Careful! Life Begins at 40,
But Not in Uganda
Can 20 extra years make you sexier? If you are 40 now, is there a remote possibility that you look more attractive to girls of 20 than you did 20 years ago? Many middle-aged men in East Africa tend to think so. And that is one of the major reasons capital accumulation in our economies is failing.
At 20, a young man looks his best. He no longer has pimples, his voice has stabilised and he has learnt how to trim the hair growing on his face. He is in college and speaks the same lingo as the girls. His clothes are trendy and his body has no excess fat.
If the girls are not all over him – and in most cases they are not – what are the chances that they should find a man twice his age, with a flabby body and hair sprouting from all the wrong places, more attractive? If the 40-year old believes that the girls who make eyes at him find him attractive, then there is an even more serious problem with his mind than with his ageing body. If he had enough sense, he would know that the girls’ attitude has less to do with his looks than with the contents of his wallet.
Failure to realise this has affected the spending habits of many middle aged men who should otherwise be playing a key role in making small to medium scale investments in our region.
Many men start fathering children at 25 or before. This means that by 40, the woman you have been having children with is also about 40 and, in the interests of safety, should not be having more children. That is when the two of you should have the time, energy and spare cash to plan investments.
But it seems many of our men tend to misunderstand the European slogan that life begins at 40. That slogan is applicable in societies where there are formal social security structures that enable someone who has been in fulltime employment to start reaping from his life insurance, to let the provident fund he started building for the kids’ college take over; generally, to start dipping his fingers into his nest egg. That is when people choose to "see the world" in style, not like they did as youthful backpackers. It is the time for luxury resorts in faraway places. But because they are still strong, they continue working for another 20 to 25 years to support their lifestyle.
But your average East African reaches forty exhausted from paying school fees for his kids and relatives. At around that time, he joins the senior ranks of whichever sector he works in. The seniority brings more money and the derailment begins.
Instead of being smart and continuing with the same lifestyle for five to ten years while saving the extra income to accumulate capital, our friend declares that life starts at 40. And there is no shortage of disruptive agents to convince him that he is now an attractive young man. Suddenly, the girls notice him. The poor fellow swallows the bait and splashes the extra income on them. This kind of expenditure only helps the multinationals that sell beer and petrol.
At the end of five years, our senior executive has little or no accumulated reserves for investing or even securing his family’s future. Yet he easily burns at least $300 a month in this unnecessary, misguided expenditure. This, with minimal interest, would make $20,000 (Ush40 million, Ksh1.5 million or Tsh20 millon) at the end of five years. How many 45-year-old executives have this extra cash in their accounts?
To some people this may not sound like much money. Yet many senior executives in Nairobi, Kampala and Dar es Salaam don’t have it. And they have lot of excuses for not having it. They blame everybody else but themselves.
But if the day they hit 40 they decided that they are no longer teenagers, they would have the money, and much more.
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Joachim Buwembo is Editor of The Sunday Vision of Kampala.
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