A month ago, I decided it was time to relieve the stress that comes with a workaday existence. Thus, I went to a bar in Bukoto with a curious name. It’s clear that whatever happens there does not stay there. It becomes part of the tales told about world-class Ugandan boozers. That’s why I’m sharing my own tale. It’s a big place.
But its size should be taken with a grain of salt at 1am, a time you’re most likely already seeing double. Anyway, as soon as I stepped into the joint, several women began winking suggestively at me.
Surprised that I had become an overnight Mukazi magnet, I was incredulous. So, I kept looking behind me to see who they were winking at. There was nobody. Clearly, it was me.
Feeling like a freshly minted superstar, I puffed my chest. I had to look like the star that they were looking at. After this briefly ridiculous theatricality on my part, my friend and I ‘attacked’ the counter like it was the UPC government and we were both Salim Saleh.
Clearly, by that time, we had already started seeing double. As soon as I ordered a drink, a woman materialised out of the blue. For a minute, I thought she came with the beer in a sort of hourglass-shaped beer promotion. Her smile earned her an instant drink, on me.
I asked her what she was drinking and her answer took aim at my wallet, then pulled the trigger. My wallet almost died of its wounds from that order.
The woman picked the most expensive drink in the house, in tots. That way, each drink she took, my wallet took a hit. Her radiant smile and noticeably buxom endowments were no longer placebos enough to get my wallet out of intensive care.
The bill for its restoration to health was close to Shs1m. Still, refusing to die in my own movie, I gave her tot upon tot like her body was a baby factory and I was its production engineer. It was a charmed night. I thought I was even in love. Then came the bad news. I was told that ‘big’ bars nowadays place alluring women at the bar counter to fraternise with the punters. Naturally, after being approached by a comely woman with sights and shapes in all the right places, a punter would even buy subsequent drinks with his land title as security.
Hence, the more the customer spent, the more commission the sultry bar counter queen received. Crushed by this revelation, I looked into my pocket and its inners looked at me, vacantly. I was broke. Immediately, the inequities of the world crystallised around me.
It was the President’s fault. If he had left power in the early 2000s, I would be rolling in money. This knee-jerk reaction to one’s problems in the context of the Museveni presidency is common. Many times, our over-the-top spending habits and poor saving culture have spelt ruin to our finances.
To compound matters, every week there’s an event, a wedding or a burial one must contribute to. Frugality having died of natural causes as soon as we resuscitated an economy savaged by the Bush War. The economy reflects how people make money and spend it.
If we spend every cent we make on women whose beauty comes with an exclamation mark, wedding launches and meetings, as well as weekly burials and other events, the economy shall continue to flounder at a personal level. That’s because its wellbeing is tied to our discipline, not our politics.