Miles Rwamiti

Reminder;

Next week every school will require 80% of school fees paid on the first day. Bank slips will be collected at the gate by the askari. Continue wasting time giving lousy opinions about who should be the next King of Tooro as if you actually know anything.

Don’t buy a microwave at home. Microwave is used to warm leftovers to serve u. But why eat leftovers?

How can a man be served amawolu??

Let the wife wake up , awaate bulungi amatooke akufumbire fresh food for your morning.

A traditional man’s home shouldn’t have these fake, cancer building microwaves from Pakistan !!!

Bwaba tasobola kufumbira kumakya mwesonyiwe!!

Mr Kutesa #

JOB OPPORTUNITY – SHOP ATTENDANT

Qualifications:
1. Computer literate
2. Experience managing social media platforms
3. Excellent communication and customer service skills
4. Must be honest, responsible, hardworking, and presentable
5. Prior experience as a shop attendant or in sales will be an advantage

To apply, send your CV or contact 0708 808 619

*KAMPALA IS HARD, GROUND IS TIGHT, MONEY HAS REFUSED… BUT WHY IS EVERYWHERE PERMANENTLY FULLY BOOKED?*

If the International Monetary Fund or the Bank of Uganda truly wants to understand the macroeconomic realities of this country, they need to burn their textbooks. Stop looking at inflation graphs and stop measuring the GDP. Instead, they just need to sit at a random pork joint in Kisaasi, Banda, or Kabalagala on a random Tuesday afternoon and watch the magic happen.

Kampala is the only city on the planet where everyone is completely, thoroughly broke, yet every single venue is permanently fully booked. The mathematics of this city do not connect with the lifestyle of its citizens. It is a financial paradox that completely defies physics.

Every single morning, your Facebook and Twitter timelines look like a virtual funeral committee. People are typing "Kampala is hard," "Ground is tight," and "Money has completely refused" with a level of deep sorrow that makes you want to offer condolences. You check WhatsApp statuses, and it is just a barrage of motivational quotes about enduring trials mixed with screenshots of empty Mobile Money wallets.

If you dare ask ten of your closest friends for a quick 50k loan to fix a mechanical issue on your car, you will receive nine voice notes that sound like they were recorded from inside a hospital ICU. Your friends will explain how their money is locked in "goods on the high seas," how a relative in the village just got struck by lightning, or how their banking app has developed a specific glitch that only prevents outgoing transfers. The tenth friend will simply blue-tick you, enter a digital witness protection program, and never view your status again.

According to the internet, the entire city is on the verge of economic collapse. Everyone is one bad day away from packing a single mattress and trekking back to the village to start manual agriculture.

But then, the weekend arrives. On Friday at 11:30 PM, try to look for a parking space anywhere near a popular bbaala in Nakawa, Kololo, Bugolobi, or Kira Road. You cannot find it. In fact, the traffic jam inside the parking lot of the bar is worse than the traffic jam on Jinja Road during peak hours. Where does the fuel money come from? Nobody knows.

Who is buying those massive whisky. The exact same people who were crying in your inbox at 9:00 AM. We are a city of professional mourners who cry bitterly about poverty while holding a cold bottle of premium beer. We swallow our economic sorrows with large single-malt whiskies. We are broke, yes, but we are broke with class.

The financial mystery of Kampala becomes even more confusing when you look at our social calendars. In this city, being broke is a personal problem, but celebrating is a community project. Take weddings, for example. A young couple working entry-level corporate jobs will decide to get married. Their combined savings cannot even buy a decent sofa set for their sitting room. Their bank accounts are gasping for air.

But instead of having a small, realistic scientific wedding of twenty people, they call a meeting. They form a WhatsApp group called "Brian and Sharon Wedding Preparations." Suddenly, a budget of 80 million Shillings appears out of thin air. For the next three months, people who claim they haven't eaten a proper meal since Tuesday are forced to attend weekly physical meetings, drink expensive tea, and pledge 500k each. If you don't pledge, you are labeled a witch in the family.

On the actual wedding day, the decorations alone cost more than the groom's annual salary. The cake is the size of a water tank. Everyone eats, drinks, dances, and congratulates the couple for a successful event. Then, on Monday morning, the newly wedded couple wakes up in a rented house with zero balance on their mobile money, wondering how they will buy charcoal for the rest of the month.

If you think weddings are expensive, try dying in Kampala. Funerals in this city have become high-budget production events. The moment a relative passes away, the budget expands like yeast in warm water. People who never contributed a single shilling for the deceased person's medical bills suddenly become VIP chairmen of the burial committee.

They budget for a high-tech public address system, five giant tents, professional caterers from the city to cook in the village, and a custom-made casket with gold-painted handles. A fleet of thirty cars, mostly Subarus and Harriers, will drive in a high-speed convoy to Budaka or Masaka, burning fuel like water. We will cry for two hours, eat buffets with three types of meat, and then hold a post-funeral evaluation meeting to discuss who stole the pieces of chicken meant for the in-laws. We cannot afford healthcare while alive, but we will spend millions to ensure you travel to the grave in absolute luxury.

Then there is the church. The relationship between Kampala's economy and our spiritual lives deserves a whole PhD study. On Sunday morning, the very same people who were hiding from their landlords will dress up in custom-made outfits, drive cars running on fumes, and head to church. Enter the celebrity pastors. These men of God have mastered the art of capitalistic spiritualism.

The pastor will stand on a stage lit like a Beyoncé concert, wearing a designer suit that costs more than your university tuition, and look at a congregation of heavily indebted people. He will tell you that the reason your business is failing is not because of high interest rates or bad customer service, but because your tithe has no "spiritual weight." He will ask for a "prophetic seed" of 500,000 Shillings for a specific breakthrough.

And because Kampalans love shortcuts, people will line up. A man who has ignored five reminders from his child's school about outstanding fees will run to the altar, pull out his last savings, and drop it in the basket. He will walk out of the church completely empty-handed but smiling, fully convinced that a financial miracle is loading on his MTN Mobile Money account by Monday afternoon.

This brings us to the endless cycle of fundraisers. Kampala runs on fundraisers. If it is not a wedding or a funeral, it is an introduction ceremony. If it is not an introduction, it is a medical car wash. If it is not a car wash, it is a school alumni reunion where people are raising money to paint a staff room that was built in 1970.

We have developed a cultural immunity to financial shame. A person will text you out of nowhere, someone you haven't spoken to since the secondary school geography trip in 2012 and their first message is a flyer with a mobile money number. No "how are you," no "how is the family." Just a digital begging bowl.

And don't even get me started on the school fees season. This is the ultimate biannual psychological warfare in Kampala. The school fees circular from a standard kindergarten in Sonde or Gayaza looks like a national budget proposal. The tuition alone requires you to consider selling a kidney. But it’s the "school requirements" list where the real comedy lives. Parents are ordered to bring a specific brand of heavy-duty toilet paper—usually enough rolls to wipe the backsides of an entire army battalion for three years. You must bring two high-quality brooms, three reams of photocopying paper, a squeegee, and five kilograms of sugar.

On reporting day, you see parents with university degrees carrying bundles of local brooms on their corporate shoulders, looking like traditional herbalists. Everyone complains that schools are extortionist cartels. Fathers are switching off their phones, mothers are taking microfinance loans with interest rates that should be illegal. But come opening day, look at the school gate. The traffic jam of premium fuel-guzzlers dropping off children is insane.

The children themselves are packed with snacks that can feed a small village during a drought. We curse the school directors, we abuse the system, but we pay. Why? Because in Kampala, your child going to an expensive school is 70% about education and 30% about your status in the estate.

Then we have the corporate class vs. downtown traders matrix. If you want to see real financial comedy, look at the corporate elite working in Acacia Towers or Kololo. These ones have English accents, expensive lunch habits, and lanyards hanging around their necks like Olympic medals. They spend 40k a day on iced lattes and chicken salad while earning a net salary that cannot buy a front tyre of a modern car. They live in permanent, sophisticated debt, financed by salary loans and credit cards.

Meanwhile, look at the trader in Kikuubo downtown. He wears a dusty t-shirt, sandals made from old car tyres, and speaks broken English. He looks like he needs a financial donation. But if you sit down and look at his books, that man is handling cash transactions that can clear the national debt of Malawi by lunchtime.

The corporate guy will use big vocabulary like "synergy," "market pe*******on," and "liquidity constraints" to explain why he cannot buy a round of drinks, while the dusty Kikuubo guy is buying his fourth plot of land in Mukono using cash carried in a black polythene bag.

How do we survive this endless pressure? We do it through highly classified, unwritten laws of local economics. First, no sane person in Kampala lives on a salary alone. A salary in this city is not money; it is just a myth. It is a formal cover story we use to justify waking up at 5:30 AM to sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

The real economy runs entirely on the art of the chaotic side deal. Someone is a formal human resource manager by day, but by 2:00 PM, they are using the office desktop to coordinate the supply of secondary school mattresses to a boarding school in Mukono. They are secretly importing second-hand iPhones from Dubai through a cousin’s friend. They are brokering a land deal in Gayaza for a plot they have never actually seen with their own eyes, convincing a buyer they have known the landlord since childhood.

Everyone has a side hustle that requires them to stand up, walk out of the office, and whisper intensely into the phone while looking around suspiciously. If you don't have a deal that makes you look like a fugitive, you are not doing Kampala right.

Second, Kampala broke-ness is highly specific and deeply emotional. It is not an absolute lack of money; it is a tactical reallocation of funds. A Kampalan will look their landlord dead in the eye and give a 45-minute speech about global supply chain disruptions, fuel prices, and the post-election economy. It will be a speech so moving, so full of sorrow, that the landlord will leave apologizing for asking for the three-months rent arrears.

However, that exact same tenant will somehow find 250k that very evening to buy a VIP ticket to a concert or an all-white party. Why? Because the Kampala operating system operates on one golden rule: "You cannot kill yourself." We view financial discipline as a spiritual attack. We do not lack money; we just choose what we want to be broke for. Rent can wait, but a good time is an emergency.

Third, we survive through a massive, city-wide web of rotating debts. The money in Kampala never actually disappears; it just moves from one person's Airtel Money account to another person's MTN Mobile Money account at the speed of light. You borrow 100k from Peter to pay Paul. Then you enter a joint venture with John to confuse Peter so that Peter forgets about the 100k for at least two weeks. By the time Peter remembers, you have secured a small commission from a car sale, which you immediately use to pay half of Peter's money, while borrowing another 200k from James. It is a beautiful, fragile ecosystem of financial gymnastics. Everyone owes someone, and someone owes everyone. As long as nobody demands their money all at the same time, the city keeps moving forward smoothly.

The truth is, Kampala is like a toxic ex-partner we simply refuse to leave. The city squeezes you until you feel your bones cracking. It feeds you dust, traps you in two-hour jams on potholes that look like craters, cuts off the electricity during a crucial football match, and taxes your mobile money transactions. But just when you are sitting in your room, completely defeated, looking at your last 5,000 Shillings, ready to pack your bags and go back to the village... someone sends you a hilarious TikTok video of a politician. You step outside and smell the roasting meat of a roadside rolex guy. A friend calls you and says, "Drop what you are doing, come over, there are two mutual bottles on my table." And just like that, you forgive the city. You smile, wipe the dust off your shoes, and step back into the chaos. We are broke. We are stressed. Our bank accounts are in the negative. But by the grace of God, some good music, and pure Ugandan audacity, we will always survive.

Between the corporate salary wrappers, the wedding committees, the school requirement drama, or the celebrity pastors, which Kampala financial scam is currently draining your wallet the most?

Happy New Month!

Nakivubo Channel has been transformed into a thriving commercial hub. Today, modern malls stand where there was once sewerage; hosting thousands of traders and redefining Kampala’s cityscape. A powerful reminder of what vision and bold investment can achieve.

As Ramadan ends, may Allah accept the du’as you whispered, the tears you hid, and the strength you showed when it wasn’t easy.

Even if you missed a fast, may His mercy still reach you, forgive you, and write you among the accepted.

Eid Mubarak to all Muslims 🥰

Had the honour of visiting Sheikh Maffu to seek guidance on what it takes to perform Hijja. I must say, the clarity, wisdom, and sincerity stood out; and he truly offers some of the best arrangements I’ve come across so far.