Dimmo Irene

There have been moments in the last few years when I felt I was the only one who was too broke for my age. When I felt that I was the only failure in my bracket of friends. I felt I had underachieved and, by any measure, was a loser. It is a quiet shame, usually known to a few friends. Friends who care to forward you adverts to jobs they think you are qualified for, but they don’t know you stopped applying for jobs a long time ago. You can only handle so many rejections. You attend family functions, and relatives give you those askance looks, of doubt, disapproval, disappointment (not so much for you, but for the system and anyone responsible for your failures at life). By the time your mother starts to send you food from the village to go and pick from Easy or Ena Coach, you don’t know where to hide your head in shame. It is food sent purely for your survival. My 30s were terrible, and I have even written a book about them. But I have not been alone in the predicament. Many college mates and childhood peers who held so much promise are broke and broken in so many ways; it is a crying shame. In the 1990s, at the peak of the HIV/AIDS infections, there used to be a slogan, “If you are not infected, you are affected”. Even if you were a well-to-do millennial, successful in your career, marriage, and in good health, one way or another, you are affected by the combined destructive years of Jubilee and Kenya Kwanza. The two regimes have succeeded in extinguishing the hopes and dreams of millennials and Gen Zs. You are affected because your siblings are probably jobless. Your cousins are jobless. You are affected because education and health care are not accessible in the public sector, and you have to send your kids to private academies and your sick parents to private hospitals. Even at their worst economically, our parents could afford to send us to public schools. When sick, public hospitals, even at their worst, did have a modicum of order, and well, you died without a debilitating medical bill. Millennials now exist in that endless fundraising loop: Medicare, education, weddings, and sponsoring folks to try life out there. This month you have two funerals, next month you have two cancer patients, in April, a wedding of your niece, in May, a friend is relocating abroad, and he needs to raise some Sh 700,000 to pay some agent and sort the paperwork. I guess you have seen many people complaining about the black tax. Working-class women have become louder about the exhaustion of the black tax, and men can’t yet gather their voice, yet their burden is double. Beyond the black tax, I recently came up with what I call the buddy tax or buddy bailing. It is a situation where you must bail out your friends. It could be you who relies on bailouts. It could be people you were there for in the past, and now it is your turn. It could be a friend you simply cannot abandon. And strangers too. In the past, it was a one-off, and then you hooked someone up with a job, a gig, or something more sustainable. But under Jubilee and more commonly under KK, getting a job became impossible. People took longer to get a job, that is, if they were lucky enough to get one. In the meantime, inflation became toxic. The runaway cost of living consigned many people to negative coping mechanisms, and every time someone says ‘tutam! the hope diminishes further. I have finished reading the ground-breaking essays on the Elephant, and I urge all of you to read them for context. To understand that you are not alone. That is not just you with nieces and nephews who are stranded at home. That you are not alone, in those WhatsApp Mchangos. Read. Read. Read. And whatever you make of the essays, I hope they can make you think long and hard into the weekend. Only the right political choices can rescue us.

The shutting down of the internet in Uganda can easily happen to Kenya in 2027, do not think you are special!

Someone said if speed was in Uganda he’d be arrested thinking he’s an opposition leader 😂😂😂