Surviving Kyeyo: Mwine's lessons in saving, investing, and endurance

Many Ugandans who go for kyeyo find it hard to invest back home. For Henry Kitwe Mwine, who hails from Mbarara district, the story has been different because of the choices he made during his 15-year kyeyo stint in the UK.

Mwine was born in Nyakazinga village, Kashari County in Mbarara district. He is the seventh born in a family of nine.

His father was a civil servant who spent most of his time away from home.

“So, I was with my mother most of the time. I grew up looking after our cattle and goats, which taught me endurance,” he says.

Starting school

“I went to many primary schools in Mbarara, starting in 1980. I went to Kakoba Demonstration School, Rweishamiro Primary School, Rutooma Primary School and Mbarara Municipal School, where I sat my Primary Leaving Examinations in 1985,” Mwine recalls.

After primary, he joined Mbarara High School for four years and went on to Nakasero High School in Kampala for A’level, which he completed in 1992. He then joined Nakawa Business School for a diploma in business studies.

After college and faced with no prospect of good employment, he answered the call for greener pastures abroad. This was in the late 1990s and there were no employment agencies such as the case is today.

“I was fortunate that the jobs I secured after college, despite not paying much, had enabled me to buy my first piece of land at Nabuti Hill near Uganda Christian University in Mukono. Just after I started constructing my two-bedroom house there, I felt the urge to leave Uganda for kyeyo. In November 2000, I went to Germany for a two-year course as a technical instructor,” Mwine explains.

During the two years he spent in Germany, he mastered their work ethic, which became helpful in the later years. On return from Germany, he teamed up with colleagues and started a small company that used to do inverter installations.

“That was early 2003 when Uganda had a power shortage. I was financing the project and in charge of marketing, while my other two colleagues were in installation. We were doing well in the first six months, but fate struck and we lost one of our colleagues. The loss of my business partner hit us so hard that in a few months, we closed,” Mwine says.

But all his savings from Germany, apart from completing his house, vanished with the inverter business. However, while in Germany, he used to visit his friends in the UK.

During that period, he would board a night bus from Mannheim in central Germany through France, and arrive in London early in the morning. These cross-border visits gave him an insight into how the UK offered better opportunities than the rest of Europe. After making up his mind, he finally decided to go to the UK.

“My arrival was ironic. While my father had arrived in the UK in the 1960s as a Commonwealth student, I had arrived as an economic immigrant 30 years later,” Mwine says.

He adds that when he arrived, he realised that the Ugandan curriculum had prepared him for clerical and white-collar office jobs, whereas in industrialised countries, it was skills-based.

“We found ourselves working as couriers, cleaners and care-givers looking after the frail and elderly, while the rest worked as porters and labourers — picking apples, packing flowers, as well as sweeping streets and collecting garbage or, if you were so lucky, you would load a shelf in a supermarket,” Mwine says.

But this was short-lived and, in 2008, Europe was hit hard by the American banking crisis, which resulted in many companies closing.

The locals hitherto employed in skilled jobs started scrambling for the odd jobs that had previously been left as a speciality for immigrants.

“I found myself at the epicentre of one odd job after another. I was living in West London in the multi-cultural borough of Hounslow in the shadow of Heathrow Airport, sleeping directly under the noisy flight path of terminal one and two. I took up four jobs. One was cleaning two schools, the second was cleaning offices, and the third was doing shopping for people living alone and unable to go out and shop. The last one was a night job at Hounslow bus garage, cleaning and refuelling the iconic London red buses,” he recalls.

It was on this night job in the winter of 2008, while refuelling the red buses, that he first experienced the brutal English winter.

“I remember one night that January, while working as the wind started to howl like a hungry Siberian wolf. My fingers became numb. I was shivering uncontrollably and saliva was dribbling from my gaping lips, while my teeth clenched and chattered like a rattlesnake.

It was the most painful experience I have endured. I almost quit, but running away from the cold British winter to spend years penniless in Uganda was unacceptable.

I remembered the fireside stories by my grandmother about our grandfathers who used to endure hardship and walk from Ankole to Buganda for opportunities and feel encouraged. Besides, the pay was not bad,” Mwine explains.

His salary was £2,500 and in five months, he had saved £10,000, which he sent to his uncle, James Katarikaawe, a retired senior surveyor, to buy for him land in Kira municipality, where he built rentals.

Because of the high London rent, Mwine says he changed addresses more than five times.

“In all these years, I rented no flat or apartment. I spent all those years living in a squalid room measuring 8ft by 6ft, equivalent in size to a standard prison cell. Friends compared my foxhole to a prison cell. The decision to live in a foxhole was not a joke. I wanted to save and pay for my university education.”

He says while in the UK, he saw people who never put much effort into bettering themselves, studying or saving.

“There is nothing so painful like seeing a grumpy, old black man in a winter coat and a hat standing on a bus stop in the middle of a bitter British winter. It is a sight that puts in perspective the lost opportunities of the past years,” Mwine says.

He would leave his foxhole at 5:30am on Monday morning and return at 3:00am the next morning. This was 20 hours at work each day. For meals, he survived on McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) with Coca-Cola.

“I made up my mind to go back to school. So, in January 2010, against all the odds, I enrolled for a full-time bachelor of arts in international relations, peace and conflict studies at London Metropolitan University.”

Studying fulltime meant Mwine had to look for a night job and, fortunately, one employment agency found him some work with good pay.

“However, as I came to learn later, combining full-time studies and full-time work was a recipe for disaster. It pushed my physical and mental capacities to the limit. Around my second year at university, faced with endless deadlines for assignments, I considered quitting,” Mwine says.

His first lectures would start at 9:00am up to 5:00pm, Monday to Friday. So, between Monday and Friday, he hardly slept for more than two hours. He was working until dawn and studying until sunset.

One morning while he was driving from work, he fell asleep behind the wheel of his Ford Fiesta and nearly lost his life after driving through a red light. It was sheer luck and the professionalism of other drivers that saved him. That was the first of the only two days he missed his lectures in the three years he spent at London Metropolitan University.

The second time he missed his lectures was when he fainted while on the train to university.

“Luckily, the London ambulance paramedics came to my rescue. In the autumn of 2012, I was caught sleeping at work and sacked. It was such a great relief because it enabled me finish my university research in time. In the summer of 2013, after three stressful years, I graduated with an upper second class degree from London Metropolitan University,” he says.

Mwine on graduation day with friends at London Metropolitan University in 2012.

Mwine says the years he spent confined in the foxhole studying without any spare money for a ticket to come home and see his loved ones felt like prison.

“I was a free man walking the streets and jogging in the parks, but with an imprisoned spirit. In the course of my kyeyo, I had returned to Uganda and married a beautiful wife from Toro. I looked at the prospect of taking my family with me to UK, but after discussing with my wife, we agreed they would rather stay here. Raising a family in the UK when you are a target worker is tough,” he says.

Acquiring farmland

While on kyeyo, he bought a farm in Mbarara where he started rearing Ankole cattle.

He realised his children in Kampala needed hands-on exposure to the reality of the world and spending time inside the wall fence was a bubble, yet the farm in Mbarara was too far for them.

So, he acquired an eight-acre piece of land at Senga in Makulubiita, Luwero district through a friend at sh200m.

It is on this farm where he established a coffee plantation, dairy cattle farm, piggery and fish ponds, among others.

“I started these remotely while still in the UK, but they were not breaking even. After the COVID-19 period, I spent sleepless nights trying to figure out everything. As much as the farm in Mbarara has the potential to make money, it is far away from Kampala, where my family lives. So, I decided to settle for Senga, which, despite being small, has an advantage of proximity to Kampala, just 28 miles away,” Mwine says.

Brush with death, starting a farm in Uganda

In 2020 while in the UK, he got COVID-19 and spent the entire lockdown confined to his foxhole.

“It was a tough moment. I imagined dying, which I was not so much afraid of, but the thought of dying in a foreign country really hit me harder than COVID-19 itself.

When I recovered from COVID-19, I decided that it was time to quit,” Mwine says.

However, the Senga farm was still at an infant stage.

“To retire here and depend on the farm entirely needed a comprehensive, robust investment to turn it commercial. Like any other parent, I had genuine concerns about school fees for my two children at Kampala Parents School, and my eldest daughter in her final year at Kyambogo University,” Mwine says.

So, he sat down and did a comprehensive assessment of his assets and income.

“The rentals in Kira were bringing in an average of sh3m per month, but all this money was going into day to day running of the home and fuel. I looked at the other viable alternative, which was to keep selling off my Ankole cattle or the Friesians at Senga every school term, but this was likely to deplete my herd,” Mwine says.

Faced with this challenge, he decided to embark on an aggressive investment plan. He settled for fish farming.

“So, through the entire second lockdown, I returned home and mobilised the local folks around Senga, and our neighbouring villages of Buligwe, Bugayo, Kasozi, Semyungu and Kikandwa to dig ponds. We managed to dig five fish ponds and presently they are a total of 10. The fish project is on a good footing. Each pond has capacity to stock 1,000 catfish, which give me an average total harvest of 10 tonnes a year. Tilapia has more market and fetches a high price, but is hard to raise. Catfish, on the other hand, is easy to raise, but only bought by Congolese who come with their trucks. For fish feeds, I make my own and also depend on the big chicken companies that give me leftovers.

It is now four years since I retired into farming. I manage two farms, one in Mbarara and another one in Senga,” Mwine says. It has become his family’s second home as his children and their mother usually go there almost every weekend.

He had acquired a pick-up truck in 2016 which helps him with farm work.

Sh2oom

Mwine acquired an eight-acre piece of land at Senga in Makulubiita, Luwero district, through a friend at sh200m.

Lesson

Regarding his advice to Ugandans in the diaspora, he said: “They should exercise self-discipline if they want a happy retirement. I plan to share my story of endurance, hard work and perseverance in a book titled Life on Kyeyo that I will launch soon so that young Ugandans who leave for kyeyo....