By Frank Sserugo

After years of Ugandan media speculation, US-based Ugandan boxer Kassim ‘The Dream’ Ouma will finally walk down the isle with long-time girlfriend Jalia Nandawula, a practicing nurse and pharmaceutical proprietor in Texas.

The two lovebirds will on Saturday say their vows in a low-key wedding ceremony in Dallas, Texas.

Ugandan star singer Bobi Wine, currently on a musical tour of the US, is expected to act as Ouma’s best man at the function which will be presided over by US-based Burundian Sheik Issa Gisesa.

The boxer broke the news of his decision to finally get married a week after announcing his intention to retire from active boxing.

“Mwana, kati nkuze. Ye ssawa mbe n’omubezi anandabirira obulamu bwange bwona” meaning: “It’s high time I got a wife to take care of me”.

After the wedding, the former IBF junior middleweight champion reiterated his plan to stage a bigger and more glamourous party in Uganda sometime early next year after officially retiring from boxing.

Ouma’s fiancée excitedly revealed how theirs was a match made in heaven: “I met Kassim in 2005 in Houston, but since then we have been on and off until the chemistry between us finally sparked.”

The soft-spoken nurse, who described the boxer as loving, passionate and romantic, said she enjoys a warm relationship with Kassim’s two sons, daughter and mother.

“I don’t think anybody can now separate me from my darling Kassim. I think we were meant to be one,” said Nandawula. She added: “He is the man I have been dreaming about all along.”

Nandawula is born to the late Moses Kasenge and Hajati Hamiyati Mukasa of Roko Zone Kawempe on Bombo road.

Among the guests expected to attend the wedding are local artistes Ragga Dee and Iryn Namubiru, who will entertain guests, California businessman Michael Lyada, Mohammed Kivumbi, Sam Kasozi, the Babukulu family, Samson Kagonyera, son to Makerere University Chancellor Mondo Kagonyera and friends from Boston, New York and Las Vegas where the boxer is based.

“I want daddy Ssebagala (Kampala Mayor Al Hajji Nasser Ntege) to witness my wedding, because the first thing he told when I had just returned from exile is to abandon spending money on every girl I came across and I have fulfiled his wishes,” said Ouma.

The boxer’s wedding comes at a time when he and ex-lover, singer Juliana Kanyomozi, are having a rift. In a highly publicised wedding-to-be, Ouma had promised to make Kanyomozi, also currently performing in the US, his wife in 2007.