Despite having been an attorney at law in a top tier law firm for the past seven years Ojil had been feeling like a rookie in the recent past. Nothing was working out in his life. Fate seemed to have turned its face against him. However, this needed to change, something needed to give. He had a baby on the way with the love of his life Namiro (the only good thing in his life at this point) and she would be looking upto him to provide for her and her child. Yet so far he had nothing to show in terms of financial stability. This is not how he had pictured thirty-three would be for him. He had grown up in a middle class family with two loving parents who had given up living an affluent lifestyle to give him a good education yet the law degree he had earned in the end was yet to change his bank account balance.
He needed to reinvent his whole career. If law was not paying the bills, then something else would have to. Ojil's parents had been model citizen's and they followed rules to the letter. This is something that Ojil had faithfully picked up and the more he interacted with Mark the more he was beginning to blame his failure to climb up the career ladder on his textbook approach to life.
Mark was a happy go lucky chap; he had a modest demeanor but a one on one interaction with him let you see beyond the modesty. Ojil had worked closely with him when he had been assigned by his current firm as the lawyer on a case his marketing firm was entangled with by a client. After a week of working together a bromance had developed and they found themselves at Purees an upper middle class joint in Kampala that middle class folks went to unwind out after a week of making their employer richer while all they got out of this relationship was fatigue and little money to keep them going for yet another month.
This friendship was the beginning of the end for Ojil as three years later he found himself in a courtroom dock fighting to stay out of jail. Mark was slightly older than Ojil and yet at thirty-five he owned an apartment in uptown Kampala and a string of businesses that employed five thousand people. Ojil was immediately inspired by Mark's success and after five beers they agreed on a working arrangement where Ojil would be the corporate lawyer in all his businesses. He quit his job and began working for Mark .Mark was paying Ojil handsomely and as fate would have had it Namiro had a difficult birth and this new job came with all the new money when his young family needed it. Without Mark's help the financial strain at this point in time would have been more than his pockets could have handled. This made their relationship grow in leaps in and bounds and they began to lean on each other more.
After this stringent situation in his life passed Mark began to call him in for more personalized assignments that came with strings attached. He 'fixed' situations that the staff in his transport company found themselves in. This involved him bribing cops here and there with the hefty cash allowance that he received weekly. The more the size of his wallet grew the greedier he became .He started veering off his lawyer role and leaned more towards Mark's transport business. Mark welcomed him into this side of the businesses whole heartedly because he preferred chaps like Ojil who had a family they cared about as this meant they were more vulnerable .Vulnerability was a weapon that he used to keep his transporters in check and keep them from talking to the authorities about his business. In reality Mark had been running a drug cartel for ten years and he had managed to full the public and the authorities.
On completion of his university degree Mark had been a victim of unemployment before his benefactor and godfather in the cartel identified his management and people skills as good for his cartel business. This changed his fortunes a thousand fold. The past ten years had been good but a change in government regime was disrupting their norm. Ugandans had finally gotten the new dawn that their parents had fought for pre-independence. This new leader embodied integrity, in the streets of Uganda from Kampala to Buganda and Koboko the people had already coined the name 'Black Ugandan Jesus' to use in reference to him.
His presidency had come with hope for the poor and the down trodden. Mark and his benefactor now found themselves in a corner, the black market operations in the country had been dismantled and with it their business. Their previous contacts in the police force were afraid to work with them on protecting their product. They started to find themselves in difficult situations that were a non-issue with the previous regime.
It had been six months since the new government had come into place and these six months had been nothing short of a nightmare. Ojil found himself caught knee deep in taking care of unscrupulous deals for Mark. Mark trusted him and with trust came responsibility. At first he had resisted Mark's urge for him to start doing deliveries of the heroine to the student's distributors in the hostels of the Great Kobo University with his sports car. But eventually he caved; the narcotics arm of the police had become vigilant after the president appointed a new commandant to eradicate drugs from the streets of Kampala. So Mark had begged Ojil by almost going on bended knees .To appease him he had tripled his earnings to match the risks tied to transporting the drugs. Ojil was a learned man with a family. No one would suspect he was part of the cartel unless the police had recruited an informant in their team. And anyway Mark always protected his own so Ojil never saw getting arrested as part of his future.
One evening as Ojil was on one of his errands for Mark he was stopped by the cops when he was just a few minutes away from what had now become his usual drop off point. His luck had run out. Somebody within Mark's team had sold him out. The police commandant himself had been the one to make this arrest and in his bid to assure the presidency that he was doing his job. He ensured the media got wind of this incident, he not only needed to be seen to be doing his job but Mark's cartel was one of the largest ones and having caught one of anyone on his team would warn others that the police were closing in.
At the onset of his arrest Ojil was not as worried as he had expected Mark to take care of this. Being his lawyer he had gotten other people off the hook by bribing the police with handsome amounts of money. He was sure Mark would actually kill his case before it went to trial. However the media frenzy around this case made Mark cower and it was decided by the cartel that they would hang Ojil out to dry .He was the sacrificial lamb that would take one for the team.
As fate would have it on this Tuesday morning he found himself in a courtroom dock, the sentence the judge was about to hand him was going to change his life forever. He had used the money he had earned during his stint with Mark to hire one of the best lawyers in Kampala but the facts of the case were against them. The media interference in the case crucified him before his trial started .His lawyer's prowess with the law could not save him from jail. What with the government determined to teach other people in this drug cartel business a lesson by punishing one of them.
His life was falling apart right in front of him.Namiro was seated in the court gallery with their child in her arms. She had been present for every hearing of his case for this past year. Her tears broke his heart more than the 10 years that the judge was likely to prescribe for him at the end of this trial. He was no longer listening as the prosecutor and his lawyer went back and forth but reflecting on how his quest for more money had only gotten him time behind bars and friends like Mark who abandoned him when he needed them the most. Mark had distanced himself from him; as soon as both the media and the police had begun further investigation on the source of Ojil's income. He had not even come to support him in court.
His mundane life post Mark should have been enough for him, now he was not only losing his freedom but the two most important people in life were all alone in the world. Maybe he should have stuck to his job with the law firm, It was an interesting yes but instead of being in court today he would have been at work strategizing on how to surprise his wife on valentine day which was two weeks away. In his quest for more he had overlooked his values now he was losing it all.
They say a bird in hand is worth two in the bush and boy, were they not right. Sticking to an honest life in a top tier law firm would have saved him so much heartache. He had been doing better than most folks from his graduating class back then. A little patience would have seen him running a law firm of his own in a few years, now he had only jail to look forward to. His involvement with the drug cartel life had given him short term bliss and now grief. By the time he served his ten years sentenced his child would be a teenager and hopefully Namiro would not have remarried. For him to get through prison in Uganda he had to have the hope that he would survive prison and get a chance to start his life all over again on a clean slate with the two people he loved the most.