Uncle Rwamiti’s Musings on the Mobility of Human Capability

There is a question that sounds so simple most people answer it too quickly.

What business are you in?

Ask a banker.

“I work in banking.”

Ask a doctor.

“I practice medicine.”

Ask a teacher.

“I teach.”

Ask a hardware merchant.

“I sell building materials.”

Interesting.

Now ask a different question.

What capabilities are you accumulating while doing those things?

The room usually becomes quiet.

That is because we spend our lives introducing ourselves by our industries.

Rarely by our capabilities.

That distinction turns out to matter more than most people imagine.

I learned this from a man who believed he had spent thirty years selling cement.

He hadn’t.

His name was James Mulindwa.

He graduated from Makerere University with an Honours degree in Sociology.

Wrong degree.

Wrong decade.

Wrong economy.

Or so he thought.

Like thousands of graduates before and after him, James believed education was a passport.

Instead, it became a waiting room.

Applications disappeared into silence.

Interviews rarely came.

When they did, someone else’s uncle had already been chosen.

So James did what desperate graduates have always done.

He made himself useful.

His aunt owned a modest hardware shop in Nakasero.

He sat there reading newspapers, circling vacancies that never called back.

Customers interrupted him.

“We need three-inch hinges.”

The shop didn’t have them.

James ran across the road.

Five minutes later he returned with the hinges.

Another customer wanted plumbing fittings.

Another wanted roofing bolts.

Another wanted paint that wasn’t stocked.

James became the bridge between problems and solutions.

Notice something.

Nobody had employed him to become a hardware merchant.

He became valuable first.

The hardware business simply noticed.

That sequence matters.

How many careers begin not with expertise, but with usefulness?

Half a stall became a full stall.

One shop became two.

Two became three.

Thirty years later James had become what newspapers like to call a successful businessman.

There was only one problem.

Success had quietly changed employers.

James thought he owned three shops.

His three shops owned James.

Have you noticed how often we admire businesses without asking what they demand in return?

Revenue has a way of distracting us from captivity.

The balance sheet looked healthy.

His blood sugar did not.

The shops expanded.

His waistline expanded faster.

His customer base grew.

His time disappeared.

His doctor prescribed exercise.

The market prescribed longer opening hours.

One of them was always going to win.

Reality usually keeps score.

One Tuesday afternoon an elderly gentleman wandered into the shop.

He bought nothing.

Instead, he watched.

He watched James calm an angry contractor.

He watched him persuade a supplier to extend credit.

He watched him settle a disagreement between two employees without raising his voice.

He watched him remember a customer he had not seen for eight years.

Only after almost an hour did he speak.

“My son,” he said quietly, “when do you ever leave this shop?”

James laughed.

“I own three hardware stores.”

The old man smiled.

“That wasn’t my question.”

His name, I later learned, was Uncle Rwamiti.

He walked slowly to a shelf stacked with bags of cement.

He rested one hand on them.

“My son,” he said, “suppose every bag of cement disappeared tonight.”

He pointed to the shelves.

“Every hammer.”

“Every nail.”

“Every tin of paint.”

“Everything.”

“What business would still be left tomorrow morning?”

James looked puzzled.

“There wouldn’t be one.”

Would there?

Or had he answered too quickly?

Uncle Rwamiti shook his head.

“You negotiated with three suppliers before lunch.”

“You settled two disagreements.”

“You persuaded an unhappy customer to stay.”

“You coached a young employee.”

“You remembered names.”

“You built trust.”

“Tell me…”

“Which one of those is hardware?”

Silence.

The kind of silence that arrives just before a belief changes.

For thirty years James had believed his success came from what he sold.

He had never considered that it came from what he had become.

The cement was inventory.

Trust was capability.

Paint was inventory.

Negotiation was capability.

Steel was inventory.

Leadership was capability.

Inventory can be stolen.

Capabilities travel.

That evening James went home and drew two columns.

On the left he wrote:

Products.

On the right:

Capabilities.

The left-hand column filled half a page.

The right-hand column kept growing.

Leadership.

Negotiation.

Conflict resolution.

Supplier relationships.

Customer psychology.

Cash-flow discipline.

Mentoring.

Recruitment.

Systems thinking.

Decision-making under pressure.

Only then did he realise something astonishing.

His Sociology degree had not been wasted.

It had simply been hiding in plain sight.

Over the next year he stopped trying to be indispensable.

He documented what had once existed only in his head.

He trained managers.

Delegated authority.

Built systems.

He discovered something that many founders fear but few test.

The business became stronger the less it depended on him.

His blood sugar improved.

His blood pressure settled.

But something even more interesting happened.

Every Saturday morning young entrepreneurs began gathering in the room above one of his shops.

They came to learn about hardware.

They left talking about leadership.

Banks invited him.

Universities invited him.

Business associations invited him.

Nobody was really inviting a hardware merchant.

They were inviting someone who understood how human capability creates value.

On my way home that day, Uncle Rwamiti asked me a question I have never forgotten.

“Petero…”

“If James had become a district sociologist, would the world have discovered the leader hiding inside him?”

I did not answer.

Because I wasn’t thinking about James anymore.

I was thinking about myself.

And perhaps, if you’ve read this far, you’re no longer thinking about James either.

You’re wondering about your own two columns.

Not What do I do?

But What has doing it been quietly teaching me all these years?

Perhaps that is the better question.

Because industries change.

Jobs disappear.

Technologies become obsolete.

But capabilities—if we recognize them—can travel from one chapter of life to the next.

And perhaps that is the real business we have been in all along.
Dr Petero wamala writes about bridging the knowledge-action gap.
Mbunifueastafrica@gmail.com