Do you have a wealth vision? Or are you just working until you die?

In a country where we hustle to survive today, Absa Bank Uganda just asked the question we have all been running away from — what happens tomorrow?

By Mukama Phillip Kahigiriza

Do you have a wealth vision?

I read that question on my phone at exactly 3:47 in the morning, sweating through a power cut, and it stopped me cold. Not because I did not understand it. But because I understood it too well.

We Ugandans know how to work. We wake up before the first boda-boda noise. We sell in Owino in the rain. We drive for sixteen hours. We till. We code. We preach. We hustle as though our lives depend on it — because they do. But wealth? That word has always felt as though it belongs to someone else. To Kololo. To people with the right surnames. To people who speak with a certain accent at Serena.

Last week, Absa Bank Uganda launched its Wealth Investment Solutions at the Kampala Serena Hotel. On the surface, it was a bank event. In truth, it was an interruption. A necessary one. Because the real question is not whether you have money. The real question is whether you have a vision for what your money should do when you are too tired to work.

We were taught to save but never taught to grow. Our parents did their best. My mother still says: “Kikumi kikumi, n’ekibbo kiyala” — a hundred at a time, and the basket fills up. So we save. We keep money in a tin. On mobile money. In a SACCO that may or may not return it when we need it most. We save to survive the next emergency, not to build the next decade.

As Chinua Achebe wrote, a man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starvation. We have been saving to avoid starvation. We have not been building toward abundance.

The launch of these investment solutions represents something different: a shift in the starting point. The first step, according to this approach, is not how much you have. It is the decision — a first goal, a first deliberate move to turn ambition into action.

Seneca put it plainly two thousand years ago: if a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favourable. That is the financial condition of most of us. We are sailing with no port in mind. We are working hard, but the energy is scattered.

Here is what moved me most: the entry point. For years, serious investment in Uganda has felt like a members-only arrangement. Treasury bills were for the wealthy. Eurobonds were for people in London offices. Mutual funds were for those with industrial-area connections and inherited capital. The lie we absorbed, without always knowing we had absorbed it, was that wealth creation was reserved for a particular class of person and we were not it.

That lie needs to be challenged directly. James Baldwin wrote that you have to decide who you are and force the world to deal with you — not with its idea of you. For decades, the world told the average Ugandan that investing was not for them. A platform that changes that entry point is not a marketing exercise. It is a philosophical shift.

If you can spend ten thousand shillings on data to watch videos that do not add to your net worth, you can invest ten thousand shillings to buy a piece of your future. That is not a slogan. That is a reorientation of how we think about money.

Wealth is deeply personal. And, in Uganda, it is deeply lonely. I know a thirty-four-year-old teacher in Mukono who earns seven hundred thousand shillings a month. Every month, two hundred thousand goes home to her family. She has never missed a family gathering. But she has never asked herself who will send her money when she is seventy.

We have been taught to think of legacy as something that belongs to men who have buildings named after them. It is not. Legacy is the decision that your child does not have to start from zero. It is the bond you locked away quietly in your thirties that pays for the hospital bill in your seventies.

Aristotle wrote that we are what we repeatedly do — that excellence is not an act but a habit. Wealth follows the same logic. It is not the one large deal that suddenly arrives. It is the repeated decision that even ten thousand shillings should work while you sleep.

The most honest line in this entire conversation is also the simplest: your wealth journey does not have to be walked alone. Ugandans are financially lonely in a way we rarely admit. We lose money on bad deals and say nothing because of shame. We borrow at punishing interest rates for school fees because we never planned for the term. We are conned by people we trusted because we did not know where to turn for advice.

What proper investment guidance offers is not only financial support. It is the emotional reassurance that someone knowledgeable is available to say: your small money is worthy of serious attention. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi has written beautifully about how Uganda’s real struggle has never been a shortage of effort — it has been a shortage of structures that honour that effort. This is what a genuine wealth framework can provide.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that a person who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. A wealth vision gives you the why. It gives you the reason to say no to the unnecessary expense, to invest the ten thousand rather than risk it, to wake up early one more time with a destination in mind.

The question is no longer whether you have enough to start.

The question is whether you have the courage to have a vision.

The writer, Mukama Phillip Kahigiriza, is an author, political and society scholar and journalist on wealth, power and what Africa becomes when we stop surviving and start building.

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