It can be a good thing to check on old friends. Former classmates. The female ones, most especially. Pick up that phone of yours and dial their numbers. You will learn a thing or two.
Some of them are in violent marriages. They’re being battered by their husbands. Like they’re primary school kids of the early 2000s. Some of them are depressed single mothers; a trend of our times. Some of them are stay-at-home mothers; their overly protective husbands do not dare to let them be snatched by richer men at their workplaces.
I was chatting with one last night. We left school in the June of 2019. She has since mothered two beautiful babies. Does it affright you? Well, she is carrying a third in her womb. Hers is a fertile womb, no? Never mind that she abandoned her job at a prestigious private hospital and leapt into marriage and, ostensibly, motherhood.
In 2010, I was admitted into a boys’ school in Western Uganda for O level. Having stood for close to a hundred years, the school charges more fees than most universities in this miserable country. I attended another boys’ school for A level in Western Uganda. I do not know how much fees they pay today, but I shudder whenever I remember that my parents had to sell a huge piece of land to raise the money. Till now, I keep wondering how they were able to pay fees for all of us; for I wasn’t the only child under our roof, you know. I always ask them how they did it and they never give me explicit answers.
I like surprising poverty. More often than not, I contact different people and ask them about the cost of a bungalow in posh places like Muyenga, Ruharo, or Nkokonjeru in Mbarara. I check online shops for the cost of a Kluger; the car I want to buy in the near future. You too can go and ask how much a plot of land costs in and around Kampala. Ask about how much it costs to build a house for a family of five or six people and you will not like what you hear.
The Covid-19 pandemic has given us a good enough lesson. You should ask those who were tested or treated for that disease in private hospitals in Kampala. I know of people who did not make it out alive and their bodies were confiscated for weeks. I know of people whose families had to involve prominent politicians to get back their loved ones who were nursed back to health and then detained until their outstanding medical bills were settled. I heard of a distraught woman who threw herself down from the storeyed building of a private hospital because she couldn’t afford to pay her hefty medical bills.
One might ask, what exactly do the proprietors of private hospitals give to these patients for their medical bills to shoot above fifty million shillings? But that question can only be answered by understanding that Uganda’s economy is a capitalistic one. That is why you will go to Serena Hotel and pay twenty thousand shillings for a bottle of soda worth one thousand shillings. That is why whenever it’s a festive season, Global Coaches and Link Buses will charge two hundred thousand shillings for a bus ride worth twenty thousand shillings in ordinary time. That is why you need to sell two exotic cows to send a son to Ntare School. That is why one medical emergency can humiliate and turn you into a beggar. Everything here is extortionately expensive because individuals sit down and decide the prices of their commodities, and the government has nothing important to say on the matter.
I do not understand why the people of our generation keep producing babies with reckless abandon. I do not understand whether they know that by 2040, education will not be affordable for the ordinary citizens. I do not know if there are people who know that by 2040, it will be a common thing to find a 70-year-old senior citizen struggling to pay house rent, with neither a piece of land nor a house to call his own.
What sort of life shall we give to our children? Shall we afford to pay for them fees in the kind of schools we attended? Shall we comfortably afford to feed and clothe them? Will they look up to us and count on us the way our parents were (and still are) our heroes? The cost of living is increasing at a rate that does not inspire confidence.
About the author: Daniel Kakuru is a Ugandan medic in private practice. He’s passionate about creative writing and social commentary. He writes under a Facebook hashtag #MugOfPorridge and blogs at danielkakuru.wordpress.com.
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