There are stories that pierce the soul more deeply than the sharpest spear, not because they are about strangers, but because they are about men we call “giants” who, when stripped of their gowns and mortarboards, stand before us like beggars with diplomas.
I once laughed when a friend told me that despite being a celebrated lecturer in not one, but more than two universities in Uganda, he wrestled every dawn with the monster called poverty. I thought he exaggerated. How could a man crowned with the honorifics of “Doctor” and “Professor”—a man whose very lips were fountains of wisdom—struggle for the price of soap or the firewood that cooks his food?
But the joke, as fate would have it, turned on me.
The Honeymoon of Hunger
My friend confessed to me, with tears swimming in his weary eyes, that on the very honeymoon night with his second wife, he fed her nothing but posho and mukene—silver fish dried by the merciless sun. Not for a day, not for a week, but for the entire season that birthed their first child.
His bride, full of youthful hope and radiant with the glow of a new beginning, asked him, “Darling, why this strange diet? Why insist on firewood, on posho, on mukene, on the life of peasants, when you are called Professor?”
And in her innocence, she believed this was his secret test of her resilience, a cruel exam to prove her loyalty and endurance in marriage. But no, it was not philosophy; it was not a test of virtue. It was poverty—the silent tyrant who mocked his degrees and erased his honors.
He had walked this road before. His first wife had already fled the marriage bed, whispering in the darkness that “love without bread is but a funeral march.” Now, even his second stood at the edge of despair, mistaking poverty for deliberate pedagogy.
The Grasshopper Professor
I remembered then the former University Secretary of Makerere University. Once he sat in the high offices of power, authorizing budgets that ran into billions, respected, bowed to, chauffeured in state cars. Yet, one year after his tenure ended, he was seen walking the same university grounds—no longer as master, but as vendor—selling enseenene (grasshoppers) to the same students who once saluted him.
Tell me, O Uganda, how does dignity collapse so quickly into disgrace? How do we allow the learned, the very custodians of our civilization, to become beggars in the twilight of their lives?
The Silent Tears of Academia
So my friend told me again, “Muuna Lubogo, can you believe it? My wife thinks I am testing her commitment with this diet of suffering. But the truth, my brother, is that I am simply too poor to afford her dignity.”
He wept as he said it. And I kept quiet, not for lack of wisdom, but for lack of reply. For what words could bridge the canyon between honor and hunger? What counsel could I give to a man whose mind overflowed with knowledge but whose pockets echoed with emptiness?
The Curse of Titles Without Bread
Here lies the paradox of our land: professors who cannot profess prosperity, doctors who heal others yet cannot heal their own households, intellectuals whose libraries are filled with books but whose kitchens are empty. Degrees become shackles, titles become tombstones, and knowledge becomes a cruel reminder of what dignity should have been.
Yes, money comes and goes—sente mukisa gugya negudayo—but in Uganda, for the scholar, it seems to come rarely and to go permanently.
The Question that Haunts
And so I ask: of what use are our universities if their custodians are condemned to poverty? Of what pride is it to raise men to the rank of Professor only to abandon them to posho and mukene?
The tragedy of our time is not ignorance—it is educated poverty. The nation feeds on the wisdom of its professors but starves their bodies. And in that starvation lies the slow death of the dream that education was meant to deliver.
Closing Lament
I walked away from my friend, carrying his tears as my own. His silence spoke louder than all his lectures. His pain was the syllabus of a broken system.
And I too asked myself: what is the worth of wisdom in a land where even Professors feed on firewood and tears?
# Suigeneris
