Where Is Your Office?

Nov 12, 2002

IT’S EARLY, 7:00 am to be precise and streams of people are pouring into Kampala through the different inlets.

Kalyabujungu, a toilet operator, gets to his office as early as 7.00am
By Stephen Ssenkaaba

IT’S EARLY, 7:00 am to be precise and streams of people are pouring into Kampala through the different inlets.
It’s the beginning of a new working day. Confusion rocks the city streets as hordes of pedestrians and motorists negotiate their way through the heavy traffic jam.
Moses Kalyabujanju is among the thousands of pedestrians rushing to their ‘offices’.
Kalyabajungu operates a public toilet near the New Taxi Park. His job is to collect money, provide tissue to toilet users and to ensure the toilets are kept clean. He has no shortage of customers who range from town idlers to the working class.
Seated on a huge blue box at the entrance to the gents section of his office, Kalyabujanju, a father of three says that since he became a toilet operator two years ago, he has never considered leaving his job.
“This is my office. It is from this job that I get money for my children’s school fees and other needs like rent, so I have no reason to leave,” he says.
For so many of us, the word ‘office’ is synonymous with a well furnished room, tucked away on some floor of an ultra modern complex along a busy street and complete with computers and mountains of paper work.
Little do we realise that beyond such well-organised rooms are other offices. Offices that are not housed in expensive buildings with any security guards hovering round. These are offices whose occupants earn peanuts after a long day’s work and whose major driving force is the determination to survive against all odds.
Kalyabujanju’s day at work starts at 7:00am and ends at 6:00pm. At the end of each day he walks home with a pay cheque of sh3,000 for the day’s work. While at work, he is supposed to keep watch over all the customers who use the toilet. This leaves him very little time for relaxation and lunch. “I always have my lunch in the evening after work,” he says.
Seated under a tattered green and yellow umbrella holding her one-month-old baby is Joyce Namande, a phone booth operator opposite Grand imperial Hotel.
She has been there since 1993 reporting to work at 9:00am and leaving at 5:00pm. She attends to customers, looks after her baby and balances her accounts later in the day before handing over to her boss.
“I earn between sh1,000 and sh3,000 at the end of each day depending on how many customers I have received.”she says. While she admits that this money is not enough to sustain her and her three children, she says it is better than earning no money at all.

Asked why she chose this work spot, Namande says she was lured by the calm atmosphere, the orderliness and kind of customers in the area. “This spot is secure and quiet. One doesn’t have to worry about pickpockets and bayaaye like those down town. The big hotels, banks and offices make it very strategic in terms of customer turnout. My customers pay promptly and do not ask for discounts, which makes my work easy,”she says. Her customers range from business people, bank employees to office workers.
“Many of them actually have mobile phones and sometimes carry their own cards. This is not my main concern, as long as they keep coming to my booth,” she explains but it’s the heat and the rain that are her biggest problems. “My booth is so small, I cannot use it as shelter. When it rains I have to seek shelter on the pavements of either Grand imperial or Standard Chattered Bank. And when it gets too hot, I use my umbrella. These forces of nature mean I lose business, as customers cannot make calls when it is raining.”
Namande has got such a strong attachment to her job that she would not let anyone interfere with it. What If you woke up one day and found somebody else in your office? I ask. “That cannot easily happen but if it did, I would immediately contact my boss and inform him about this intruder, after which I would put up a spirited fight to reclaim my place. This job is my sole breadwinner; I cannot let it go just like that,” she retorts.

A few meters away from Namande’s booth, Ronald Kizito is curled on a wooden stool trying his hands on a well-worn out pair of brown shoes. It is 1:30pm and since the start of the day, he has only had one customer. He has not had lunch yet, because the owner of the shoe has yet to pay him.
“He wants me to finish his shoes first before he pays me. Once he’s done that, I will order for lunch,” he says softly. His lunch is either bananas or cassava with beans (katogo) which he gets from Luwum Street. Kizito’s lunch is a luxury that he enjoys only when he has made an extra buck. Though he reports to work at 7:00am and works until 5:00pm, sometimes there are not enough customers to attend to.
“On a lucky day, I’ll fix about five shoes and polish about 10 for both the ladies and gentlemen. But this is not always the case. Sometimes I get just two or three customers a day,” he goes on to explain. He polishes a pair of shoes for sh300, but the cost of mending depends on the extent of the damage.
As to why he chose to work under a tree along the pavement of Bank of Uganda, Kizito says the spot is not only full of rich customers, it is also less competitive working there because he is the only cobbler in the area.
Despite all the problems he goes through, he will do anything to protect his ‘office’ from intruders. “If I found someone working in ‘my spot’ without my permission, I would not listen to any explanations. I’m the owner of this place!”
For the last four years, Margaret Nalunkuuma has been selling newspapers along Colville Street. Her biggest problem is the KCC officials who refuse her to sell anything else apart from newspapers.
“I make only sh100 for every newspaper I sell. When I deal in other items like chewing gum and cigarettes, they confiscate them. She also has to deal with the scorching sun and rain which forces her to abandon her office.
“The customer turn out here is very low, if I had a better place I’d go for it, but since I have not found such a place yet, I have to make do with Colville,” she explains. Unlike others, Nalunkuuma, a mother of four is not worried about any one taking her place. “It is not very easy. If anyone tried to displace me, the police would stop him or her, because everyone knows this is my spot, she says confidently. Ends

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