From Across the Table: The golden age of tinkerers

It involved, however, the burning of precious fuel from home to Kisementi, where the lunch would be served. It also involved navigating the Kampala traffic whilst playing facial Russian roulette with the vendors – God save you if your eyes match!

Kampala isn’t aging like fine wine, it is rather, decomposing like fermenting juice; the jams are excruciating, the fumes suffocating and the green is slowly dipping into the abyss of tarmac and concrete.

Traffic lights are often times only but a suggestion to motorists, trade order has gone down the piles; everything from underpants, to toy cars and the myth and legend of the most ancient breed of locusts called grasshoppers can be found on the roadside or at your side mirror.

Former homes are morphing into bars and the food portions in restaurants are way too small for the prices they command.  

The prediction is that; if all cards remain on deck, only the rich and powerful – not the rich or powerful – will inherit its ruins.

We started our lunch by mourning these dire conditions of our city but as the afternoon set in and with finer beverages taking control of the reason faculties, a conversation came up; side hustles and their performance.

We each, around the table, ran some sort of side hustle.

Literally all employed young Ugandans are running a side hustle – and if they aren’t, they are sending money that makes up for a batch of capital and operation costs of many side hustles.

The government has always been kind enough to acknowledge that 15 million people in Uganda are in employment but only nine million of those earn some sort of salary from their work.

Which means some six million folks are out there on premium ocular secretions making ends meet.

The more dizzying statistic - on which stronger content is required in the beverage to distill - is that 7.5 million of those nine million earning ‘some ka money’ are doing it in informal jobs and they aren’t taking home much – barely scraping the surface.

Now back to our lunch.

In the year that just ended, those of us on the table running a side hustle had noted a freeze up in cash to run business. That freeze up of course started with a pandemic but was accelerated by government’s response to it. Not to say that fortunes would have been better without the pandemic but at least, we would have gotten by easier without one or with a more flexible government response.

We are living in the golden age of tinkering.

A lot of paid professionals aren’t where they are by passion but by decisions they made whilst in high school at the age of 16.

Those who passed the science subjects are now doctors, those who passed the arts are lawyers, journalists and musicians. Considering that human passions vary from time to time, to pursue passion, a lot of these professionals have been forced into the golden age of tinkering where they put aside some of their salary to pursue their deepest desires. Some are lucky to tinker with development aid from taxpayers of more monied countries – aka running NGOs whilst others have to tinker with bank loans and salary advances – business.

No matter the route one takes, the most inevitable is happening; there just isn’t enough money to tinker with things. As kids, tinkering with toys was fun but if the supply of toys stops, you have to make-do with what is available.

Which is unlike adulthood.

When you finally exhaust the runway of your money or the donors refocus their funds, the plane has to stay in the air – somehow – or else the disaster is enormous when it crashes.

What the pandemic – and largely government response did – was to tinker with the fuel from a battered, pent up, crickety but sturdy airplane. 

And now we all stare up to the sky to see what falls and what doesn’t.