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Broke In Kampala? Sharks Will Smell Your Blood!By Deox TibeinganaWhen a man bleeds financially in Kampala, society doesn’t offer a bandage, it brings sharks.They say Kampala doesn’t just watch you fall. It buys front row tickets to your funeral and complains about the entertainment.This particular story begins in September 2023. That was the month the walls cracked. That was the month I lost my house on Mbuya Hill. Let me be completely honest from the start, I made mistakes that led to the financial situation I found myself in. In business, when you run hard, sometimes you trip. But as the patriarch and the family head, I had always planned for my family and given them the best.When the trouble culminated, I did what a responsible man does. I entered into a financial arrangement with my creditors that involved voluntarily leaving our family house, which was securing some facilities with NCBA Bank. We walked away from that house on the clear understanding with the bank that it would be sold quietly on the open market. This was a smart, deliberate decision to let go of the asset to avoid the steep valuation drop that always happens once a property is publicly advertised as a bank foreclosure. Sometimes these things need to go before you gain some.But the spectators outside thought the game was like it always is for everyone else. They did not realize that no two situations are similar. Each victim has their own temperament, resilience, and plans. I had already planned for my family. I was already working on a new home.But I was dealing with a bank representative named Kibaya. Throughout the negotiations, Kibaya looked at me and repeatedly asked with a malicious sneer, do you think your creditors are happy to see that you live on Mbuya Hill? All he cared for were his thirty pieces of silver. He did not care about the mental consequences on my children, my wife, and myself as the family head. He carried a deep personal vendetta.On the 25th of September 2023, the trap sprung. My wife and I woke up to a WhatsApp message from a so called friend. It was a screenshot of a newspaper advert of our house, a house we had already long vacated and handed over. On that advert, it was boldly written that the occupants had seven days to vacate or be forcefully evicted.This was a planned, malicious humiliation by Kibaya. You cannot imagine the crushing, suffocating humiliation of waking up to such an international embarrassment. True to Kampalans form, the digital streets erupted into a carnival. The neighbors celebrated. Friends called each other, not us, to spread the gossip like wildfire. Professional colleagues were all being hospitalized with bruised ribs from laughing so hard at my fall. Some family members too were high fiving each other online.People pretend to care when in fact they do not give a hoot. They only “care” because we love ebyononeese as Ugandans. They love destruction disguised as concern.But the public mockery was nothing compared to the central, most vicious battle of this entire ordeal: the terrifying, coordinated attempt by friends to completely dismantle my home the exact moment I was down. When a man is bleeding financially, society does not offer a bandage, it brings sharks.While the public laughed, professional colleagues, men I had trusted, men who had actually eaten my own money, actively sought my imprisonment. The pain of seeing a colleague who ate your money try to put you in handcuffs is a unique kind of psychological torture.Take Kagoro. Kagoro had privately eaten over 100 million shillings of my money. Yet, there he was, always in court, aggressively seeking warrants for my arrest and incarceration. He wanted me behind bars to erase his own guilt. One time, Kagoro actually succeeded in having me spend a night at the Central Police Station.He went to sleep that night super confident, fully believing that he had finally broken me and that I was going to prison the next day. But he did not count on my cleverness to beat him. The next morning, using sheer mental guile, I outsmarted his entire trap and walked out a free man, leaving him holding nothing but his own malice.Then there was Zzimula. Zzimula sent court bailiffs accompanied by a police truck to arrest me like a common criminal. Their goal was to have me completely humiliated by being shoved under the metal seats mounted at the back of the patrol truck. These guys never succeeded, but the mental stamina it took to outmaneuver them while jumping from one police station to another, constantly recording statements and negotiating police bonds, was exhausting.And while I was fighting off the Kagoros and Zzimulas in the streets, the real assault was happening inside my own living room. The peer pressure groups from Namagunga swarmed my wife like vultures. The moment they saw that malicious newspaper notice, they struck.Without a single thought, and without any knowledge that I was already working on our new address, they piled immense pressure on my wife to leave “that thug” right away. They told her to cut loose and dump the bastard who had brought such shame to her.They saw her as a class above the very man who now they saw as beneath her brand. These were her OGs from Namagunga and other friends who believed her social standing was far too elite to be dragged down by my financial storm. They chanted, how can a man be so irresponsible as to lose the family home? To them, this newspaper advert was the last straw, and they told her she needed to extricate herself from the situation immediately. Soon, family members followed their lead.They treated the situation as if the amputation of the leper from herself had to be an emergency. These advisors to my wife did not know my sacrifice, my love, or my care for their OG. They had no understanding of the dream I had started for my family. Instead, they were driven by a dark, toxic urge to dismantle what they could not build. This is the tragic reality of our society today. These peer networks are fueled by a vulture mentality. They sit in wait, praying for a storm to hit your marriage so they can swoop in under the guise of sisterhood and empathy.This is where the ultimate danger lies: if these malicious advisors find a weak woman, they can easily mislead her. A woman without a firm anchor, a woman who relies on the applause of the digital streets and the superficial vanity of her school brand, will easily buy into their poison. They wanted her to take the family business and “save” it from me. Their master plan was for her to cut me off totally, hijack the enterprise, and start a new life without me.They did not care that the business they wanted her to take was set up for the family by the very man they wanted her to leave. They wanted to weaponize my own creation against me. They will convince a weak woman that her husband’s temporary financial setback is a permanent character flaw, and that staying with him devalues her own social equity. They will brainwash her into burning down her own sanctuary just to appease the false sense of outrage from her peer group.If my wife had been a weak woman, their vicious drive would have succeeded, and she would have blundered right into their trap, mistaking their competitive envy for genuine protection. They did not care that we had two lovely children who loved both their parents deeply and had a secure sanctuary as long as their parents were together.For the kids, even if you lived in a swamp, a house is just a structure. What truly matters to children is their mental wellbeing. Earthly things come and go, bricks and mortar can be rebuilt, but the psychological sanctuary of a unified home is irreplaceable.Parents need to learn that the bad times need all hands on deck. It requires standing shoulder to shoulder in the trenches, not taking flight to save oneself and abandoning the other to the wolves. True parenting means guarding the peace of your children by keeping their foundation intact when the world outside is shaking. But those so called advisors were just so keen to break up our home over a newspaper advert.Some of her friends went as far as stating how they hated her hubby and openly wondered how, in the first place, she had ended up with such a thug.They had no clue about the depth of our foundation. They did not know that I had journeyed with my wife for twenty eight years, that we started out as high school sweethearts whose parents belonged to the generation just emerging from the war in 1986, with absolutely no wealth to pass on to us.They did not know that before we ever reached Mbuya Hill, we had worked so hard and toiled through some of the most demeaning work. I remember the bone crushing labor. I had worked in the USA as a supermarket cashier, and sometimes as a parking lot guy collecting shopping carts at COSTCO in the freezing weather.From there, I went to London, where I worked as a butcher at Bantuway Foods Limited. I spent days driving a delivery van, operating a forklift, and manually offloading forty foot containers of frozen fish with my bare hands, or offloading heavy plantains. I never looked down on any work as long as it advanced me and gave my family a better life than I had growing up.The situation in those dark days of 2023 was so bad that if my wife had left me and fled perhaps alone, I would have struggled even to feed myself. I would have seen pepper. I was the only guy who had to keep resilient and fiercely believe in myself while the whole city bet on my demise. In my quietest, heaviest moments, I looked at my boys. I wondered, how would my boys take it if I gave up? If their father broke down and let the wolves win, what would become of them? I could not even fathom it. Giving up on them was impossible.Can you imagine what a man would have to deal with if his wife left him under such circumstances? The crushing weight of seeing the person you love betray you just because of a temporary season? A man’s mental health would be completely shattered.It takes extreme mental guile to navigate such sudden falls. The psychological toll is immense, and it can easily push a man into the dark corner of suicidal thoughts. These so called advisors did not care that my kids would be losing a father. They just wanted my wife to blunder, so they could turn around and laugh at her should things change.But I thank God every single day that my wife ignored her friends calls. She remembered her holy vows in good and in bad times. She weighed the options of betraying the man with whom she had journeyed for twenty eight years, and she followed her heart. She was strong, and she withstood that kind of evil advice.In today’s world, it seems holy vows no longer matter. We live in an era where marriages are treated like short term corporate mergers. The moment the profit margins drop or a partner’s social brand faces a temporary crisis, the advisors tell you to liquidate the asset and run. People are terrified of being associated with a struggle.They want the Mbuya Hill address, but they flee the trenches. This is the danger of fake friends. They don’t want to see you survive the fire. They want to use your fire to warm their own hands. They offer sympathy only to gather intelligence for the evening gossip circles.If you build your marriage on the applause of the digital streets or the approval of your school alumni networks, you are building on sand. When the storm hits, those very cheerleaders will be the ones handing your partner the match sticks to burn your sanctuary down. Let this be a stern caution to the weak: those very advisors who are pushing you to abandon your partner will be the exact same people who will laugh at you tomorrow should the abandoned person survive and rise again. They will mock your lack of foresight. They will sit in their own marriages and call you foolish for listening to them. They will point fingers at your isolation and say you should have known better than to burn down your life over temporary gossip. The wolves have no loyalty to the person who runs with them. They only respect the one who stands their ground.Because she stood firm by my side and never wavered, I was able to keep my mind intact and work hard to overcome the season. Within just two months of that bank advert hitting the papers, I had completely finished building and preparing our new address. When God is on your side, you never go back. I say this not to brag, but as a testament to His grace. Today, we live twenty four meters in the sky, still on Mbuya Hill, far above the noise and the toxic reach of Kampala gossip.To the men who treat another man’s fall as pure entertainment, and to the corporate executioners who carry out their duties with malicious schadenfreude: remember that life is a wheel. The corporate desks you sit behind, the titles you hide behind, and the temporary leverage you hold can disappear in a single morning.When you manipulate processes to inflict maximum humiliation on another man, you are not exercising power. You are exposing your own deep insecurity. True men build up, they do not orchestrate a carnival around someone else’s crisis. Joy in another man’s downfall is a heavy debt to carry, and the universe always collects its dues.The journey to stand up after a fall is tough, and it is intensely challenging. We live in a third world environment where the economic landscape is unforgiving. Even those who have not fallen are equally struggling to breathe right now. Surviving here takes exceptional grit.I am not running away from my responsibilities. My primary focus now is working hard to get CALIAN HOTEL fully operational and driving my other real estate ventures forward, so that I can continue systematically sorting out my creditors with integrity.What if my wife had left me? Perhaps she would have found herself alone today, wondering if it had been worth it to break up her children’s home all because of fake friends who only care about appearances, gossip, and image. What would have happened to her mentally if she had left?She would have perhaps suffered chronic narcissistic injuries, the kind of deep, psychological injuries that never heal and follow you all the way to the grave. And those so called friends would have been sitting comfortably in their own marriages, laughing at her blunder. I am glad she followed the teachings of her Bible and never left her man.To the men out there fighting silent battles this Men’s Mental Health Month: your worth is not defined by a temporary financial storm, a malicious creditor, or envious colleagues. The world will try to dismantle your home when you are down, and if your partner lacks the strength to see through their guile, they can tear your life apart. But if you keep your resilience, believe in your vision, and stand with a woman of substance, the storm will pass.We are still here!About Post Author
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