The love letter could save the day

It is back to school for third term and one thing teachers should take seriously this time is the teaching of how to write love letters. It would help them too. In fact, if James Tweheyo, the secretary general of the Uganda National Teachers Union (Unatu) had written a clever letter to president Museveni professing the teachers' love and absolute support for the big man in 2016, the 20 percent salary increment for teachers would have long been effected and the strike prevented.

I first learned of the power of words to feed and take you places back in the day when a rich kid I went to school with paid me to help write a love letter to his girlfriend. I soon started spending a bulk of my free time leafing through the library dictionary and listening to song lyrics because the more words I learnt to use impressively, the more mandazi money I made from not just those who wanted to mesmerise their high school sweethearts, but even those who wanted to show their parents back home that their time at school was turning them into wordsmiths!

This was before social media hit the scene and popularised the condensation of grammer which has in turn murdered the way the English language is used. It was way before schools had labs filled to capacity with computers connected to the internet. Even mobile phones (then the size of bricks) were the preserve of the very rich. Thus communication was mostly through hand-written letters.

That is how it came to be that the coolest kids in any school were not the nimble dancers or the comics. These were popular but not as widely as the literature students who carried heavy volumes of classical novels. They knew their words and it showed during school debates and seminars.

In the single-sex school I attended where our preoccupation was writing love letters to the girls’ school in the neighbourhood, we were consultants! Of course the letters we wrote were mostly silly but the effort we put in enriched our vocabulary and gave us loads of fun as well. That fun can revive your hurting relationship too if you stop what you are doing now and pick pen and paper. That letter could put a smile on your spouse’s face and bring the spark back into your marriage.

Today's urban youths who are losing the authentic use of language through social media and SMS will become born-again through letter writing and their teachers will get their pay rise too! In short, everyone benefits.

Lecturers should be happy with goat-rearing

It is a little disappointing that the Ivory Tower lecturers ignored the president's advice and returned to the lecture room. Tending the frisky and naughty animals would have revolutionised their personal lives and earnings beyond their wildest dreams.

It is true that goats can be little devils with a knack for messing up neighbours' gardens and therefore putting you on a collision course with them, but this is where sisal ropes and an impenetrable barn will come in handy.

The other tedious bits of rearing goats such as mucking out the smelly pens, laying down clean straw, hauling buckets of water or taking them to the stream will give our lecturers strong arms, legs and general physical fitness that would leave Kampala's top body builder, Ben Lukwago, envious. Now, lecturers who award marks for sex would certainly love to hear this!

There are other advantages that the lecturers in the department of Literature will particularly love. Watching the goat nibbling a turnip or gobbling a sweet potato, even seeing young ones skipping about in the morning sun can inspire such fine poetry as would make Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino elementary!

It has been said that the best way to a goat's heart is through his stomach as well. They love the choicest cabbages and cereals but that should not worry you because the returns are way greater. If you attend to their needs, they will release enough milk for home consumption and to sell to the cheese factory. If you didn't know, not only is goat's milk incomparably delicious, its nutritiousness will keep you strong, wise and ageless as well.

Moreover, goat's meat is more expensive than mutton and beef, and such cost has not stopped it from selling faster than the proverbial hot cakes. If a woman has been playing hard to get, go buy her goat muchomo.
Besides, you will never bother about buying chairs and mats for the home as goat skins are warm and more comfortable sitting and sleeping on.

Here in Kampala, the goats will grant you the much coveted opportunity to belong to the exclusive class behind the annual goat races. Before you know it, you will be rubbing shoulders with the likes of Sudhir and enjoying prime coverage in the media, leaving our attention-seeking politicians green with envy.

So, really, I don't understand why our lecturers would be so disenchanted with the President for advising them to rear goats when doing so is obviously more rewarding than eating chalk for a pittance.

Welcome to my world of grand entrepreneurs

Becoming "a grand entrepreneur" is a decision I reached recently after receiving a text message from a girl I had not heard from for quite a while. The text wondered why I've been silent, ending: "you must be a grand entrepreneur by now!"

The look of an entrepreneur?

That word 'entrepreneur' touched a chord in my soul. This was a girl I had once been crazy about but had shied away from because I was a church mouse. Was she now implicitly telling me she's still available if I've the financial clout of a business mogul? 

So I decided I had nothing to lose if I tried try out entrepreneurship. Yes, it was time I started having self belief that I could more than make it and live large! But first, I had to learn to pronounce "entrepreneur" perfectly. I went to work immediately till I sounded the word better than a parrot, till it tasted like honey on my tongue and tickled like stacks of bucks in my hip pockets! 

I proceeded to the wardrobe and wore my only suit. It hang on my gaunt self like a silk shirt on a wooden skeleton. No doubt I needed to devour lots of millennium-type burgers and omelettes to attain the physical stature befitting a grand entrepreneur. Evidently, I needed a loan. My stylish bookshelf and plasma screen would do for collateral, hopefully. I also needed to surf the net too for ideas that would make me rich in the shortest possible time! 

Drawing from my high school art skills, I designed a business card. It simply had my name on it, in sophisticated calligraphy, followed by two words: "Grand Entrepreneur" plus related details.

I then kept reciting the words of William Shakespeare's Malvolio in Twelfth Night: "Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them."

Swelling with positivity, I then stood before the mirror and took a look at my reflection. There was soul and tenacity in the eyes of the man staying back at me. Nothing could now prevent him from being rich, nothing at all.

With a smile, I pointed at him (the man in the mirror) like I was going to poke him, and he pointed back at me, and we said together, meaning every word and syllable: "Welcome to the world of grand entrepreneurs!"