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#47: What would you do?
Shem Opolot
November 24, 2023
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Who am I? I’m Shem Opolot, a health professional turned content creator, passionate about helping people be their best selves in life and work.
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Happy [Black] Friday 🎉 The holidays are around the corner, and my browser tracking cookies told me right now is the best time to buy a Rolex or a Patek Philippe watch on the secondary market. You know how people talk about there being signs when they make it? The day you see me wearing a Rolex watch, stop me immediately and ask for money.
Estimated read time: 5 minutes
ONE THING I’VE LEARNED
What would you do?
In Uganda, it’s impossible to build wealth without doing some illegal things.
The year is 1971, and I can’t even lie; I don’t know what Uganda was like. But I’m told the times were tumultuous, with the whimsical waters of Lake Victoria occasionally kissing the shores violently, delivering dead bodies fed to them by the ruinous Idi Amin regime. I’m told soldiers roamed the streets, trading in fear and folly. I’m told there was a 6 p.m. curfew and salt was as scarce and valuable as Nsenene (roasted grasshoppers, for my foreign audience) in November 2023.
These are terrible times for most but not for you. No, no, YOU have a cushy government job as an accounting officer at (the once consequential) Coffee Marketing Board, no less. Your job as the accounting officer is to, well, account. To make sure funds go or remain where they’re supposed to. And you excel at this task so much that your menial tasks mushroom into more consequential assignments.
Eventually, they let you behind the curtain. They show you where the ‘bodies are buried.’
Initially, blinded by imposter syndrome, you work ten times harder than anyone else, balance every account, and ace every assignment. You become a trusted force.
But one day you find an accounting error.
Like the pedantic pencil pusher you are, you tell your boss immediately, and that’s when you learn that this error is not only the norm but also the expectation. And your discovery was really your initiation.
Will you play ball or get blackballed?
The rosary hanging from your neck underneath your crisp white button-down shirt squeezes tighter, getting lost in the folds of your neck. It demands your attention.
Sanctimoniously, you leave Coffee Marketing Board, and you’re blackballed. Never to swim in government water again; at least not while your former colleagues are wearing matching speedos.
You go into private business—logistics, where you swing and hit and swing and miss repeatedly. The highs facilitate your expensive tastes and send your children to the best schools in the country, but the lows…the lows make your children besties with the school bursars.
Over time, because of the country you live in, the government is the biggest spender, and you rely on government contracts for your primary business. While this was fine in the 80s and early 90s, when there were a handful of clearing agents, government officials wised up to the lucrativeness of logistics and started their own logistics companies to grab the government gigs from your grasp.
The government bidding process becomes corrupt, with the biggest jobs going to the connected while you and your economic peers scuffle for the leftover scraps. As time passes, peace prevails, but the economy doesn't; the scraps get fewer, and you get scrappier. The government takes longer to pay, and your children continue to go steady with the most empathetic bursars.
Eventually, to win certain bids and to get paid on time, you must bribe government officials. You’ve been here before, with your rosary making like a hangman’s noose.
But this time is different.
This time you’re much older, and the stakes are much higher—a wife, five kids, hopes, dreams, comforts, nice shirts…
You pay the first bribe. You pay the second bribe. Nowadays, you factor bribes into every transaction.
How do you sleep with yourself?
Worse still, since you caved, your guilt makes you reckon with the choice you made 30-something years ago: Given the chance at Coffee Marketing Board again, would you make a different choice?
That choice would determine if your son vacations in Ibiza and wears Rolex watches or starts newsletters in his mid-thirties.
What would you do?
SHAMELESS PLUG
People are using TLDR Weekly like a humorous search engine, and honestly, I don’t blame them. Stop window shopping and come in and try it for size.
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MY FAVOURITE THINGS
A quote
Life is like an empty field. With intention it becomes a garden, without it weeds and debris will take over. Something will grow either way, but it's your choice what takes root.
The Good Library
Some day I’ll build fancy libraries all over the country and start a good old-fashioned book club. But today, I’m adding The Good Library here. A place for you to access the books Evelyn and I (mostly Evelyn) read.
A picture
I love a good ad.
Source: Twitter
PRO TIP
Stop wasting your good time in Google Sheets
You have the table below:
Q: What if you want to add another column for the price in UGX that matches the formatting?
A: You could do it manually by typing the text, bolding the text, changing the font color and type, and then adding a boundary line. But that’s a waste of time.
Copy the column with the formatting you want, click Paint Format on the tool bar, and select the text you want to format.
What ever will you do with all this free time?
WHERE FUN GOES TO FLOURISH
The Friday Fix playlist
Brain teaser
From Braingle.
You have a piece of paper, 10cm by 10cm. Area = 100cm2. For some reason, you need a square piece of paper with an area of 50cm2. Using the paper you have, what's an easy way of getting the new square?
Answer below
Shem’s picks
✔️ Imagine: What if your streets were more walkable?
✔️ Watch: The history of the earth in 1 hour
✔️ Learn: Every story you know follows one of these formulas
Brain teaser answer
Answer: Fold the four corners of the square into the centre. This doubles the thickness of the paper, and so halves the area.
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
Et cetera
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