JOSEPH BEHAKANIRA R.I.P

Hello folks, Last week my wifey accused me of writing too much about death. I told her it was purely by coincidence but that my fear of the grim reaper is legendary. Yesterday as I drove to work I received a phone call from a colleague; David Ssempala who told me that he’d heard on radio that Behakanira Joseph had died. I was dumbfounded for a second. I could not believe it at first. It was only confirmed by the 8 o’clock news. What a loss! I have always used the late as an example of how God can give man and man decides to bite more than he can chew. He was a very religious businessman who believed a lot in prayer. His offices all had to have a grotto where The Virgin Mary’s idol was kept. It was amazing especially considering that he was a former soldier. I first met him somrtime in 2006 and he immediately struck me as a man of pomp. He had two big cell phones and a briefcase. He talked big and left quite an impression on me. I later learnt that he was putting up a one thousand room hotel off Entebbe Road. I was in awe of the man. When I probed further I discovered that he also had a shopping complex in town whose rental income per month was in the region of USD $70,000. In the course of our conversation, he told me that he would be Uganda shillings eighty billion [approximately USD 40M] in debt upon completion of the hotel. I was taken aback and I remember asking him how he thought he would pay for it. He said that God would see him through it. Later I thought to myself that he was being unreasonable; I wondered why a man who has a shopping center that brought in all that money would want more. I thought he was a very greedy man. This inspired me to set a very low benchmark for the income I would want to have to live a happy life. I promised myself to work towards generating an income of only USD $5,000 per month after deducting all expenses. If I make any extra income, I will use it to do God’s will; make other people happy and enable them live a good life. He was such an influence on me that I often use him in examples when discussing what level of income should be enough. There is a tendency in human beings to yearn for more when they have more than what other people already have or don’t even have at all. I intend to be different and in Behakanira’s memory I intend to live my life according to the benchmark I set having listened to him tell me his life story. Requiescat in pace Joseph, Deox