My Story

From Ntungamo to National Impact.

I lost my mother at five. I lost my father nine years later. Before he died, he gave me a sentence I have lived by ever since.

Written by Julius Nandeeba

Roots.

Iwas born in Ntungamo District, in the south-west of Uganda — a rural community where life was simple but structured by hard work, responsibility, and the quiet expectations of neighbours who knew you by name. We did not have much, but what we had was held in common. A child who misbehaved on one end of the village would be corrected on the other before reaching home. Discipline, in this sense, was not something my parents invented. It was the air we breathed.

My mother died when I was five years old. I do not remember her clearly — I remember the absence of her, which is a different thing. I remember the way the house grew quieter, the way meals were prepared by other hands, the way certain conversations stopped when I walked into the room. A child without a mother learns early that the world is not a settled thing. It tilts. You learn to walk on a tilted world.

My father did not remarry quickly. He raised us with a gravity I did not understand at the time. He spoke about school the way other men spoke about land — as something you tended carefully, because it was the only inheritance worth leaving. He had not had the opportunity to study far himself, and I think he saw, in education, the one resource that no neighbour could take from his children, no drought could destroy, no government could confiscate.

He used to say, when I came home from primary school in the afternoons, that my real work was not in the field. My real work was in the books. The field would be there tomorrow. The books required me today.

The Sentence.

Nine years after my mother died, my father followed her. I was fourteen. I do not need to describe what it is to lose a second parent as a child — anyone who has lived it will understand, and anyone who has not should not be made to imagine it carelessly. What I will say is this: in the days before his death, knowing he would not recover, my father said something to me that I have lived by ever since.

You are destined for success if you remain in school and well disciplined.

— My father, 1994

He did not say I would succeed because I was clever. He did not say I would succeed because the family expected it. He gave me two conditions, and he linked them. School. Discipline. Both. Either alone was insufficient. A disciplined boy out of school would still be poor. A schoolboy without discipline would waste the schooling. The two had to hold each other up.

I was too young to understand what he had given me. I understood only that I had been given something — that his last words were not a goodbye but an instruction, and that the instruction was the inheritance. Years later I would come to see that he had handed me a complete philosophy in one sentence: that opportunity must be earned by remaining in the place where opportunity exists, and protected by the character that does not waste it. I have written a book around this sentence, and I still do not think I have exhausted it.

After my father’s death, our circumstances changed quickly. There was no parent to provide for us, no income to count on, and no certainty that we would be able to continue our education. School fees, which had once been a household worry, became an existential one. For a moment, a long moment, the future closed.

Then my aunt stepped forward.

The Discipline.

My aunt took us in. She ran a small roadside restaurant, the kind every Ugandan reader will recognise — chapati and beans served from a charcoal stove, sodas in a cooler, customers who paid in coins and sometimes did not pay at all. She rose before the rest of us and slept after the rest of us. The restaurant did not make her rich. It kept us in school.

I want to dwell on this because it is important. My aunt was not a public figure. She did not give speeches. She did not run a foundation. She ran a small business in a small place, and she used what little it produced to keep her brother’s children in classrooms that her brother could no longer pay for. This is what discipline looks like when nobody is watching. It is unglamorous, repetitive, and entirely serious. It is also, I now believe, the most important leadership I have ever observed.

Watching her, I understood what my father had meant. Discipline is not motivation. Motivation comes and goes. Discipline is the decision to do the thing whether or not you feel like doing it, because the consequences of not doing it are unacceptable to you. My aunt did not feel like opening the restaurant every morning. She opened it because we had to eat. We had to be in school. The feeling was irrelevant. The work was not.

So I did the same with my education. I studied whether or not I felt like studying. I went to class whether or not the lesson was interesting. I sat with subjects I disliked until I could pass them. I treated school the way my aunt treated her restaurant — as a non-negotiable daily duty whose results would compound into something I could not yet see.

And it did compound. I finished primary school. I finished O-level. I finished A-level. By the time I sat my entrance examinations for Makerere University, the boy who had been told to stay in school was a young man who could not imagine being anywhere else. I was admitted to read Accounting at the Faculty of Business and Management. Four years later, I graduated with First Class Honours.

A First Class is not, in itself, important. What it represented to me was important. It was proof that the sentence had held. The two conditions — school and discipline — were sufficient. My father had been right.

Becoming.

Agraduate is not yet a professional. A professional is built over years, by qualification piled on qualification, examination piled on examination, late evenings piled on late evenings. After Makerere, I made a deliberate choice that I think confused some of my classmates: instead of treating my First Class in Accounting as a destination, I treated it as a foundation.

I qualified as a Certified Public Accountant of Uganda. Then I pursued — and was elected to — Fellowship of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants of the United Kingdom, the FCCA. Then, because tax work and legal work intersect constantly in the kind of public finance environment I was moving into, I went back to Makerere and read a Bachelor of Laws. After the LLB, the Diploma in Legal Practice at the Law Development Centre. I was admitted as an Advocate of the High Court of Uganda. Later I added a Postgraduate Diploma in Tax and Revenue Administration, completed at the Uganda Revenue Authority itself. Today, I am pursuing a Master of Business Administration through Heriot-Watt University.

I list these qualifications not to impress anyone — qualifications, on their own, do not impress anyone who matters — but to make a specific point. Every one of them was completed while working full-time. Every one of them was paid for. Every one of them required choosing study over rest, study over leisure, study over the easier life. The discipline my father named in 1994 was not a phase. It was the operating system.

The qualifications, in order.

Makerere

Bachelor of Business Administration (Accounting) — First Class Honours.

ICPAU

Certified Public Accountant of Uganda.

ACCA · UK

Fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants.

Makerere

Bachelor of Laws (LLB).

LDC

Diploma in Legal Practice — Law Development Centre.

High Court

Admitted as an Advocate of the High Court of Uganda.

URA

Postgraduate Diploma in Tax and Revenue Administration.

In progress

Master of Business Administration — Heriot-Watt University, UK.

The work, now.

Acareer, if you take it seriously, eventually presents you with a question: what is the surplus for? By the surplus I mean the part of your knowledge, your relationships, and your reputation that is not strictly required to keep you employed. Some people spend the surplus on themselves. Some people return it.

I have tried to return it. I serve on the boards of ACTogether Uganda and Ripple Effect Uganda — organisations working on community development, livelihoods, and rural transformation. I direct Capital College, where I help build the kind of professional education I once needed myself. I founded the CCAM Investment Club to teach financial discipline to young Ugandans who, like me at twenty, had been given no instruction in money beyond the instruction not to lose it. I teach. I mentor. I speak.

And now I have written a book. From Rural Roots to National Impact: The Discipline of Engineering an Unstoppable Life is, in one sense, the long form of the sentence my father gave me. It is the answer to a question I have been asked many times, in many rooms: how did you get from there to here? The honest answer is too long for a conversation. It is the length of a book.

The book is written for the person I once was. A young Ugandan, perhaps without both parents, perhaps without a clear path, perhaps wondering whether the discipline being asked of them is fair, given how little they have been given. It is for the secondary school student preparing for examinations, the undergraduate choosing a course, the young professional wondering if they will ever rise. To them I say what I now believe with my whole life: your starting point does not determine your ending point. School and discipline. Both. Together. They are sufficient.

The mentorship I now offer — focused specifically on young Ugandans pursuing careers in tax, law, accountancy, and public finance — is the same answer in another form. I teach the path I walked, applied to the people walking it now. I do not pretend the path is easy. I will not lie to you about how long it takes. But I can show you that it has been walked, and I can walk part of it with you.

That is what I am doing with the rest of my life.