A landlady from heaven
“I understand what you are going through. Don’t pay me until one month after the President allows us to work.”
At the beginning of the lockdown, Faridah Kwagala sent a text message out to her tenants in Namugongo, a suburb in Kiira Municipality. It read: “I understand what you are going through. Don’t pay me until one month after the President allows us to work.”
Two months later, one of her tenants, Marion Achipa can’t stop talking about her landlady’s generosity. “I am a temporary worker at an institution, there is no way I could have raised three hundred thousand to pay my landlady during this lockdown,” she says.
When the lockdown began, Achipa, a single mother of two had only saved up for one month. She thought that the first two weeks were the longest the country would be on lockdown. She thought wrong.
“In two weeks, I was down to nothing; I was choosing between food and electricity. We were having just one meal a day,” she recalls. Scared that she would be thrown out of the house, and that was when Achipa sent her landlady a text message asking if she could wait for a month.
A few weeks after she received the message from her landlady allowing her to stay rent-free, she got a visitor; it was her landlady’s driver. “He asked me to pick food from the car. It was from my landlady, can you imagine?” she wonders. Not only did Kwagala excuse her tenants from paying rent, she also sent them fresh food from her garden. “I got two bunches of matooke, about half a suck of fresh beans, sweet potatoes, onions, and tomatoes,” she recalls.
It has been two months now since Marion last paid rent, and while many sadly stay up at night worried about rent arrears, her landlady has told her that she will only pay for the months after the lockdown. “God sent this lady into my life; I have never seen anyone with a heart like this,” Marion said.
By Civsource Africa Team