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Salary Earners Sickness (SES) by Dr.

Atwine Banabas
There is a disease that is reaching epidemic level among salary earners, self-employed people and
elected officials. If left untreated, this disease has the capability to financially kill or maim those
infected. Financial doctors have not yet given a name to the disease which we are calling Salary
Earner Sickness (SES). Below is the symptoms reported by a person employed by a financial
institution.
February 24: Patient received his salary after deduction of the loan instalments.
February 25: Patient paid off informal debt he owed fellow workers and the grocery store in his
neighbourhood.
February 27: Patient seen shopping for dry rations to last two to three weeks.
March 2: After paying taxi fare all the money is now over and Patient is thinking Who is still doing
money lending around here?
The doctors working on the patient have determined three possible causes of the sickness and this
discovery is expected to lead to the discovery of a treatment or even vaccine.
The majority of patients get the disease because they spend money according to how their peers
spend and not according to how much money they earn or have.
In one institution that has a hierarchy starting from assistant to manager; when the financial
statements of the people were examined it was found out that the assistants spent as though they
were officers. Officers also spent like they were supervisors and supervisors in turn pretended to be
managers. The result was that people earning lower salaries were spending money that was
corresponding to a higher pay grade.
The spending money according to peers channel was found to be widespread throughout the
Ugandan society. As an example a lady who already had three children told her husband that she
wanted to get pregnant again in order to have the chance to deliver a child from Nakasero Hospital
where many of her friends had their babies. Members of Parliament, bankers and other groups of
people were found to spend money according to how their colleagues spent and as a result many
were either broke or heavily indebted.
The mentality of What will people think was also found to be another channel through which the
SES affected patients. When it came to things like wedding parties, choice of school for children and
buying cars it wasdiscovered that many people operated under the influence of what will people think
about them. The desire was not to spend what they could afford but to impress other people by the
amount of money spent on such items.
Sadly, none of the victims who attracted the SES through this channel ever had the chance to tell
whether the people they sought to impress even noticed their efforts.
The conclusion seems to be that apart from the occasional gossip in the media many people really
do not pay much attention to what another person is spending.
A third channel of infection is not paying attention to investments. Many sufferers from SES are

people with no investments.


They think that investing is too risky and it is therefore better for them to spend their money instead
of investing it. Ironically, their chosen level of expenditure is too high to be sustained by a salary and
having investments would have saved them from either becoming heavily indebted or getting
involved in corruption.
The ability to invest was also hampered by the fact that many of the people kept the company of
people who were non-investors like them. From 8am to 5pm they were in the company of other
colleagues who were bound to their desks. On weekends they either stayed behind their selfimposed prisons also known as wall fences or visited with friends living in similar prisons. After
sometime of this kind of interaction the salary earners conclude that they cannot invest because
there are no investment opportunities. Basing on their experience, some go further to assert that
there are no local investors in Uganda.
Although SES is widespread, a financial doctor working with a Ugandan-based consulting firm told
me the good news is that it is a treatable or even preventable condition.

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