Building roads with makeup

By Grace Nakato

I think it is the much-awaited royal wedding in the Toro Kingdom that started this mess.

With my girlfriend’s make-up budget for her modest wedding standing at Ksh150,000, I can imagine what that of the Toro royalty must look like. This must have got the mathematicians at the Ministry of Finance crunching some numbers, I think.

And alas, the Government realised our economy is built on salons, restaurants and bars. A walk down Kampala Road can reveal this, but I guess graphs had to be drawn. 

The result was to hit us where it hurt the most — our little pleasures. When you drink, the world takes on a rosy hue, and when you colour, tweeze, and tweak what the creator gave you, the life of those around you takes on a rosy hue.
 

Natural
But after the budget reading, it appears good grooming is going to cost us big time. We should have expected it, though. The precursor to the taxation on cosmetics was M7 warning darkly that the only people who are close to his heart are scientists. He even intimated that we need to keep it real in the natural sense. His madam is, of course, the clothed version of ‘au naturel’. 

Now we have a crisis. Cosmetics are what transform Plain Jane into Tantalising Delilah. What brothers see are versions that have been tweezed and filled in because girls have three faces: the real face, the public face and the party face, each more pricey and colourful than the previous one.

So serious is the crisis that a female MP urged Parliament to stop the taxes because they will deny women cheap cosmetics and prevent them from enjoying life.  Hers was an understatement.

Cirrhosis
I looked into my crystal ball and the swirling mists revealed scores of breakups and divorces in the horizon, when men find out that the women they fell in love with wear imported faces and that those faces cost a pretty penny.

I foresee many power outages despite Bujagali now taking up the slack in power provisioning. These cuts will only seem to occur as madam is walking from the bathroom to the bedroom and they will last until morning. The upside is there shall be many (female) early risers regardless of day of the week.

I also predict increased cases of liver cirrhosis. These may be self-induced or due to the madam making her man’s liver well irrigated to ensure that the world around him takes on a falsely colourful and rosy hue.

Crooks are the only ones who will be laughing all the way to the bank when one lot start producing cheap cosmetics or black market ‘originals’ while the second lot produce creams and potions to counteract the effects of ‘cheap’. 

My prophesy is that dermatology will be the new word in town and many colleges will sprout ensuring our faces and skins do not go the way of the Ugandan liver when local brews were legalised.

We have a crisis, people of East Africa. Somebody help. Smuggle cheap, counterfeit cosmetics across our borders, will you?