A town in central Uganda has been put on the spotlight after it emerged that Rwandese women were being sold as brides to Ugandan men for a mere sh. 2200.
Mityana a municipality in central Uganda has gotten Ugandan authorities investigating the lucrative trade where the women are ferried from neighboring Rwanda according to Ugandan media.
According to the Uganda Radio Network which first broke the story, a man interested in a Rwandese bride parts with Ush.80,000 ( ksh. 2200) which he pays to the middleman to ferry the bride to be and if the bride is interested the man pays up the rest.
Eddie Dawola a boda-boda rider operating in town told URN that the business started off as a pimping arrangement in 2016.
At the time Ugandan pimps used to ferry Rwandese women to the town to work as escorts in nightclubs and bars, however, some men went ahead and expressed interest in marrying those women hence giving rise to the trade.
The brides according to URN are ferried into the town every last Thursday of the month.
However since the news of the trade cropped up, authorities in the town have launched investigations to establish if some of the women were being forced into such an arrangement.
According to a Captain Yahaya Kakooza, the District internal security officer of the region, preliminary investigations showed that some of the brides had been taken from their country without the consent of their relatives.
Some residents said that some of the Rwandese brides had so far been deported since investigations were launched, however; Captain Yahaya denied such reports saying they were not interested in the women as they could not come in between an arrangement of two consenting adults of legal age.
However, Yahaya said that they were investigating the pimps behind the trade to see if any laws were flouted in the process of ferrying the Rwandese brides.
This comes just a few months after reports emerged that a senior Mombasa politician had been ferrying Rwandese escorts into the country and accommodating them in an upmarket hotel in Nyali.
Edited by Janet Murikira
