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Uganda: So Much Money... Soon It'll Be Old Fashioned to Talk of Trillions
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The East African (Nairobi)
OPINION
6 November 2007
Posted to the web 6 November 2007
Joachim Buwembo
Nairobi
Looking back a mere three to four decades, one can hardly believe how rich we have become. We Ugandans are now among the richest nations of the world and the evidence is there for all to see.
Imagine how much more money we have now than we used to in the past. Up to the late 1970s, for example, a university graduate in the public service used to earn a mere Ush1,800 a month as starting pay. Today they earn a few hundred thousand. A private soldier was getting only Ush505 a month, now it is Ush180,000 ($103).
And let us not talk about inflation here. The currency was corrected in 1987 and two zeroes struck off all values, and even a further 30 per cent conversion tax was taken away as a price everyone had to pay so that we can get out currency that is strong once again. So if you had Ush1 million, it became Ush70,000 in the new currency that we are using. Ush100 was reduced to a single digit, becoming Ush7 only.
Those days when we were still poor, we used to pay Ush25,000 for a brand new car (Peugeot), but now we pay, er, who buys a brand new car anyway? We pay Ush10 million ($5,714) to Ush60 million ($34,286) for a second-hand car.
MILLION? THAT is a rather new word. Nobody talked of millions when we were poor. The largest imaginable figures were in tens of thousands. See now where we have got! A lot of hard work must have had something to do with it. We never even had words in our local languages for sums from six digits, and we have had to develop them along the way. Vocabulary has to catch up with our growing largesse.
When we graduated to the millions, our thieves also had to adjust their appetites. So in the late 1980s, first Inspector General of Government Augustine Ruzindana started chasing after people for stealing real millions! And we thought it was a big deal!
Come the 1990s, and we started talking of billions. The national budget crossed the billion-shilling mark. We were there! Even thieves started embezzling hundreds of millions.
Come 2000. Our budget had crossed the trillion-shilling mark. Even the thieves lost interest in millions and started eyeing billions. Real billions! The attorney generals also got generous. In obscure cases against the government, they started settling out of court for billions.
This year, we have struck it real rich. The figure of a trillion shillings has finally become an everyday word. But it is creating problems for communicators. How do you say "trillion" in vernacular for people to understand?
For the past several years, this was not a problem - the word was only said once a year on budget day. But what do you do when it becomes an everyday word?
The other day, the Auditor General said the government wanted to write off a debt of Ush1.6 trillion owed by some 40 borrowers or so. Members of Parliament are up in arms against the proposal.
They have their reasons, but how do they tell their voters in the village about what they consider a preposterous proposal?
I HAVE heard some commentators trying to say "trillion" in vernacular and it is hilarious. "Uncountable" is the word they seem to be settling for. So the other day, the Supreme Court upheld a High Court order to award soldiers of the disbanded Idi Amin and Obote armies "four and a half uncountable shillings."
Meanwhile, MPs continue to oppose the government's proposal to forgive some guys "one point six uncountable shillings."
At this rate, we had better be foresighted and start coining local words for zillion, gazillion and others that do not yet exist even in the English language.
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Joachim Buwembo is editor of the Daily Monitor of Kampala
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