The Economics of the Storm

Suffice it to say, normally in Kampala, especially in the rainy seasons, after a stormy down pour, all streets, subways, run ways, even walkways too get thickly jam-packed with cars, and some stuck for being deficient in fuel or mechanical evils. One often wonders where and why all this swarm of vehicles that congests our tapered infrastructure leading in and out of the City come from after the gracious rains.

Sitting in such a ram of cars killing time, snailing a meter or two per every ten to fifteen minutes is nearly idyllic. Crisscrossing of vehicles in junctions, round-abouts or even walkways is cluttered; with some knocking each other further adding salt to the injury.

Kampala has this heavy jams that sometimes necessitates a little more knowledge of some extra ordinary roads, closes, or even panyas stretching down into galleys, valleys; windings, turnings and twists, ins and outs from gaudy buildings neighboring putrid slams. In a grand attempt to navigate ones way out of it, the beatitude ‘blessed are the drivers who know many roads for they shall escape jams’ releases its true holiness.

In the midst of this iconic mystification, most especially when the drizzles are light or its just sultry, vendors of all sorts retailing various kinds of goods ranging from air-time, electrical appliances, mechanical tools, personal effects to grocery and even some artifacts profit as they bazaar their merchandize from one car window to the next.

‘This has been it for ages!’ one can safely assert. Even when the regulatory authorities of the City tried to clamp down on it, somehow these merchants have kept at their trade unabated. For those exodused into some organized affluence of modernism this is a state of lawlessness while to others that have known this as the biggest and best of all cities they have ever been to, it’s normalcy.

The convenience this trade brings to occupants of a vessel in such critical hours is to explain for its continuous flourishing. From vehicles needing fuel, to fixing of mechanical tribulations, satisfying a hunger or quenching thirst, to making an emergency call, to finding an alternative escape route and many more are the desires engrossed in such clatter.

Talk of the economics of a wrong or evil or immorality and all such things as are communally condemned, here is the proof. I guess it’s true, every coin has two sides. Your best Kampala street preacher would say it, and like an Amen to it affirm that ‘there always is a good in your storm’. Take the merchants view of things.