Schools operate like unregulated tax collection agencies, while parents are treated like automated teller machines with unlimited balances.
By Lawrence Mayanja
The country is currently waiting for the swearing-in of Uganda’s Education Minister, having missed the turn of the rest of the new members of the cabinet. This comes at a time when medical interns—whose welfare falls under both the Education and Health ministries—remain uncertain about their allowances and future.
The education sector is stuck in a ditch that, ironically, only engineers might be able to fix.
I recently told a close friend whose children attend one of Kampala’s most expensive schools that before he contributes another sh100,000 towards an “International Pyjama Day” celebration at his toddler’s daycare, he should pause and be honest with himself.
The truth is that many schools in Kampala are no longer educational institutions. They have become premium subscription services designed to keep parents financially exhausted while maintaining an image of excellence.
Parenting in Uganda has evolved into an extreme survival sport. Schools operate like unregulated tax collection agencies, while parents are treated like automated teller machines with unlimited balances.
The comedy begins at the daycare and nursery level, where “baby boarding” has become a luxury trend.
Parents take four-year-old children—human beings who cannot even locate their left shoe—and send them off to boarding nursery schools. Parents pay millions of shillings per term to have strangers raise their children in the name of independence.
Then the holidays arrive.
The child returns home looking at their parents like distant relatives encountered at a funeral. They speak a strange version of English acquired from overstretched teachers and seem emotionally detached from the people who brought them into the world.
This trend graduates into the deeper tragedy of primary boarding schools.
Many parents in Kampala hand over seven-year-olds to boarding institutions in Mukono, Luwero, and beyond. They pack metallic cases with sugar, powdered milk, and biscuits, drop the children off in February, and effectively outsource parenting.
Visitation Sundays become the only opportunity for meaningful contact. Parents spend a few rushed hours feeding their children fried chicken before returning them to institutions that increasingly shape their identities.
Over time, home becomes a transit lounge rather than a sanctuary. Parents realize they no longer know their children’s fears, dreams, or favourite meals. They have spent millions of shillings creating emotional distance from the very people they claim to be investing in.
The burden intensifies for parents raising multiple children in different schools.
Ugandan schools seem incapable of coordinating calendars. Instead, they compete to see who can stress a parent’s wallet first.
At the start of every term, fees are only the beginning.
One school demands reams of photocopying paper, tissue boxes, and brooms. Another insists on detergent, squeegees, and a specific brand of shoe polish. By reporting day, a parent’s car resembles a wholesale supply truck headed to Kikuubo.
And heaven help the parent who forgets a single item.
A missing roll of toilet paper can become grounds for denying a child entry.
Then comes the legendary Visitation Sunday.
A daughter is in Mukono. A son is in Gayaza. The youngest is somewhere along the Kampala–Gulu highway. Somehow, every school schedules visitation on the same day and during the same hours.
Parents wakeup before dawn to collect cakes, biscuits, juice packs, and assorted “grub” before embarking on a cross-district expedition worthy of military logistics.
The day is spent battling traffic, racing against time, and trying to divide attention equally among children scattered across the region.
The final destination is often reached minutes before closing time, only to discover a disappointed child crying because their favourite snack was forgotten.
For parents who avoid boarding schools and opt for day scholars, a different form of academic captivity awaits.
Many primary and secondary school students wakeup before sunrise and navigate Kampala’s dark roads on foot. The lucky ones are picked by shuttles early enough between 5:00am-6:30am. On top of that, the learners spend long days memorising facts that may never influence their future careers, only to remain at school until late evening for compulsory “night preps.”
At 8:45 p.m., exhausted teenagers finally return home carrying bags heavier as if they have sacks of cement.
Yet the day is still not over.
Homework, essays, and revision exercises await completion before dawn.
Parents become unpaid co-teachers, spending midnight hours wrestling with chemistry equations and history essays while wondering why they are paying millions in tuition fees in the first place.
Driving much of this pressure is a school culture that has mastered the art of monetising parental anxiety.
Teachers understand that parents fear academic failure.
During midterm meetings, they lower their voices and deliver carefully crafted warnings:
“Your son is brilliant, but mathematics is hovering around 45 percent. Unless he joins our special remedial programme, the final results could be disastrous.”
The remedial programme costs an extra sh300,000.
Parents immediately pay.
The school owners, meanwhile, continue upgrading their fleets of luxury SUVs, financed by parental panic and educational insecurity.
Just when families think they have survived primary and secondary education, they enter the grand arena of university life.
Here, financial pressure evolves from school supplies into lifestyle financing.
Students reject ordinary accommodation in favour of premium hostels equipped with balconies, Wi-Fi, televisions, and modern conveniences. Parents continue sending money for “research materials,” “functional fees,” and “academic requirements,” often unaware that part of those funds supports nightlife, betting slips, and social entertainment.
After years of sacrifice, parents finally celebrate graduation.
A framed photograph goes up in the sitting room.
A degree certificate is proudly displayed.
Then reality arrives.
The graduate enters a job market that has little regard for the decades of sacrifice behind that achievement.
They print dozens of CVs and walk through Nakasero, Kololo, and Industrial Area seeking job opportunities. They attend interviews and answer questions about leadership, innovation, and strategic thinking.
The reward is often a six-month unpaid internship.
If fortunate, they eventually secure employment paying less than what their parents once spent on a single term’s worth of school requirements.
The tragedy becomes even more painful when they watch former classmates—some of whom left school years earlier—drive expensive vehicles and secure lucrative opportunities through family connections and networks.
Suddenly, academic excellence appears less important than social capital.
Parents stare at graduation photos and wonder whether the hundreds of millions of shillings they invested truly prepared their children for the realities of the world.
Uganda has built an education system that treats children like factory products and parents like inexhaustible sources of revenue.
We have become obsessed with grades, rankings, and prestige while neglecting the practical skills, creativity, entrepreneurship, and emotional development that young people need to thrive.
Children are overworked. Parents are overburdened. Schools are over-commercialised.
And after all the sacrifice, many graduates enter a labour market that offers too few opportunities to justify the cost.
Perhaps the question is no longer whether our children are receiving an education.
Perhaps the real question is whether the system itself is educating anyone at all.
The writer is a Parent, Political Activist, Businessman, Media Practioner and Keen to the Law
Email: lawmayanja@yahoo.com