Kalyegira wrong on hustle

I read in utter bewilderment a Facebook article by veteran journalist Timothy Kalyegira titled ‘True entrepreneurship — for Uganda’ in which he wonders how Ugandan could have been ranked the most entrepreneurial country in the world when all he sees is ‘plain hustle.’

In typical Kalyegira style, he goes on about how selling vegetables, toothpicks, handkerchiefs and second hand clothing along Kampala streets is a ‘wasteful, unprofitable way of doing business’ that ‘should not be celebrated’ adding that countries do not develop on the back of hustlers, most especially in the 21st century.
Like the Ugandan government, the elite in Uganda make the mistake of thinking entrepreneurship as only big business, mostly manufacturing and employing hundreds of people and as such, hustlers have been often sidelined when government is offering subsidies, tax waivers and other incentives necessary for their growth. This explains why most start-ups in Uganda hardly celebrate their first anniversary.
It is the elite like Kalyegira who will not buy a Ugandan tailored shirt, handmade shoe or cap dubbing them ‘substandard’ yet they will be the same people who busk in the sun as they read statistics of failed companies while they thumb their chests in acknowledgment of their self-rightousness. How would you expect a local company to turn a profit when all you do is criticise it?
Hustle is as legitimate a business as Microsoft. All multi-national companies that we admire today started out of sheer ingenuity to create a solution for a prevalent problem. If the Ugandan problem is poverty, why pour scorn on those trying to get themselves out of it? Entrepreneurship is less in the invention but more in the spirit. The only difference is that the conditions prevalent in Silicon Valley or in Europe during the industrial revolution are different from what we have here but our baby steps indicate a determinism to succeed — to dream. Does it get more entrepreneurial than that?
But who is an entrepreneur anyway? While Kalyegira and those of his ilk will rarely associate the term entrepreneur with the corner shop owner, the fruit and veg seller or the fruit seller in Nakasero market, by definition, that’s exactly what they are. An entrepreneur is someone who starts a business taking on some form of financial risk. The difference is in the relativity of this risk.
The rationale for the research that he (Kalyegira) questions focused on the percentage of an adult population who owned or co-owned a business that had paid salaries for at least three months and with an entrepreneurship rate of 28 per cent, Uganda ranked in first place with almost double the entrepreneurship rate of second-placed Thailand.
And although Kalyegira argues that a country cannot develop on the back of hustlers, the 2014 UBOS report indicated that up to 50 per cent of our GDP came from the informal sector and that 80 per cent of the labour force in Uganda works in the same sector albeit not making enough money to escape poverty.
Although I can’t say that Uganda is developed, I submit that the growth realised — however small — would not have been realised if it weren’t for the hard-work and determination of these hustlers. Rather than criticize, discourage and dismiss their craft as below average, we are better off supporting them by: extending to them the same business incentives as we do with multinationals, buying their products and providing constructive criticism where it is due. Everything else is cynical rhetoric and should be paid less attention — if not none at all.

The writer is the founder of The Workshop Uganda