COMMENT: If you woke up and found your boss has doubled your salary?

COMMENT: What would happen if you woke up tomorrow and found that your boss had doubled your salary?

Well, on January 5 1914, Henry Ford doubled salaries for all his employees. That simple fact revolutionized the auto industry. Ford’s actions may noy have been led by altruistic intentions but he realized that an economy that works for only a few is no economy at all.

It is of no use to be the only well-off person in your family or among your friends. It is of no-use to be super rich in a society of poor people.

This is already back-firing for the elites in Uganda. At first they thought; “if i have a good job, can afford to drive a good car and sleep in a good apartment, I just don’t care what happens with the rest.”

Little did they know that this just made their lives worse in the longterm. Henry Ford doubled his employees’ salaries so they could afford to buy the cars they manufactured. That act alone created market for his products and profits more than trippled.

The economy is a circular flow. One man’s expense is another man’s income. If you are an entrepreneur and all your neighbours are broke, then who will buy your products?

If all your neighbours are unemployed, then who will guarantee your safety? Yes, Ugandan elites, it is lonely at the top.

You still don’t wonder why you can’t freely use that smart phone in a taxi with open windows?

Instead of teaching your relatives to fish, you conditioned them to become dependent on you. Now when you make that money, you can’t keep any of it. Because they will all be scouting for it. Everyone will be asking to make your contribution to something. Karma is indeed a bitch.

You see a job opportunity and don’t tell your friends about it. You want to be a big fish in a small lake. Yeah?

You would rather pay for a foreign service than a Ugandan service? You would rather buy foreign music, honey, than Ugandan made?

You would rather kill Crane Bank a Ugandan owned bank where the owner has invested 99.9 percent of all his earnings in Uganda. And you are comfortable with empowering foreign banks that don’t even own their headquarters. They simply rent and take out all the profits. And you think you will get to middle income? Huh.

This culture is just sickening. It is only in this country where people are comfortable owning too much of a small thing than owning a small share of a big thing. This scarcity mindset is what is killing us.

We pride in building mansions in our villages in a sea of mud and wattle houses. And in the end we pay for it. With insecurity, with deaths.

It makes no sense to have majority poor and few rich. It always back fires. It makes no sense to have the only beautiful girlfriend among all your friends. It will backfire. They will all be rooting for her. See?

It is this simple common sense that we have failed to grasp. We waste time mastering all sorts of economic theories and wonder why we have this growth without actual development.

You educate your kids abroad and are comfortable leaving other kids with a failed education system. In the end when you get that accident, you will be rushed to that hospital with a poorly educated Ugandan doctor.

You build bad roads then get massacred by the same roads. What goes around comes around. The inventor of the Guilottine suffered at the same hands. You pay your teachers poorly and expect them to produce awesome graduates? Really?

I hope we soon get some common sense and start caring about the man next door. And make sure everyone is earning their worth. And male sure when we do work, we do it excellently.

If you are employed, give your work the best of efforts. If your boss succeeds, you too succeed. If he earns more, he can afford to pay you more and hire even more people.

If you see an opportunity, notify your friends or family members.

I told people that I would be the happiest if all my family members are much richer than me. That means if I had a business, they would invest in it.

But here you are, all your friends are broke and it is the same people you will send invites to your wedding meetings. It is the same people you will ask to fundraise for your medical bills.

Please, please…start doing something to make sure the economy works for everyone regardless of their field. Let it work for a musician, for an artist, for an engineer, for the teacher etc. That is how you build sustainable societies. Let women fight for men’s rights and let men fight for women’s rights. Love your neighbour as you love thyself. Is that too hard?