Only William Shakespeare could have succinctly explained the folly of what has become an apartheid-like annual ritual in which well-connected and well-heeled women recite empty slogans about International Women’s Day, while millions of ordinary Ugandan women — especially graduate girls — are forced into prostitution to earn a living:
“I am one, my liege, whom the vile blows and buffets of the world have so incensed that I am reckless what I do to spite the world,” Shakespeare wrote in The Tragedy of Macbeth.
“And I another, so weary with disasters, tugged with fortune, that I would set my life on any chance to mend it, or be rid of it.”
Where is the latest evidence?
The Nile Post reported on March 4, 2026, that “two Ugandan women, Janat Nakalema, 32, and Mariam Namatovu, 29, were detained in a Thailand prostitution sting.”
“They reportedly told investigators they received an average of three to four customers per day and had served more than 180 clients during that period.”
Authorities further alleged that the operation generated around 500,000 baht per month — approximately Shs60 million — which the women said was sent to support their families in Uganda.
Janat Nakalema and Mariam Namatovu are likely university graduates. Whatever their qualifications, the two women are someone’s daughters, sisters, nieces or aunts, educated at unimaginable financial cost and emotional investment for a better future.
No parent expects their university graduate daughter to earn a living using the most degrading and immoral means — prostitution. Yet countless graduate Ugandan women and girls are doing just that, hanging around posh hotels and clubs in Kololo, once an exclusive colony of top government officers, businessmen and diplomats.
Some graduate girls are heading to the Middle East to become modern-day slaves.
Wherever unemployment has driven them, millions of Ugandan women and girls will shun this International Women’s Day and instead focus on eking out a living by any means, including prostitution.
The first International Women’s Day was marked by the United Nations in 1975, nineteen and twenty years before Janat Nakalema and Mariam Namatovu were born respectively.
Back then, the slogan was “equality between men and women, the full integration of women in economic, social and cultural development, and the promotion of peace.”
But which of these subsequent International Women’s Day themes has made an iota of difference to the lives of the vast majority of women — especially graduates — in your family, village, district, region or Uganda as a whole?
- 2025: “Accelerate Action for Gender Equality.”
- 2024: “Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress.”
- 2023: “DigitALL: Innovation and Technology for Gender Equality.”
- 2022: “Gender Equality Today for a Sustainable Tomorrow.”
- 2021: “Women in Leadership: Achieving an Equal Future in a COVID-19 World.”
- 2020: “I Am Generation Equality: Realizing Women’s Rights.”
- 2019: “Think Equal, Build Smart, Innovate for Change.”
- 2018: “Time Is Now: Rural and Urban Activists Transforming Women’s Lives.”
- 2017: “Women in the Changing World of Work: Planet 50–50 by 2030.”
- 2016: “Planet 50–50 by 2030: Step It Up for Gender Equality.”
And in 2015 — forty years after the first International Women’s Day — it was: “Empowering Women – Empowering Humanity: Picture It!”
Almost nothing has changed, and that is why our graduate girls are turning to slave labour in hotels, housemaid jobs in the Middle East, or prostitution.
Yet Article 1 of the 1949 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights is clear:
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
Article 25 is just as clear:
“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”
Rather than pausing and evaluating the outcomes of previous themes, the UN deliberately continues churning out more empty and misleading slogans, which are causing unbearable stress to hundreds of thousands of unemployed Ugandan graduate women and girls.
Our unemployed graduate girls should organise an International Unemployed Graduates Day.
The media should highlight their plight and shame the overpaid, do-nothing UN Women.
Meanwhile, some Ugandan lawyer or lawyers should sue them for specific and general damages caused by the stress of unemployment and sexual abuse at the hands of rich men old enough to be their grandfathers.
I rest my case. Please exercise your right to reply.