WATCHDOG VOICES: Does Minister Moses Ali Need Another Wife? I am Searching For A General to Marry 

With no relations in top government offices, without parents who speak Cambridge English and with connections above and without money yourself, you are as useless as a blind rat unless you can marry from such circles. I didn’t, and I am paying the price.

 I am called Anne Natukunda, 31 years old. I lost my husband, Tebandeke Muhammad in an abrupt death in May 2021. He was not sick. He got out of the house very early in the morning as was his daily routine. I wished him a nice day and off he went. I didn’t know it was the last time I was seeing him. Just minutes later, I was informed by neighbours that my husband had collapsed a few meters away from our house. It was around 5 am and we were still in bed. He had just left less than 30 minutes ago. I dressed up and hurried to meet the love of my life. He was static and cold. He had a wound at the back of his head and was only bleeding slightly. I insisted that he is taken to the Hospital even when those around kept telling me he was already dead. I wasn’t going to believe them no matter what. It was impossible. How could he be dead yet he had just left me a few minutes back? What about the many good things he had been promising to do for me and our two children? He had just told me he would be home early that day and I believed him always. He never lied to me.

We took him to Nakasero Hospital but I had been wrong all along. He didn’t make it. He was already dead as I had been told from home. Doctors struggled to convince me that my dearest had crossed over to the other side of life. He was not going to come back. I protested. Not until a Doctor led me to the mortuary and showed me my darling husband stone silent, quiet and as cold as snow. My world froze. He was my everything. He meant the world to me. The autopsy report from Mulago Hospital indicated that he had died of heart failure.

I married Tebandeke in 2012 at just 20 years. He was relatively older than me but he did everything to erase all the doubts I had initially had about if he was the right man for me. One thing I learnt, later on, is that he was married all along. He explained that it wasn’t going well between him and his then-wife and I let that pass. Less than a year, he separated from his first wife and life went on. I never complained thereafter. He made sure he became a perfect husband and on that, and I don’t regret I chose him. We had our firstborn in 2013 and another the following year, a boy and a girl respectively. I had since learnt that he had other three children with his first wife, a truth I had accepted wholeheartedly.

The day after his death, however, I was stunned. Children kept appearing one after another until we were counting 14 in number. He had lied to me all along. He had children as old as myself and as young as two years. But the worst was yet to come.

We buried my husband in Nkokonjeru and the following days would turn my life upside down, never to return. I was informed my husband had other children and so I had no right to stay in the house we had built together from scratch. I had married my husband in a rented single room and patiently worked our way up until we owned a home of our own and some rentals. But here I was, being lectured on how I had no claim on the property because I wasn’t a Muslim and I was not a Muganda like my husband’s clan members. One Sheikh offered to rent me a cheaper house somewhere if at I willingly agreed to relinquish the one I had built with my husband. Another mulamu of mine asked that he becomes my new husband only if I still wanted to live there. I refused and he warned that I would regret my stubbornness. I have already regretted it countless times.

At the family meeting shortly after the 40 days’ rights in Islam, all the other women who had children with hubby confessed that they were just his child mothers but not wives. It was thus concluded that I was the only widow the deceased had. But this would not be the case for long. Before I knew it, one of them ran to court and claimed that she had been driven out of the house only after the death of her husband. She was lying. She had left in 2015, long before my husband owned a spoon of land in Kampala. Besides, she had been married to him in Kibuye and had never been to Nansana where our house is. But that is it. She now claimed she wanted to take everything.

In 2018, with my own money, we agreed with my husband that we buy a certain plot in Nansana East II B. Since I had some money at the time and he didn’t, we paid with my money with a promise that he would cover the cost of construction. We had both our names on the agreement. But in 2020, as we had just started constructing, his income dwindled with the lockdown. I had to foot most of the bill because I continued working profitably since I dealt in food items whose demand was not affected. At the time of his death, the rental units we had constructed were not yet complete and I finished them after selling off my business.

I have received threats everywhere and forced out of my house. I have young children who I can no longer fend for. I no longer work. I have been driven out of my rented house after defaulting on my rent. My tormentors blocked rent payments by the tenants. I have cried every day and watched my little children suffer at the hands of those heartless people and lost hope. Only if I had someone powerful in positions of authority would I dream of getting justice.

I have been in court since. My only demand is that I shouldn’t lose the house I worked for with my sweat. I have had thoughts of taking my life along with my children so we can report to their father all the injustices we have encountered at the hands of the relations. I have painfully watched them grow thin, groan in pain from hunger, when they have been forced to miss school because I am unable to pay their school fees, and complain because I can no longer buy them toys to play with, and it has consumed me. I feel hopeless. I need to feel protected. I need a shoulder to lean on or else, the world will witness another sad story in the headlines. My poor children.

We need a place to stay. We need food to survive. They need to go to school like other children. They demand that the law of their country should protect them because it’s their right. But their mother is not married to a General. To a minister. One who can make things work by just waving his hand. I need General Moses Ali’s number. Someone tag him for me.