It had rained last night too. That’s every night for the past month, which is normal for this time of the year in Uganda near east Africa. We broke ground for our new factory on the very same day the rains came. The ground is saturated with water now, making the digging even more laborious. The men complain of the leaches and the fire ants. Fat from dieting on an inexhaustible supply of food, the ants bite and hold onto the skin with a deathly grip. Trying to brush them off is of no use; pouring salt water or kerosene is the only way to kill the little critters. Can’t blame them though; for decades, these ants know humans only as food.

In the records, this little piece of land in a Kampala suburb was the site of a church that had been bombed by Idi Amin’s forces in the 1970s. But they had done a lot more than raze a church to the ground. The site is one of thousands in the country that Amin, and the military dictators after him, used to bury the dead.

I am jolted back to the present, when someone shouts, “Stop!” and the sounds of digging ceases. Then I hear sloshing outside my office door. One of the construction workers barges in, his sweat-soaked clothes reeking of decayed flesh. His eyes bloody, no doubt from drinking too much hooch last night. Anyone will want a drink or two, after weeks of digging up the horrors of the past.

“We found another body ma’am,” he said calmly, his body weighed down by what he had seen.

“That is twenty bodies just this week,” I sighed. “Ok. You know what to do. Tell the foreman to call the police again.”

Within the hour, the police will come and haul the remains away. A technician will take samples for DNA analysis, and the search will begin for the next of kin to reveal the news they already know. It seems pointless, but it is necessary to maintain peace; to help families move on.  It’s important for people to realize that the state cares.

This is how it has been since I was appointed the minister of peace of our good country in 2030. When we are done here, there will be a basket-weaving factory standing in this place. There is a car conversion factory not far from here. Things are getting better now, but gruesome discoveries like these make me question my decision to return. It has only been a couple of years, but it seems like a long time ago that I was a successful investment banker in London. Like so many other MBAs from the famous California State University in Sacramento, I lived the high life in Europe. But I returned home to Kampala to tend to my grandmother, when she was dying from cancer. I never left.

These days I think of her a lot. She was Tanzanian, and had a cynical sense of humor. “Ayo. Be careful about digging up old stories in Uganda,” she advised me once. “Nothing is buried that deep here.” I miss her more now than ever before. She had been the president of the country, and a very loved by her people. She was one of the first women to enter politics in Uganda, after giving up her cushy job in a Johannesburg firm in 2020. Since then, Uganda has produced more CEOs than any other nation in the world. There is a very simple explanation for this remarkable turn of events.

Whenever there is a war or uprising, they always killed the men first. Since there were very few men left in the country, the women took over the job of running the government. Generations of young girls and boys have grown up seeing their mothers and grandmothers become ministers and presidents. I think that breeds a certain degree of willfulness and focus in the young children that serves them well in boardrooms later in life. I know it helped me.

To people who have seen a lifetime of peace, it would sound mighty odd that a country would need a ministry for peace. But it actually makes sense. Peace is a precious national resource, just like minerals, wildlife, fisheries and forests. It needs to be cultivated, nurtured and monitored carefully. Our mandate was simple: No war, negotiate. No conflict, compromise. I understand how this might be misconstrued as being weak. After all, picking up a gun and shooting anything that moves is what we had done for more than a century.

That’s where Karma Pays helped. At the time, it was a small stealthy startup that my friends from Sacramento had started. Uganda is where they first set up shop. This is where their revolution began.