Then you start looking at, you register with the tax authority and you're paying your making a small contribution the country and also you're getting some benefit, then you're an SME. And that's what we've got to transition to. If we remain with thousands or millions of these micro. They're like little cockroaches running around. Nobody's helping one another and they compete one another out of business. So we need to support one another where we are buying from one another. It's a value addition. You produce something and sell it. And that normally happens when you have a big company at the top that creates linkages to the SMEs. Like if MTN did not come and create a linkage, Simba Telecom wouldn't be there and all the other dealers wouldn't be there. And then we have all these sub dealers and then the people who sell the airtime at the last mile before we're in digital. So we created so many jobs by forming linkages with the bigger companies. You have to create that. So if you are like Mukwano Industries and you're producing sunflower oil, you need to have so many farmers. You've got to have the wholesalers, you've got to have the retailers, you've got to have the farmers all supplying you. You're producing the oil and selling it, but you've got to support all your input suppliers. So this system has got to be a complete system, an ecosystem that works to support itself and becomes virtuous. It keeps growing and that's what we need. Otherwise, if we look at things in isolation, then it's a bleak story. But if you look at the whole big picture, then there is hope. And in the last 20 years there's been a lot of hope. The country has grown, otherwise the country wouldn't be collecting these taxes. The SMEs are the ones that pay the taxes. Many of the SMEs and the corporates are the ones paying the taxes. The tax base is still very narrow in Uganda, but it's going to broaden. And those who are paying the taxes are paying a lot more. They are feeling it's an unfair burden, but it's because they're making a lot more money than all the others. So they've got to pay their contribution, make their contributions. And the government is eventually doing the things that they're supposed to be doing. Providing better roads. They've done a good job with their main infrastructure short of Kampala. Providing infrastructure like electricity, building the dams, providing water, clean water, health services, improving. Still a bit of way to go, but they are making strides. It was a rude awakening, this Covid slap. Then we realized we needed so many ambulances, many doctors to pay the people much better. The doctors, the scientists, all these are things that Are work in progress, it cannot be done overnight, and it takes patience, and we are slowly getting there. But I think there is hope. How would you like to end this as a parting shot? What do you leave the young people especially? How do you give them hope? How do you encourage them that tomorrow will be better than today?

It's good to understand the context, and I think it's encouraging for young people to understand the whole system. And as much as it feels like it's terrible or it's a crisis or it's difficult or you don't see the hope in your individual life, you have to know and trust and believe the system is working and things are improving. But then what it's up to you to do is to keep going and to create these opportunities. Like you said, how MTN has made a huge difference. That linkage, those linkages happen if you're ready for it. So you also have to do your part. You can't just sit and wait for it to happen. As a micro business, what can you do to improve your discipline, to grow your network, to grow your customer base? So at the moment the opportunity comes, you're ready for it. Because that ecosystem, whether it's access to capital, access to network, access to mentors, what you're looking for, you have to be ready for it when it arrives. So get up and start instead of waiting. I'll start my business when I have this much capital, when this changes, when my mother. There are always so many excuses. The sooner you're ready, the sooner opportunity will strike and the sooner that you get to move up in the system. And then that's how we all move. Because if everyone is putting in their own effort and they're doing what they can, the collective grows indeed.

Thank you. That's a good response. I'd like to assure the young people out there that indeed, Uganda is on the right trajectory. It may rain today, but remember that sunshine follows after rain. There will always be sunshine in Uganda after the rain. So Uganda is going places. We just have to hold on, do your bit, have the right attitude, and make sure you keep pushing the envelope. Keep learning. Every single day, keep learning something new. Find a mentor. Find someone who will guide you. Ask questions, be curious. Better to ask a question and they think you're a fool when you ask the question. But you remain wise for the rest of your life because you asked that question, rather than remaining a fool for the rest of your life because you didn't ask that question.

Thank you. I hope you enjoyed that after this episode. We shall be talking about understanding the value of time because that ties in very nicely to what we've been talking about. What you can do, how you can keep learning, and how you can plan your time. Because time compounds everything. So stay tuned. Sam.