Behind Kamunyu’s success in real estate

Many years have passed and the memories linger. “The man would die right next to the rest of us, but the soldiers would not care to take the body away until liquids started draining out of him and flowing outside the garage. At that point, they would ask a few of us to take the body to one corner in the compound where all the bodies were placed to decompose.”

Fortunately, Kamunyu and Rwegyemera weren’t tortured physically but psychologically to have them witness and then confess. Kamunyu’s facial features were like many of the rebel fighters and Rwegyemera’s name was, to the soldiers, disturbingly like that of Fred Rwigyema, a rebel commander.

During the month in custody, both men ate fewer than 15 meals. There was no drinking water, so they drank their urine. This was terrible but paled in comparison to the fate of the others; with only seven other prisoners still alive, fighting broke out in Mbuya Army Barracks between Acholi and Langi soldiers.

“The soldier who manned the Mpoma Satellite Station grieved the death of his tribesmen and in his grief, decided to set us free, the remaining seven, in protest. He did it to show disrespect to his boss at Mbuya who he believed had caused the coldblooded murder of his kinsmen,” Kamunyu says.

Almost in disbelief at their luck, the men walked free, physically unscathed. Mentally, however, they would remain tortured for life by the dark memory of their custody and the terrible deaths they witnessed.

They made their way back to their rented accommodation in Seeta. On their way, a Good Samaritan took them in, fed and cleaned them up and arranged for cyclists to ride them home.

When they got there, they were relieved to find that Kamunyu's younger brother, whom they had left in the house, had hidden the cash they had left behind, in a sack of charcoal.

Kamunyu and Rwegyemera took the money and found their way to a bus headed to Kabale.
“We planned to start farming and leave the dangerous life of business alone,” says Kamunyu. “But four months after arriving in Rubanda, Museveni captured Kabale. A few months later, he captured Mbarara and then Masaka up to River Katonga. This was a welcome development.”

Back to smuggling
A few months of working on the farm convinced Kamunyu that this was not the way to eke out a living. His hands were itching for hard cash, not loam soil. So, he left Rubanda and went to Kabale town to start business. After the National Resistance Army (NRA) took power in 1986 and the fighting died down, Kamunyu felt safe enough to start travelling to Jinja to buy orupande cloths from Nytil for sale in Rwanda. 

“I would sell the orupande in Rwanda, get paid in dollars and exchange it on Kampala’s black market for good profit. By this time, Museveni had already taken government, but he hadn't yet cracked down on magyendo. So, we made money. This is what Kabale people were good at,” he says.

But in 1988, soldiers attached to the anti-smuggling unit impounded two lorries full of Kamunyu’s merchandise that was being transported from Jinja to Kabale. The soldiers arrested Kamunyu and his business partner, but disappeared the lorries and all the cloth. Kamunyu was back to zero.

“By the time they took my lorries, I had started making bricks to build my village house. We used the little cash we had to bribe the soldiers to get back our property. We bribed them so many times until we ran out. My business partner and I divided the debts and called it quits. Our great business exploits had crashed to nothing, but our debtors wanted their money," he says.

"After losing everything, I went back to the village, entered bed and didn't come out for three days. My mother went and sold a sack of irish potatoes, handed me the money and told me to just go to town and eat the money. She told me to come back and get more money from her after this got finished. She just didn't want to see me at home, depressed. She knew if I went out there, I'd clear my head and regain my will to live again. That is how she saved my life. I love my mother so much and thank God that she's still alive at 98," Kamunyu says. 

A fresh start
Kamunyu took his mother’s advice and went to town to clear his head. Meeting many people who were struggling convinced him it was worth starting again. Eventually he convinced the bank manager at the Centenary Bank branch in Kabale to lend him Shs150,000 and the one at Cooperative Bank Shs200,000. Now he had Shs350,000, a small fortune at the time, and enough to restart his timber business. He was back in play. 

Kamunyu went to Rubanda, hired some workers and went to Kalisizo, Masaka to look for trees. In one month, he managed to lumber two full lorries and ferry them to Kampala. His brothers were still in the timber business in Kampala so there was a soft landing. Kamunyu sold his lumber and went back to the forest where he had left his workers. 

He says: “From that profit, I paid back the loans and stabilised. By 1989, I had so much profit that I built my house in the village. In 1990, I asked my brother and mentor, William, to get me my first car. I bought a Nissan Sahara pick up. That car eased my work and made me more agile. I'd drive to Kabale, fill it with workers and take them to Kalisizo. When food got finished, I'd drive to the market and buy posho and beans. It helped me grow my business faster.

“In 1989, I reconciled with my father. I bought land near my father's home, even when my father had plenty of land. I built my first house in it. The house was finished in 1989. I paid to construct a three-kilometre extension from the main road to my father's house and mine nearby. On the day of the housewarming, eight priests came to bless the occasion, which impressed my father. When he stood up to talk, he said he had forgiven me for rebelling against him and dropping out of school.

“This is what I wanted for you when I took you to school,” Kamunyu recalls his father saying. “You dropped out and still got the thing I wanted for you. I am proud of you, and I forgive you,” Kamunyu wept for joy.

In 1991, Kamunyu left Masaka after three years and moved to Katuugo in Mubende where he lumbered day and night. In 1993, he established a timber yard in Ndeeba, joining William and Ponsiano there. Now he was fully established.

The road to Akamwesi
In 1994, Kamunyu went to Kapchorwa, near the border with Kenya in search for trees. The roads were so bad that they had to go through Kenya. But the area was teeming with trees, and this would soon be one of the best business decisions he made.
The challenge was not where to make it, but where to invest it. Kamunyu recalls: “Before building the hostel, I had tried to buy a building in downtown Kampala, around Nabugabo. They wanted Shs500 million, but I had Shs350 million. I failed to get the Shs500 million. My lawyer, Kabega, convinced me to buy the land in Katanga in Wandegeya. It was an acre owned by one of his relatives and he convinced me that it was clean. He would have bought it himself. But he was wary of buying family land. I bought it at Shs250 million and used Shs100 million to start construction.”

Kamunyu had enough timber stock in Kapchorwa to keep running his business smoothly. The method of renting out every 50 rooms that were completed meant that, with income from his other rental houses, he did not need any outside financing.

Major loss
After many years enjoying a winning streak, bad luck would befall Kamunyu around this time. In 2004, while on a business trip to Nairobi, Kamunyu heard of timber opportunities in Iringa, northern Tanzania. He lumbered metric tonnes of timber and ferried it to the shores of the Indian Ocean for transportation to Somalia and Dubai. 

Unfortunately, the ocean had receded from its original shores because of lower water levels. The drop was so much that the ship could only anchor about a mile away from the shoreline. 

Kamunyu waited for the sea levels to rise to their original level so that the cargo ship could come closer and load the timber. But by the time this happened, the elements had destroyed the timber.

“Pine is just like that. It gets destroyed by humidity if it sits even for three months,” he says ruefully. Kamunyu lost Shs3 billion in the Tanzania deal and decided to up stakes and return home to his hostel business, which was doing well. He decided to use whatever money was left over to invest in more commercial real estate in Kampala.

Akamwesi Nakawa
The construction of Akamwesi Hostel of Nakawa started in 2005 and was completed in 18 months. The 320-room hostel also included an apartment complex and an office block.

“I changed Nakawa when I built Akamwesi Hostel there. The valley between Nakawa and Bugolobi was a den of rapists that ruined the lives of many women until I built those three buildings there, completely lighting up the area and chasing evil away,” he says. 

When he finished his apartment block, hostel and office block, Kamunyu was recognized as the Investor of the Year – Middle Class in 2006 by the Uganda Investment Authority.

Soon after, he sold the apartment block to a friend whom Kamunyu knew could pay. So Kamunyu signed the transfer forms before receiving the money.

“As soon as I did so, he transferred the money from the account he had shown me into another, so the funds didn't appear in my bank account. I lost 1.7 million dollars in that deal. But surprisingly, that person is poor now. Such is life!”
Two big blows in two years were too much to bear and Kamunyu went back to building and selling houses. He also decided to buy land and plant his trees for timber.

“My older brother Ponsiano was already in the tree-planting business, so I sought his advice and planted two square miles of trees. He helped me with seedlings for the first 50 acres for free, encouraging me to plant,” he says.

He started planting in 2006. By the end of 2010, he had covered the two square miles. In about six years, he had recouped this investment by selling eucalyptus poles. Today, 18 years after planting the first trees there, he has harvested and replanted the entire forest several times over. He no longer runs around looking for trees to buy. He only lumbers his trees now.

Building of Akamwesi Mall
In 2011, six years after he had been conned in Nakawa, Kamunyu decided to give the property business one more try. He had visited many countries and seen mixed-development strip malls and thought it would be a great idea to replicate back home.

“I started buying land in Kyebando in 2011, small bits and pieces. Fifty decimals, 30 decimals, two acres, 100 decimals, one at a time. The biggest chunk I ever bought was six acres. I bought different pieces of land next to each other. By 2017, I had bought a total of 22 acres. This was enough land to achieve the kind of property I had in mind,” he says.

In 2018, he started the architectural plans and worked with his son, Leonard Matsiko, an engineer. 
An engineering firm from Kenya had asked for more than Shs100 million but Caleb Tugumisirize of Infrastructure Projects Limited, a local firm, who would become the lead project engineer, offered to work on the project for free.
Kamunyu approached Uganda Development Bank (UDB) for financing. UDB liked that the project was a community development venture that included a fresh food market, gardens, a park, and a football pitch. 

The UDB funding came in 2018, a year before the Covid-19 pandemic broke out.
“People who think I received Covid-19 money to build Akamwesi Mall are wrong. I got the loan one year before Covid-19 started,” he says.

The good side of lockdown
By February 2020, when the whole world locked down, the building had long come out of the foundation and was on level 2. 
The workers went into lockdown but two weeks later, government announced that construction sites and trucks carrying building materials could resume. The building resumed. But since most people were locked down at home and jobless, when the site reopened, hundreds of people came looking for jobs in the only open workplace.

“Before the lockdown, I was employing about 70 workers. When they allowed the building site to reopen, seeing how many workers were available, I increased the workforce to 300, including 70 women. All these workers were staying at the site. This made the work go a lot faster. But materials were extremely expensive because I was buying imported materials locally.
“Because of the global lockdowns, I lost money I had deposited on importation of materials like roofing tiles from Spain and some goods from China. I had to change plans and use the readily available materials in Uganda,” Kamunyu says.

When the mall opened after the first lockdown, it became an instant hit with businesspeople. Many banks booked space and set up branches. Supermarkets, shopkeepers, restaurants and bars all paid for space until occupancy was at 80 percent. 
The hefty loan would be a light burden with such occupancy rates. Unfortunately, the second lockdown happened and by the time the lockdowns were fully lifted at the end of 2021, occupancy had dropped to a mere 20 percent.

“My two-year grace period for loan repayment was finished. By end of 2020, the hostel income was no more because students were not there, and the forest was also not bringing in the income because the workers had been forced to go home. But my banks, especially UDB were understanding, and I would advise Ugandans to visit them and get help,” Kamunyu says.
Luckily, the property has three large gardens that are slowly becoming popular with people that throw parties, the children’s park and swimming pool are becoming a community favourite, and the football pitch is unlike any other.

“The only hindrance is the more than 60 percent taxes that URA [Uganda Revenue Authority] and the different government bodies levy on us. Something must be done about this, otherwise the property market might crash,” he says.

Some of the big tenants at Akamwesi include URA, National Drug Authority, Bata Shoe Company and restaurants like Sweetly, Oak café, Himalayan, Momo, other local food restaurants, ATMs, a modern bar, a gym,  among others.  Kamunyu says China Town headquarters and Airtel Service Centre are opening soon, and a few slots remain for office space rental. On-site accommodation will also open soon.

Kamunyu turned 60 in November 2024. This, he says, is his last decade of pushing his grown children to find their path to wealth.
“When I clock 70, I will stop helping my children completely because what could I do for them at 70 that I have to do at 60 to push them to success? At 70, if I am still alive, I will turn my help to charity. My money will be for helping other people outside the family and worthy causes like building churches and mosques,” he says. 

As he looks back on a dramatic but rewarding life, Kamunyu is full of gratitude towards his workers, the friends and family members that he has worked with, his business partners and lenders but most importantly, his immediate family, which has been part of the story and a source of encouragement.“I could not have done it without the support of my family and workers,” he says. 

“I would not be what I am today if it wasn’t for my brother William. He has been a friend, a counsellor, mentor and financial supporter right from the start to today. All my challenges have been and remain to this day, his challenges. I am eternally grateful.”

With that, Kamunyu rises and heads out on an inspection walk around the mall. For hands-on businesspeople like him, the work never stops.