The WorkZine

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The
WorkZine
www.theworkzine.com
Volume 3 , Issue 4
Date : 30/March/2011
Tales From The
Conference Table
Let Loose!!
+ iDealogue 9th April 2011
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Editor’s
Word
E
very once in a while you need to let it all
hang out. Work can be stressing. Work can
be demanding. Work can swallow every
minute and thought of your life. Work
should not suck you in otherwise when you retire,
you will retire. You need to have a life outside work.
Friends other than workmates. Activities to look
forward other than the drama in the weekly staff
meetings. Your calendar should not only include
Monday to Friday. Your day should not only be 8 –
5pm.
After the office, go for a drink, a coffee, a dinner. Go
watch a movie, go listen to a live band, go to a comedy show, go to poetry recital, go to …something.
Over the weekend, go blast at a house party, go to
another town, go for trip to the park, go bungee
jumping , go for a picnic, go swimming , go play at
the beach , go for a massage , go to the studio with a
friend . Attend a wedding and make the best of the
after-party.
Like the young ones say these days, just chillax!!!
Businge Abid Weere
Writers in this issue
Ivan R.Mugisha
Esther Wanjiru
Princess
Soma King
Brian B.Coutinho
Shotgun Shack
The Emerys
Tim Barribeau
Joab ToSaasire
Rafayili Kayigwa
Eric Muharu
Mildred Apenyo Kyrte
Businge Abid Weere
Cover Model: Claire
and Liz Kelly
Designed by
Collins Mugume
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TALES FROM THE CONFERENCE TABLE
T
hey were fired because
of the conference table.
We choose to blame the
conference table but we all
know that it was not the one
to blame. It was a quiet boring Monday morning at office.
You know those Mondays when
Friday seems a century away
and 5pm seems a millennium
away. Boss was asking about
some stupid work he had forgotten to give me on Friday
yet expected me to have done
over the weekend. Bosses!!!!
SO there I was trying to get myself out of the gloom when I noticed something had changed. It
was in the atmosphere. There
was excitement!! On a Monday!!
Something big must be up. As I
hurried to Gossip Jane’s desk,
Amos walked into the room and
everyone kept quiet. We are 9
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people is this particular corner
of hell. And they all kept quiet.
A security guard was following
Amos. Amos held his head up
high and was defiant but I could
detect a bit of shame in the way
his eyes kept shifting. I didn’t
know what to do. I kept still.
Amos cleared out his desk in a
record 5 minutes and was escorted out of the building. Who
the hell gets fired on a Monday
morning? Moreover one of the
boss’ pets!! As I hustled over
to Jane, I saw a female security
guard escorting Sara out of the
building too.
The story was exquisite. Apparently, the executive director
had received a frantic call from
the office manager of another
branch telling him that there was
something perverted with the IT
Esther Wanjiru
department. IT guys had denied
any wrong doing and surmised
that anything the field office was
seeing had to either their fault
or happening in the board room.
The E.D had dragged the IT
guys to the conference room
and walked in on a scene of his
life. Amos and Sara were doing it on the conference table!!
They were banging away like
there was no tomorrow. His
butt was sticking out in the air
as he drilled for gold. Worst of
all was that the teleconferencing equipment was on, transmitting both video and audio!!
Rumor has it that the guys in IT
recorded it all but aint sharing!!
Bastards!!
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EVOLUTION’S OTHER NAME IS DRAMATIC COMEDY
U
nlike in the past when
people
unconsciously
believed in God’s existence, today the “big man in the
sky” is one area of ripe debate.
There are a lot of theories that
disapprove the existence of
God, the most prominent being Charles Darwin’s Evolution
theory and the Big Bang theory.
Whoever pioneered the Big
Bang wanted us to believe that
we live by accident with no purpose, that the world came into
existence by chance. In lay man’s
language, the Big Bang explains
that some mega gasses combined from out of the blue and
exploded boom!! Thereby creating some kind of miniature life
that later evolved into you and
me, the fish, snail, birds and elephant, trees, water and metals.
According to prominent atheists, it’s very archaic and unreasonable to believe in something
like a “God” simply because he is
not available for lab tests. However, for evolution lovers, it’s
very intelligent to believe that
one day; a new breed of monkeys will learn how to shave.
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Well, a cross section of the evidence surrounding us can prove
who is insane and who is worse.
A computer; it’s just metals put
together intelligently to make
a unique component that functions as the geek wanted it to
perform. Only a lunatic would
assume that a computer just
happened by chance, or that
it evolved through natural selection of metals. All evidence
from a computer’s features indicates that it was designed; piece
by piece it was put together.
The universe; it operates on uniform laws of nature. It rotates in
the same 24 hours consistently,
gravity remains constant and
speed of light doesn’t change
and so on and so forth. Just like a
computer, this systematic functioning, a planned system like
this universe is, can’t create itself.
The theory of evolution on the
other hand, claims that no creature is right now as it was 10
million years ago (I wonder how
they know). In simple terms,
humans used to be chimpanzees, the fish used to walk the
earth...suddenly a flood hap-
Ivan R. Mugisha
pened and so they adapted
to swimming, in the process
they lost their legs blah blah.
In an advanced move to prove
his theory right, Charles Darwin is said to have kept a long
beard intentionally to show that
man can look like a chimpanzee.
Though his antics almost won
him a pat on the back, Mr. Darwin forgot the other important
side of the coin- to shave a chimpanzee and show its human side.
As if that is not too much drama
already, there is no single evidence of any species of animals
right now, 2010, in the process of
evolution! Say for example, a halffish half-fishinid (new animal).
Nature and the earth exhibit
complexity, order, purpose and
beauty with features that cannot be explained by random or
accidental Big Bang processes,
or by billion dollar projects like
Evolution, but by a mind, a creator, God!
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DAMN YOU
AUTO CORRECT
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A BAD JOB IS JUST AS
DAMAGING TO YOUR
MENTAL HEALTH AS
UNEMPLOYMENT
B
Tim Barribeau
eing unemployed is generally regarded
as detrimental to your mental health,
with the prevailing wisdom being that
gainful employment will fix you right up. Unfortunately, according to research published
in Occupational and Environmental Medicine, a crappy job can be just as bad — if not
worse — than unemployment.
Analyzing more than 7,000 working-age Australians across a great number of data points,
the researchers found that people defined
good jobs as ones that provided a defined social role and purpose, friendships, and structured time (among other things). Being hired
into these kinds of jobs resulted in an overall
improvement in mental health. Conversely,
those in jobs that offered little control, were very
demanding, and provided little support and reward
lead to a general decrease in mental health.
This could have a large impact on governmental initiatives that assume any employment is better than
none — though I wonder how the numbers would
change in a system like America, where the unemployed aren’t afforded easy access to state-run
health care.
THE HYPOCRISY OF THE WEST AND HIS LOVE FOR
Soma King
OIL
W
e are having a repeat
of Rwanda genocide
in Ivory Coast and
the rest of the world ( Western
powers , UN ) is trying to unseat
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Gadafi just so that they can take
control of the oil in Libya. Playing the card of “there are crimes
against humanity and we should
protect the citizens of Libya.” In
Ivory coast there is a civil war
going on and N+1 crimes against
humanity, is it that they cant see
them, or should Ivory Coast get
oil for it to be able to attract the
west’s eye, and then get protection for its citizens? 10 years
down the road ICC will show up
and start filling cases.........when
more than 1 million people have
already died. What is so hard
? Every one around the world
knows that Alassane Ouattara is president elect of Ivory
coast!! Why are they allowing
Laurent Gbagbo to stay in power and push for a civil war that
shouldn’t be?
F*** YOU E.U, U.N , U.S.A and
your hypocrisy.
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A CASE FOR INCREASING INDIVIDUAL INCOME
Rafayili Kayigwa
TAX RELIEF
(tax threshold) of maximum
410,000shs which in today’s
economy cannot help much.
bothered to generate methods in
which it can increase its revenue
collections from the informal
sector.
T
his Country has had
the same individual income tax thresholds for
the past twenty (20)
years. That has left us (current
individual tax payers) suffering
with a debt burden amounting
to now 16% of the Government
Tax Revenue collections. The
group of persons contributing
this amount of tax only amounts
to just over 4% of the population
(about 1.4million people).
This group of the population is
the one which is formally employed in companies and businesses that are well incorporated
and thus can be easily followed
upon by URA. The URA has not
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Most individuals in the informal
sector assume that the payment
of KCC license fees equates to
payment of taxes. URA has to
play the role of tax education.
The 1.4million PAYE taxpayers
have been made to cater for the
collection incompetence of the
URA. As such as the inflation of
the country has been growing by
year, living standards going up,
the tax rates have remained stagnant and thus made the country’s formal workers poorer as
they have not been able to match
their consumption and savings
to inflation.
When we have an annual inflation of 10% for 20 years, this
has made most goods to become
at least more than 8 times the
cost in 1990. However, in 2010
we still have the same tax relief
In 2010, 410,000shs cannot
enable one buy food, pay for
transport costs, pay for utilities like water, electricity, and
also enable one to save like
buy 1,000shares in the cheapest priced USE stock of Uganda
Clays Limited currently at 60shs
a share. This amount of money is not enough to enable the
workers pay for medical bills,
buy some decent clothes, have
a vacation. The Employment
Act entitles a Ugandan worker
to a vacation and this is usually
21 working days. This is most
times wasted as the worker has
no savings to take a rest. Most
times he would prefer to stay
at work and be paid for that
month.
In Kenya as in Tanzania, the
highest tax relief amount is
KShs 38,892 and TShs 720,000.
These translate at today’s rates
to 972,300Ushs for Kenya and
1,080,000Ushs for Tanzania.
This shows that Ugandans are
paying twice as much tax as
our neighbours and thus have
less money left in our wallets
to spend in the greater economy than our neighbours. It is
no wonder then that even with
over 20 commercial banks, the
population utilising their services is under 2%.
The reduced income after taxes
has led the country’s populace
have a poor savings culture. The
deposit making population is far
fewer than the loan seeking one
thus one of the reasons for high
loan interest rates. Since fewer
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people are saving, there exists
less money to be re-ploughed
into the economy and thus the
greater Ugandan economy is
suffering. The high loan interest
rates also discourage entrepreneurship and the brave persons
that get the loans are stressed
out from the high interest payments required which are far
higher (about thrice) than the
GDP growth rate.
As such, in the campaign for an
increase in tax relief to individual tax payers we foresee the
resumption of our economy.
This we believe to happen in
two significant ways.
Growth
of
Businesses
Local
This is bound to happen from
an increase in effective demand
from individuals. With more
money from tax relief, individuals will be able to demand
consumer goods like clothes,
imported accessories, vehicles
as well as increase in local tourism. One thing noted is that the
Kenyans and Tanzanians are a
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leading source of tourist revenue in their own countries
and this would be most welcome to Uganda which is now
dogged with security PR issues
because of Somalia that is shutting out foreigners.
The increase in wallet sizes
will increase by as much as
500,000Ushs if we are to say
get thresholds such as those in
Kenya or Tanzania. This will enable the individuals purchase
goods most of which are VAT
charged. Thus the amount can
be estimated to be taxed by at
least 18% in the first month.
Then because the money is in
the economy, the remaining
82% of the tax relief will remain in circulation leading to
purchases and savings which
will also fetch taxes in either
VAT, interest payments, WHT
or whatsoever other mode till
altogether the government
gains it all. But before it goes to
the government, the economy
would have made use of it in
so many various ways that will
also create lots of profits for
other corporations leading up
to 30% tax on these profits.
Growth in Savings
The savings of individuals is
bound to increase after an increase in thresholds. This will
not only help boost our capital
markets and commercial banking sectors but it shall also enable the enterprising Ugandans
(who are many per the numerous surveys) have access to
cheap loan capital.
The biggest gainer is bound to
be the capital markets. There
are many other products in
the capital markets which have
not been utilised by Ugandans
and among them includes Unit
Trusts which entail savings.
The increase in savings will
boost these saving schemes
and since they also ultimately
invest in both the money and
other capital markets such as
stocks we are bound to have
growth in our economy.
The campaign to increase the
tax relief or tax thresholds is
bound to not only help individual Ugandans but other Ugandans from the money that is
retained in the economy. The
country should look at the increase in tax thresholds as
retention of profits in a business with greater growth potential versus the payment of
dividends. The payment of dividends will help the shareholder
(Government) in the very short
term but retained profits (increased tax relief) will enable
more profits (bigger growth of
economy) and thus the shareholder will reap more in future.
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THE DIFFERENCE
BETWEEN MARKETING, BRANDING ,
ADVERTISING AND PR
THE WOMAN
The soul that lends peace
to the eye of the storm
That wonderful being
that makes a house a
home
The pot of love that
brings forth more of her
own
The woman,
The face of truth, to the
Guy Mambo
world, like a mirror you
have shown
The woman, for me, is
grander than I will ever
know
May blessings, towards
you, like a river forever
flow.
To ALL the women in my
life, Every day is your
Day!!
CUSTOMER CARE AT ITS
BEST!
Joab ToSaasire
Image courtesy of Neutron, LLC.
Customer : Waiter, do you serve crabs?
Waiter : Please sit down sir, we serve everyone.
Customer : Waiter, is this a lamb chop or pork chop?
Waiter : Can’t you tell the difference by taste?
Customer : No, I can’t.
Waiter : Then does it really matter?
Customer : Waiter, there’s a dead beetle in my soup.
Waiter : Yes sir, they are not very good swimmers.
Customer : Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.
Waiter : That’s all right sir, he won’t drink much.
Customer : Waiter, there’s a fly swimming in my soup.
Waiter : So what do you expect me to do, call a lifeguard?
Customer : Waiter, what’s the meaning of this fly in my
tea up?
Waiter : I wouldn’t know sir, I’m a waiter, not a fortune
teller.
Customer : Waiter, this soup tastes funny.
Waiter : Funny? But then why aren’t you laughing?
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BLOGSTAR : [http://www.2weakdudes.com/ ]
VISIT TO THE DOCTOR
o
nce again the title makes
me feel like am writing a
comprehension essay in
primary school. but be
that as it may, i finally lumbered
over to the doc this weekend after my usual ways couldn’t get
me a way out of a visit to the doc.
now, i normally don’t do doctors,
i’ll either self diagnose (yeah
yeah yeah, i know its wrong but
do i look like i give a rat’s fart)
or go to some vet uncle of mine.
i’l then proceed to give him a list
of my symptoms before he then
normally correctly diagnoses me.
this has perfectly worked for me
for the last many years. i shall
have you know that i have nothing against doctors, heck my uncle is a doctor, though admittedly
he doctors cows and goats but
who cares, at least i dont.
so anyway, last week i just wasn’t
feeling right, the self diagnosis
didn’t seem to be working and
my uncle was in some deep village poking into goats’ rear ends
and diagnosing them, hence my
visit to who (what) passes for the
family doctor on saturday. this
is one chap who prescribe meds
to last an entire month just to
treat the cold. if you are a sleeping pills junkie, he’s your guy. so
since i knew it was more than the
cold on my case and i didn’t want
meds to last me a few months, the
first thing i told him as soon as
he was done with diagnosise was
that i didn’t want to do any meds
because i would never complete
the dose. he did look pretty disappointed as he looked at his pen
like he just couldn’t believe it had
been deprived of the opportunity
to scribble down 3 months worth
of prescription.
anyway, even after finding out
there was really nothing wrong
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with me despite all the malaria
symptoms, we settled on injections (just to be safe according
to him). i really don’t mind injections as long as its not this
particular doc administering
them and lucky for me his very
cute nursing assistant was on
hand to give me my first taste
of injections in years. not that i
felt it anyway, because one second i was lost in her very long
and soft fingers massaging the
spot she was going to inject and
the next she was telling me she
was done. done?? what??? i just
couldn’t believe she was in and
out so fast i barely felt her do
her thing. it felt good though, i
just didn’t expect it to be a five
second job. so when she told
me to be there at midday the
next day, i was there 30 minutes early. and this time she
seemed to enjoy it too because
she did take her time massaging the spot with those fingers
before doing the deed. anyway
yesterday after our session, i
tell her i can only come in the
morning on monday seeing as i
had to be at work, so she told
me to come in at 8.30am.
and so this morning, i head
over to the clinic before heading to work. i walk in and she’s
not seated at her spot, but i
think nothing of it and head
straight for the injection room
with a spring in my step, i mean
after all there’s nothing as good
as a butt cheek massage before
heading off to work, right?
imagine my horror when i find
that its the doctor and not the
cute nurse that was going to
inject me. and the syringe he
was holding, my goodness!!!!
am sure it was the normal syringe but in his hands it looked
The Emrys
like he was holding one of those
injections they use on cows and
he didn’t seem like the type that
massages the spot first, not that
i would have agreed to it. anyway
the sight of that huge syringe in
his hand, coupled with the grim
look on his face was enough for
me. my teeth began chattering
while i broke into a cold sweat.
this only made things worse because somewhere in the depths
of my mind i heard him say that it
seemed like i was getting worse
and i might need to have two
injections. the thought of being
injected twice with that syringe
was giving me daylight nightmares and my butt cheeks were
quite in agreement coz i could
feel them freeze and sending a
message upwards, like “dude, yo
in this alone, aint no way we are
part of this!!!” stupid things, did
they think they were goin to grow
sudden feet and run off my body.
suffice to say i was scared shitless
but in a very confused and broken
way (heck, i couldn’t even understand half of what i was saying)
i was able to convince him that
my butt couldn’t take anymore of
the injections. i think i told him
it was swollen or something and
meds would be the better option.
at the mention of meds, the grim
look disappeared off his face and
once again he was back to the jovial chap i know when prescribing meds. and now i have with me
a months worth of tabs to pop. if
only the darn nurse had told me
she comes in at 9, urghhhhh!!!
moral of the story: if this particular doc has no cute nurses to do
the injecting for him, am sticking
to self diagnosis and my vet of an
uncle
you know it makes no sense. am
outta here!!!
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FOR THE LOVE OF BOOKS
Books.
The stuff contented solitude is made of. The shit
that be’s the shit. What am i saying?
Shit is One word that has no place
in this note. Yea well, blast it. Not
my fault expletives are so apt sometimes.
Rule Of Four (choke on your talent
Dustin thomason and Ian caldwell)
is one of the most beautiful books
ever writen, i think. The Da vInci
Code for people with brains.
On a scale of one to infinity it
probabably scores a measly 6 for
choice of main plot topic.or whatever. It’s not fair that those guys are
making money for writing a book
about a book. That’s right. I’m envious. Envious and resentful. Clever
eejits.(beef along maria. u know u
want to)
The Hypnerotomachia Polophili. I
still remember its name! Talk about
being be-elephant brained.
These be a few of the absolutely
AMAZING mind zinging envy/awe
inspiring Quotes from that book.
- Strange thing, time. It weighs most
on those who have it least. Nothing
is lighter than being young with the
world on your shoulders; it gives
you a feeling of possibility so seductive, you know there must be some- Hope, Paul said to me once, which
thing more important you could be
whispered from Pandoa’s Box only
doing than studying for exams.
after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and
- A riddle is a castle built on air.
last of all things. Without it is only
Perfectly habitable if you don’t look
time. And time pushes at our back
down.
like a centrifuge, forcing us outward and away, until it nudges us
-The Hypnerotomachia may never
into oblivion.... It’s a law of motion,
have had much outward charm, but
a fact of physics .... Like all things in
it has an ugly woman’s wiles, the
the universe, we are destined from
slow addictive tug of inner mysbirth to diverge. Time is simply the
tery”
yardstick of our seperation. If we
are particles in a sea of distance,
- You can never outrun gravity. No
exploded from an original whole,
matter how fast you go you’re still
then there is a science to our solifalling like a rock. It makes you
tude. We are lonely in proportion to
wonder if horizontal motion is an
our years.time is what disperses us.
illusion. If we move just to convince
ourselves we’re not falling.
- One of the only advantages of com-
The WorkZine Issue 4
Mildred Apenyo Kyrte
ing from nothing is the freedom to
reinvent yourself. In fact, the better
I got to know Paul, the more I understood it was less a freedom than
a kind of obligation.
- I think it was my mother who
told me that a good friend stands
in harms way for you the second
you ask -- but a great friend does it
without being asked at all.
- The pleasure of imagining her
voice in them is the joy of these pictures.
- Geriatric patients are relieved
sometimes to take a little fall, or a
minor illness. Losing the battle reminds them, they are still winning
the war.
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- You don’t get sick if you stay to
yourself but you don’t get well that
way either.
-The men in our family have a tendency to fall for certain books about
as hard as they fall for certain women
-Sharp women often have terrible
taste in men
-I’m not sure if I wanted friends
who understood me better, or saw
me differently, or what exactly, but
the old ones, like my old clothes,
just didn’t fit anymore.
-His eyes betray him, even if his
men do not.
-My father viewed the Hypnerotomachia as a tribute to the love of
man for a woman. It was the only
work of art he knew that mimicked
the beautiful chaos of that emotion.
-The magic of Paul’s intelligence
is that he has more patience than
anyone I’ve ever met, and with it he
simply wears problems down.
Rule Of Four (choke on your
talent Dustin thomason and
Ian caldwell) is one of the
most beautiful books ever
writen, i think. The Da vInci
Code for people with brains.
-Madness in great ones must not
unwatched go.
-A son is the promise that time
makes to a man, the guarantee every father receives that whatever he
holds dear will someday be considered foolish, and that the person he
loves best in the world will misunderstand him.
-Widows in every civilization are
the keepers of its memory.
-The scholars and intellectuals I met
at our dinner table always seemed
to hold a grudge against the world.
They could never quite reconcile
themselves to the idea that our lives
don’t follow the dramatic arc that a
good author give to a great literary
character.
and there’s more and more and
more... beautiful book.
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SEXY LOCAL NGOs (SLoNGOs)
E
xpat Aid Workers love
building capacity, and
where better to up your
own field cred and edginess than building capacity with
a sexy local NGO (SLoNGO)?
You know the NGOs I’m talking about. They have the smart,
sassy English-speaking director
(with the hot European husband
embedded in the senior echelons of “The UN”) who spent
a few years abroad in Spain or
France, hangs out at all the expat parties and has set up a local
think tank on accountability and
transparency. Or they’re run by
a hip local musician-slash-artist
with a stylin’ afro and a few tattoos who rocks a funky hat and a
bohemian style scarf and whose
organization’s got a super cool
name and 70s style logo and
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trains youth to rap about HIV
prevention.
Or maybe the country has just
come out of a civil war and
there’s an ex-commandante
with Marxist leanings who used
to be clandestine and is now
legit — he smokes and wears
combat boots and a scruffy
beard and a beret; he’s doing a
civic education and leadership
training project for former child
soldiers and war orphans. Or it
might be an organization of sex
workers, headed by a former
brothel owner who is a lesbian
that was beaten by the police
and then organized women
to speak out for their rights to
earn a living doing sex work….
Of course the real reason that
you want to fund these SLoN-
Shotgun Shack
GOs is their big impact on the
beneficiary population. Well,
and it doesn’t hurt that donors
and the home office love them
too – there’s no better way to
keep the funds flowing than to
take some directors or donors
from back home on a field visit
with a charismatic leader to
interact with “dangerous” and
“edgy” topics and populations,
and go for drinks together in a
“local-ish” bar afterwards. Or to
submit a “sexy” grant that includes a partnership with one
of these hot SLoNGOs.
And the benefits go beyond just
work. By hooking up with a desirable SLoNGO, you become
edgy and cool… by association.
You’ll get invited to all the best
glocal (global-local) parties, up-
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ping field credibility as well as
being offered all kinds of opportunities to go native. It’s like getting a totally free second-hand
pot-smoke buzz at a Jimmy Buffet concert.
A word of caution about SLoNGOs, however. They totally
know they’re hot and that every
other INGO wants them too….
They lead you on and you find
yourself adjusting your capacity building indicators in order
to keep them happy. They show
up late to meetings. They turn
in reports way after the due
date and only after continual requests. They demand high salaries for themselves and their
staff. They come out poorly on
audits. And the minute you try
to make them follow your rules,
they start looking elsewhere, as
if to say
“I can get any INGO or UN donor I want.”
You find yourself arguing with
your finance department because they are insisting your
SLoNGO adhere to general accounting principles. I mean, give
these poor SLoNGOs a break.
Some of them only started up
6 months ago, and don’t have
legal status; certainly you can
bend the rules a bit in order to
fund them! Because if you don’t
get busy and tap that, someone
else will and then they’ll get the
privilege of being the founding
donor! Who cares if the SLoNGO has no experience managing
money and no legal structure,
we can make this work, you insist. They need our help! And if
a year later, they haven’t turned
in a single financial report, it’s
because your organization has
failed to build their capacity.
Keep increasing their funding
The WorkZine Issue 4
before they look somewhere
else and you lose them!
And when you see the EAW
from that other big INGO cozying up to (i.e. getting drinks
for) your favorite SLoNGO at
the glocal party, it’s time to be
assertive. Take control. Join
the conversation to make your
relationship clear. Make inside jokes. Drop the news that
you’re snagging them an invite
to a meeting abroad in Sweden
or Holland or something so that
they don’t go making any deals
with anyone else. It’s important
to be the only one in the eyes of
the SLoNGO for at least the first
3 years of their existence.
After that, game over. By then
you and your donors are getting bored, you’re tired of being
a sugar momma (or daddy) and
your organization is starting to
ask the hard questions. You realize that the SLoNGO is becoming dependent on you and the
relationship has become a bit
twisted. What, these SLoNGOs
think you are going to be funding them forever? They’re out
of their minds. They really need
to come up with a sustainability
plan because, obviously, your
INGO is trying to put itself out
of business by ending poverty
in the next few years.
Your SLoNGO is becoming a
drag and you need to extricate
yourself from the relationship.
So you highly recommend them
to the INGOs that you were
shielding them from earlier to
see if you can pass them off —
kind of like hooking your best
friend up with your ex.
Once they have a few other donors funding them and their
funding base is “diversified”
and more “sustainable,” suggest
a “coordination body” of all the
donors to sit and compare notes
and jointly manage the SLoNGO
relationship. Once that’s set up,
drop out of the funding as soon
as you can (but remain the chair
of the “coordination body”). If
you can’t get the coordination
body going, another option is
after a few years of steadily increasing funds and insisting on
exponential growth and ‘scaling
up before their time,’ throw an
audit and some serious conditions in there and see if your
SLoNGO can handle it. If they
can’t, well there you go – you’ve
found yourself a legit reason to
stop funding them.
And good riddance, anyway. After 3 years, that SLoNGO isn’t
really so interesting anymore.
Your INGO has changed its strategy, and now you’re flirting with
that hot feminist filmmaker that
trains street children to take
videos of their realities with
mobile phones to then project
on a giant screen in the slums.
Or maybe you’re thinking about
how you can hook up with that
dangerously sexy former gang
member who’s training youth
in juvenile detention centers to
do graffiti arts and refurbish old
cars for re-sale as a revolving
fund for tattoo removal….
Seriously. Don’t you just love
this job?
http://stuffexpataidworkerslike.com/
15
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KATI
IDLERS CORNER
The WorkZine Issue 4
Kati, you see there are these things
called deadlines, and Abid, mbu he is
getting serious with them, just when
I had gotten used to the motion ... ok,
that sounds wrong, I will not use that
analogy, but you do know where I was
going, right? The long and short (the
short of it really) is that for an entire
three week I have not been able to
sit down and write anything like this
that you’re reading now (i.e. a bunch
of paragraphs tied together simply
because they are on the same page,
kinda hard to go with) so, instead of
applying myself to writing something
completely original, which i can do
(apparently that last part means I’m
just lazy... lazy, but brilliant, I think I
can live with that, don’t you?). Thing
is, I dislike (detest is actually a little
more like it) having someone say that
I am lazy (oh yes, I can admit it, just
won’t have anyone accuse me of it...
don’t try to understand it, you’ll just
get a headache, or something worse,
I know a few people who have). So to
prove I am not lazy, just not entirely
disposed to writing a brilliant article
at the moment, I have decided to do
the Ugandan thing and plagiarise (ok,
so I can actually be a patriot, not the
Ugandan thing, the... um... there’s really no getting around this one is there?
No, wait; the average Ugandan movie
addict thing (you know, the guys who
instead of watching the movie at the
cinema pay some random guy off
the streets to install a few viruses on
their computer in the name of giving
them movies (this is where I usually
com in by the way, I fix computers, remember?)))
(My but that is a splendid paragraph!!
(yes yes, I know, blowing my trumpet
and all, thing is, I know how to blow
it, I’m pretty sure I’ve explained this
before, right?)) eh, I was in the middle
of a sentence, continued now...
...and steal a few brilliant lines from
Brian B.Coutinho
a few brilliant chaps, poets actually, i
tell you true, these are from an actual
competition, so trust me, they will
work on your significant other. Just
make sure when you use them you’re
out of throwing range of whatever
they have in their hands at the time.
There, I warned you (by the way, I just
went online to sift through zettabytes
(yes, that is a real word (remember, google is your friend)) of data
so I could find the very best for you,
doesn’t that prove I’m not lazy? See?
Proven my point :- )) so here goes...
Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, and so are you.
But the roses are wilting, the violets are dead, the sugar bowl’s
empty and so is your head.
I love your smile, your face, and
your eyes
Damn, I’m good at telling lies!
My darling, my lover, my beautiful
wife:
Marrying you screwed up my life.
See, those work, don’t they? No? Okay
okay okay, here’s something sappy
you can actually use.
“I love you without knowing how,
or when, or from where. I love you
simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I do
not know any other way of loving
but this, in which there is no I or
you, so intimate that your hand
upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your
eyes close.”
— Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets:
Cien sonetos de amor)
16
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THANK GOD I AM NOT A BUDONIAN GIRL
S
omeone tell me, what is with
BUDONIAN girls???????
For sure we get the Budonian boy swag, but for some of
these girls, it is even more than the
boys can handle. Please allow me
to voice what millions of us from
government/ traditional schools
believe. When we think KINGS
COLLEGE BUDO, we think prestige ONLY with the boys. We understand the pride that the name
gives, but ONLY to the boys. For the
girls we are just trying to get a grip
around the fact that many of you
made it out of that school normal,
then again, the extreme aggression
explains it all. Not with the torture
you had to endure. (Go ahead and
deny it. LOL. We all know the facts.)
Let me break it down further. For
many of us who were Born 1990
and earlier, we all remember our
primary seven. We were given
a list of schools to fill in that we
prayed we would make it to. Everyone knows that for the boys, the
top schools were: Kings college
Budo, St. Marys College Kisubi
and Namilyango College. The second schools that came close were
MWIRI and maybe Makerere College third. Let us not fight people,
we all know this is the truth.
For girls, Gayaza High School and
Mt. St. Marys Namagunga topped
the list, with Nabisuunsa Girls and
Nabbingo at a very close second
and then there was Makere College
and Kings College Budo.
(Forgive me for not mentioning
other schools… you did get great
education. I’m just trying to make
a point with the Budonian girls.)
How was this graded?? THE CUT
OFF POINTS. To enter the first
choice schools, a 4 or 5 was the
mark. If you didn’t get that, a
load of cash would do the trick. It
helped more if your parent was
on the board of governors. For the
second choice schools, it was usually 6 and 7, though I must add
some people put them first choice
The WorkZine Issue 4
maybe because they did not believe in their abilities, or it was a
genuine preference based on religion or whatever. Now for the
third schools, I think it went up
to 10. For Kings College Budo in
particular, I remember complaining to my brothers that it was not
fair that they took boys who had
4 and 5, and girls who had 8 had
to sit in the same class as them. I
should look for those news paper
clippings because I can see smoke
from the budonian girl’s eyes, nose
and all openings. Ok go to the page
of ‘If you did not go to Budo you
did not go to school ‘and complain.
Deep down even your boys, including my fiancé know I am right.
Back to the point; my brother’s answer was, ‘I am not sure. You would
think they would bring the brightest girls who can endure persecution and still make it.’ To this day,
I laugh at that statement. But isn’t
there truth in it?
Which brings me back to the MAIN
point. Budonian girls, I know you
are proud of your school. Museveni
is so proud of the school where he
wore a kilt, or was it a skirt during
his adolescent days. It is understandable. But you get the pride
bit all wrong. Unlike the boys who
know how to keep it on their faces
and let the world hate, you girls
(most of you) go out looking for
the hate. You bring it up in every
sentence as an argument starter.
Oh please, that tells us a lot about
why you were not considered to
be in the TOP GIRL’S SCHOOLS.
You clearly didn’t have the classes
on how to be a lady. I am a Gayaza
Girl through and through, and I
am more than proud of it. Forgive
me for not reminding you every
second, because usually, people
can tell. THAT’S MY POINT. People
can tell a Budonian guy, a Gungas
chik, a Gyza babe, A Ngonian dude
and a Smackist gentleman from
anywhere. The budonian babes…..
well its kind of shady because the
missionaries did not plan it that
way, and we miss the lady-like
spark we can see in most of the
others. I mean, no offence, but tradition raises us to be queens. But
keep holding on. As the years go by
and history fades, you are readily
being looked at as ONE OF THEM.
Hell even Mackos is climbing that
ladder of traditionalism regardless
of the fact that we still don’t know
who founded the school. (Ok we
do, but some of them try to mislead us with claims of a new set
of missionaries who were pushing the hand of the government to
build the school. At this point, I allow you to Roll on the floor an die
of laughter.)
All in all, I am not a hater. On the
contrary, I am a great advocate for
traditional schools. I know many
people hate that, and many will
scorn this article, but you have to
attend one of these to know that
there are certain life skills we learn
that are not necessarily taught in a
classroom. While others focus on
educational success in terms of
books, these traditional schools
focus on success in life as a whole.
So I am proud of all these schools,
and I am proud of Budonian girls
for making it through. Just let your
school speak for itself. Let people
see you and ask….. are you a budonian??? Just like it is for most
gyza, gungas, sunsa and bingos
babes. Do not make them wonder,
or worse, do not be the one to have
to shout it in their faces. Someone
may think its Budo S.S. (I love budo
s s too. Im just saying).
Ok I give you a week to hate. After
you are done, think about this and
make some changes in your lifestyle.
NOW YOU GO GIRL!
By Princess <she has withdrawn
her name in case budo girls try to
beat her up >
17
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Events, Ads And Everything
Else
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO
Bath university impact ‘lookalike’
Social
on 31 March • 19:00 - 22:00 at Opium, Bath followed by Kitsch, Weir Lounge
AUTHORS’ FORUM - 06 April • 17:00 -
20:00 at Uganda NATIONAL THEATRE
AUDITORIUM Fee - 15,000/=. Tickets at National Theatre Box office or call 0712868424 /
0704666851
The Lantern Meet of Poets’
5th
Poetry recital on 10 June at 18:30 - 11 June at
18:30 under the theme “WORDS,
HEART
BEATS AND NEON LIGHTS”. At Ugan-
da national theatre TICKETS:Adults:- 10,000/=
Students:- 5000/= (with id). For more details
contact: 0712 815 895/0701 335 543/0714
562 048/0702 889 398
GET FOOLISH PARTY
01 April at 21:00
- 02 April at 00:00 at Iguana Bar Kampala
Donald Wasswa Solo Art Exhibition Starting
26 Mar 2011 through the month of april from
10:00 to 21:00 at Afriart Gallery, Kampala
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Joyo Tee Phiona
30 March
Sam Agona 31 March
Collins Richard Kaweesi 31 March
Franciscar Maithya
31 March
Poisonous Rose 01 April
Nabachwa Lilliane 02 April
Belinda Roanah K 02 April
Esta VanderWoodsen
02 April
Bob Reyman Kabango 02 April
Nancy Amito 02 April
Darlyne Komukama 03 April
Conrad Yang Kuzooka 03 April
John Mutama 03 April
Nankya Winnie 04 April
Lynn Kirabo 04 April
Francis Xavi K 04 April
Charity Kamusiime 04 April
Kayondo Francis 04 April
Nabbosa Diana Ross 04 April
Joseph Bernald 05 April
Erasmus Ellis Katwebaze 06 April
Ivan R. Mugisha 06 April
Morris Abajai 06 April
D Daisy Marione 06 April
Mubiru Bridget 06 April
Pascal Serunjoji 07 April
Herbert Byamukama 07 April
Joseph Kazibwe 07 April
Allan Simon Ssesanga 07 April
Edd Whewell 07 April
Oleke Chris 08 April
Obonyo Michael 08 April
Martin Spencer 08 April
Baguma Daniel Kajura 08 April
Kisegerwa Jamil 08 April
Serumaga Makaya Baker 08 April
Alexander McLean 09 April
Tonny Mugabe 09 April
Lydia Masembe 10 April
Tumutegyereize Paulson 10 April
Bosco Darlius Mwebesa 11 April
Arthur Zaasa Mwanje 12 April
Gregory Zulu 12 April
Kwiruka Moryn 12 April
Musana Geoffrey Jeff 12 April
20
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