With skyrocketing cost of living, dying has become cheap

At last, the cost of dying has gone down in Uganda. I really thank God for this. Imagine the cost of living has been going up and up and up!

Just to wash your hair now costs the same as buying two combs; resetting the hair costs as much as buying a new wig; treating the hair costs much more than buying a hand drier and styling the hair is like buying a new dress. Some of are about to give up on living.

But thank God dying has now become affordable, so at least we can afford that. Only last week some five young men died in a Kampala at an affordable cost of five hundred Uganda shillings each; that is about fifteen Kenya shillings.

All they each did was buy a sachet of waragi, a potent local gin and within an hour or so they were dead. Actually, my old man tells me the name 'waragi' was a corruption of "war gin", which is what the British colonialists called or local spirit which gave young men courage to enlist in the Kings African rifles to go and fight the Germans in World War II.

So when you are preparing to go and fight the devil in the land of the dead, a sachet of 'war gin' is good preparation – and coming at only fifteen bob!

Now people on social media are complaining that the main newspapers did not publish the news of the young men who died at such a little cost. Do they want the taxman to know the secret of the poor? What if the add tax of waragi sachets?

Will the poor people be able to afford death anymore? Isn't it bad enough that the cost of living is no longer affordable? What would happen if we cannot even afford to die and yet we cannot afford to live either? Some of these people who just post things of social media fwaaa – that is what we call thoughtless unplanned actions in Kampala – should learn to engage their brains before shooting off their mouths or keypads of their cheap phones.

Even if it costs a young man only fifteen bob to die, do these lazy social media know how much a coffin will cost his poor family? And now that people are no longer buried in the city, after the rich guys grabbed the public cemeteries and build apartment blocks and shopping malls on them, do they know what it costs a family to transport the body of a boy who has died after taking cheap waragi to the village? Do they know these things? Why don't they leave us alone to die in peace, now that at least we can afford death?