A short story about driving in Kampala, traffic corps and thieving commuter taxi drivers. One Sunday afternoon, while driving on a main road, a commuter taxi driver whose taxi is parked on the side of road, starts driving suddenly and boom, knocks my vehicle from behind.

I find a space 2 park and talk 2 him. He flees. His fellow drivers parked in the same space he was parked, won't give me any details. I report the matter 2 the nearest police station. I then embark on looking 4 the details of the taxi. Someone eventually provided them.

To get the details, I had 2 pay 50000 shillings to the 'informer'. And then the saga of locating the rogue taxi began. Eventually I appealed 2 a senior cop. I doubt he wants his name mentioned. I'd say he's one of the finest @PoliceUg

Soon enough the rogue taxi was found. And this is when things got really "interesting". My plan was to get the owner of the taxi to pay for repairs to my car. Eventually it turned out that the rogue driver had been sacked shortly after he knocked me, for unrelated reasons.

He was one of 4 drivers whom the owner had employed over a period of three months. They had all cheated him by bringing very little money or none at all at the end of each working day, which usually started at 5am and ended after midnight.

The owner of the taxi is a young man who graduated from university this last January. Unable to find work in Kampala, he had returned to his village in Kisoro and sold a piece of land and 'a small house', for 12 million shillings. He returned to Kampala to do business.

Someone convinced him to buy an old commuter bus. He was yet to pay the full amount, but here he was, with a problem (repairing my car) which he had no money to solve. Meanwhile the taxi is now grounded, with a serious mechanical problem.

To explain all this, the young man walked kilometres during lockdown to come to my house. He was in tears as he pleaded to be "forgiven". I decided to drop the matter. What else would anyone do in the circumstances? But the whole saga got me thinking (again)

abt Uganda, where we've come from, where we may be headed, how our society works or doesn't work and, above all, how we individual Ugandans treat or relate to other Ugandans. How we get 2 live as a normal country again, where victims of crime do not work so hard 2 get redress?