Personal Finance:The Jobless Corner

It wasn’t until the other week when The Bank of Kigali announced that it needed cashiers that I realized we are countless in the jobless corner. We always come to realize it is not only the level of education that counts but the ‘connections’ one has for the specified job.

Saturday, February 25, 2012
Technical knowledge is a major remedy of joblessness among youths. Net / Photo

It wasn’t until the other week when The Bank of Kigali announced that it needed cashiers that I realized we are countless in the jobless corner. We always come to realize it is not only the level of education that counts but the ‘connections’ one has for the specified job.A friend once confided in me that he had stopped applying for jobs after all he had realized that firms first recruited people of their choice before running advertisements for ‘vacant’ posts in the dailies. So he continued that this was all just a show to the government that they provide ‘jobs’. As a young lad, I often was told by my father that friendship and business don’t mix but as I grow more and more experienced in my career, I realize that it is easier for an employer to recruit someone he or she knows. Hundreds of job seekers turned up to deposit their application documents at the mentioned bank, and I being one of them wondered how all these documents would be sorted out. So I left God, the best provider to do the rest. In Uganda, all this talk would be known as nothing much but ‘wolokoso’. ‘Wolokoso’ is a known term for idle banter people engage themselves in and since we are in the corner of job hunters why not ‘wolokoso’! Among the thoughts of a job hunter, self-employment doesn’t miss. Is it that easy? I wonder what it takes…  Inspire Africa; a television program about young entrepreneurs is teaching lots of us how to leave this dreadful and so frustrating life of the unemployed. As an open minded person you will always realize that it is the creativity that you invest in a product that enables you maximize your sales. Take an example of an entrepreneur who buys fruits, cuts them into size-able pieces and then sells them in packing boxes to individuals in this hot weather of ours. Or he or she supplies them to supermarkets and shops that will sell them for him or her. It all seems so easy and in fact most of the time, we are called up to work somewhere, we often realize that running some of these businesses is easy, quite so! Working hard for the capital is always a key among the rest to immeasurable success.