Akamwesi: The highs and lows of building a property empire

Kamunyu was by then already a successful businessman. He had been dealing in timber for almost two decades and had recently ventured into the rental property market. 

He had seen hostels abroad on his visits but had not thought of them as viable business ventures in Uganda. Until now. He decided these students deserved better. 

While Akamwesi was not the first high-rise private student residence in Makerere, it was the first modern hostel with spacious self-contained rooms. Building started in 2002 and every 50 rooms that were completed were offered for rent. By the time construction ended in 2005, the hostel was already paying back its costs, with 257 rooms and 10 shops.

“Katanga slum was an eyesore in the vicinity of Makerere University before I built Akamwesi Hostel in it,” Kamunyu recalls. “It was an ugly slum that was feared by many. The slum had destroyed many students who were lured by cheap alcohol, drugs and prostitution. That is why some parents were worried about the location.”

Kamunyu recounts a story of a permanent secretary (PS) in one of the government ministries sending his driver to drop off a child to the hostel. Although he knew the name, the official did not know where the hostel was located.

The driver delayed returning and, when the PS asked why, he said he was stuck in traffic in Katanga, where the hostel was located. On hearing Katanga, the PS was so shocked, he immediately set out to rescue their child from the slum.

“When he arrived and saw the state of the building and the comfort in his child's room, he was so impressed that he gave up the idea of removing her promptly,” Kamunyu recalls. “He asked about the owner of the hostel and came looking for me. He told me how impressed he was with the hostel and thanked me for a job well done.”

The hostel became a hit with students, including those from Kenya whose enrolment numbers at Makerere had swelled at the turn of the millennium. All the cool kids gravitated towards this new cool hostel. 

Medical students especially loved Akamwesi because it was close to Mulago Hospital. The hostel also had a dedicated van to transport students to and from classes, an innovation at the time.

Property experience 

Five years earlier, Kamunyu had stepped out of his comfort zone in the timber trade to try his hand at real estate investments. Since 1998, he had been constructing small two-bedroom rentals and three to four-bedroom bungalows around Kampala. 

He was starting to warm up to property investments as a more passive source of income as opposed to the timber trade. This new venture had coincided with the completion of his house in Naguru. This was around the turn of the millennium. 

“As the 20th century drew closer to the end, there were rumours that the year 2000, portended financial uncertainty and political instability accruing from a worldwide computer crash. The Y2K bug. We didn't know what would happen and we needed a safer neighbourhood to live. Naguru seemed like a nice place to stay in case tough times befell the world," he says. 

He had been building sites every day for about five years, building all those rental properties and his mansion. His thriving timber business in Ndeeba, a bustling Kampala suburb, no longer needed daily supervision. He’d run a successful business for almost 20 years and understood the lay of the land. He understood the property market relatively well and had an eye for gaps and opportunities. 

"By this time, I knew the right people to ask for advice. I knew the right engineers I understood cement ratios relatively well. I knew how to ensure that what I wanted on the site happened,” he says. But it hadn’t always been that way.

Cheeky childhood 

Kamunyu began the timber business in 1982 working for his older brother, William Byandusya, who ran the business while also teaching at St Kaggwa High School in Bushenyi. Byandusya needed someone to run the business for him and a young Kamunyu was available; he had dropped out of school because he was bored with education but fascinated by business. 

His father, who had been a timber dealer himself for years, was the first person to receive a government permit to deal in the product in Kigezi Sub-region. Kamunyu’s father had tried to interest his son in education without much success.

Kamunyu was 14 when he first dropped out of school. He’d heard that young men were making a killing in the thriving magyendo (smuggling) business at Uganda’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Kamunyu had seen men return home with wads of cash after a few months in the clandestine business. At the first opportunity he left primary five behind and went to Butogota, Rukungiri, with some of those men and tried his hand at ferrying paraffin and coffee from Uganda to Congo and vice versa.

At Butogota he came face to face with the smuggling kingpin, Donato Kananura, who tried him out a few times before it became clear that the young Kamunyu couldn’t handle the labourious work of sprinting heavy loads of contraband across the border. 

He was slowing down the gang and risking their collective safety.

Kananura took little Kamunyu off the trail and put him in charge of the stores where he kept records and the keys, much easier tasks. Here, Kamunyu would keep records and contribute to the business without endangering his life or that of the other smugglers.

Back in school

After a wide investigation, Kamunyu’s father finally caught wind that his renegade son was a smuggler in Rukungiri District (current Kanungu). 

He went to Butogota, found him and dragged him back home. After a thorough thrashing, Kamunyu was placed back in school, but not for long.

He disappeared two years later back to the border, but this time to Kihihi, just north of Butogota. Kamunyu was now 17 with some muscles and bursting with adrenaline and ambition. Soon after resuming the smuggling business, however, President Obote's anti-smuggling soldiers ambushed and shot several of his colleagues.

Terrified, Kamunyu returned home, received the obligatory thrashing from his father, and settled back into school. Unfortunately, the love for scholarly pursuits had not grown on him. He just didn't enjoy school. This was for other people, not him. His calling was in money, not maths.

Entering the timber business

His older brother William eventually invited him to Bushenyi and sent him to recruit workers from Rubanda, Kabale, for his timber business. He asked Kamunyu, now 19, to manage the workers. He had disappointed his father and disgraced his family. While the assignment was meant as a punishment, for Kamunyu it became an opportunity for redemption.

He recalls: “My older brother, William, was eight years older than me. I saw him as a big guy at the time. He was an important person in our family, and I respected him a lot. I had an intense fear of him. When he asked me to go and manage his timber business, I went all in. I needed to do such a great job of it so that I save face in front of him and my father. But he was so hell bent on punishing me for the things I had done that he refused to pay me any salary for three years.”

Kamunyu's job was to go into the forest and supervise the lumberers. He was responsible for feeding and paying them, and for keeping all the records. When more workers were needed, he fetched them from Kabale.

"My brother expected to see every penny accounted for,” says Kamunyu. “All he ever wanted from me was a record of what the money he gave me had done. Every coin. He didn't want explanations or excuses. All he wanted at his table, after coming back from his teaching job, was a book containing the complete record of what his money had done. No talking. No chit chat. He was still mad at me. But I did everything he wanted the way he wanted it because I feared his wrath. I didn't want him to throw me out because this would be my end.”

What was meant to be a punishment would become a blessing in disguise. The Bushenyi job would become the critical education that Kamunyu needed for a life of big business that lay ahead of him.

By the time he left three years later, he understood the importance of thorough record-keeping to any business. The fact that he was not getting paid salary didn't faze him at all. 

"I respected William so much that I would go to Kabale on an errand and not sleep with my young wife, Dinah,” he recalls. “Often, I'd give her a hug and rush off to please my brother. I was so poor that I couldn't afford to take her along to Bushenyi for us to live together. The best I could do was to buy her vaseline after foregoing a meal.”

After three years, and with a dwindling tree cover in Bushenyi, Kamunyu decided to head to Kampala for greener pastures. He left with capital, many words of wisdom, and William’s blessings. 

His other elder brother, Ponsiano Besesya, had just been released from prison after being detained on suspicion of working for the National Resistance Army (NRA) rebel group in Luweero Triangle. Ponsiano was eager to return to his own timber trading business.

“Ponsiano helped me to settle in Kampala as he was more experienced,” says Kamunyu. “I partnered with Fred Rwegyemera, an older businessman from Kabale, who was itching to change from a grocery and tailoring business to the timber trade, which was much more lucrative.”

New challenges

Their search for green fields and green bucks led them to Buvuma Islands in Lake Victoria where they found cheap virgin forests. They lumbered and transported the timber across the great lake to Ndeeba where they sold it on.

The NRA insurgency was raging and Makindye, where Kamunyu lived with his friend, was a hotbed of instability so they relocated to Seeta, another Kampala suburb which was on the way to the islands. But while one could run, it was almost impossible to hide from danger.

One evening as Kamunyu and Rwegyemera were buying dinner, government soldiers arrested them on suspicion of working with the NRA rebels. They were bundled into a car which was driven towards Mukono but shortly the car came to a stop in a valley. Soldiers ordered the two men out of the car, tied their arms behind their backs and made them stand by the roadside and face away. Kamunyu said his last prayer and waited for the bullet.

The bullet never came. After a few mumblings on their radios, the soldiers shoved them back into the car and drove to Mukono police station. They were detained from 11pm to around 3am when they were handcuffed, shoved into the trunk of a saloon car with another unknown person, and driven off.

They ended up at Mpoma Satellite Station near Mukono where they were locked up in a one-car garage annexed to a residential house. There were already 24 other people detained in the small garage, all suspected rebel collaborators.

To be continued....