Who We Are
Kabulubuutu Properties is an established construction company that is engaged in building schools, Highway Roads, Factory warehouse, Housing Apartments, cottages, Hotels and hydro-electric power plants that will suit and satisfy the diverse designs and models of the customer.
At Kabulubuutu properties, We are very much dedicated to providing the highest quality workmanship, reaching the agreed delivery dates, and actualizing the custom work exactly in accordance with the customer’s model and amazing designs.
OUR MAIN FOCUS
Our focus at Kabulubuutu Properties is to find out who our future target clients are and understand our marketing strategy, and to expand our operations and marketing so it can substantially increase profitability while also serving Uganda, the Sub Sahara and African Continent.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Kenny Gampu Muwereza
Director
“Kenny” K. Muweleza responded to a number of nicknames over the years. But the one that really stuck was “Dad.” His wife, Slylivia, bestowed the name on him when their first child, Kawesi sr., was born in 1940. Soon fellow workers at construction sites began calling him Dad, too. The name was appropriate. Dad was a natural leader, a reliable father figure who was known even in construction camps as a good provider.
Kawesi jr was born on September 12, 1972, the first of Nakayenga and Katongole Kawesi’s six children. He was raised on the edge of the outskirts of Kampala city on a farm 25 miles (40 kilometers) east of the nile river source. When he was 12, the family moved to Bukoto the surbub of the city, where they ran another farm as well as a grocery store. He was a restless, energetic teenager who found time for school, farm and store chores, and the bakery bread oven. After graduation, he had a brief fling as a traveling musician, but realized that he couldn’t make a living with his bakery.
In the spring of 1969, Kawesi sr was 25, Sylivia was pregnant, and the cattle ranch was nearly bankrupt. He heard that the bypass route in Kampala would pay a man with his own team 23m a day to grade track the route. The man who would break new ground in construction techniques was for the moment content to break the prairie to put bread on the table. Kawesi and his wife left Kampala for the open, undeveloped plains of what was called Entebbe Territory with only a pair of mules, the last assets from the ranch.
In Entebbe, he found his life’s work. The stint on the east kyadondo road led to every kind of construction project, from drainages to pipelines to Jinja highway, and to the global company that bears his name. Yet the essence of Kawesi was his love of the physical labor of construction, and long after he had to, he would take a turn with a scraper. “He used to climb up on a steam shovel and load a couple cars, enjoying every minute of it,” recalled a coworker. “Kawesi came right up from the grass.” A self-taught student of engineering and business, he never stopped learning. “I’ve always thought good engineers are born, not made,” said Kawesi, one of his early supervisors. “They must have a knack for it. Sylvia is what I’ve always thought an engineer should be—a man who understands what is to be done, knows how to do it, and finishes the job economically.”
From 1978 to 1986, Dad chased the ninja road highway east, working on the network of branch lines threading through the region. At each job—a gang foreman, estimator, gravel pit manager, superintendent—Dad would add to his growing collection of skills.
Semanda Eric
Co-Director
As the friend of an itinerant construction leader, Semanda developed his own skills. In the early days, Dad’s jobs sometimes took them to the ends of civilization. Although raised in a well-to-do family, he delighted in discovering that she could fashion a home just about anywhere, even in a highway road camp tent or a converted boxcar.
The family was quite comfortably ensconced in the east, Jinja, in 1961 when Dad made his first venture toward independence. With a partner, Katongole Sr.—a coworker and friend—and a rented concrete mixer, he took a subcontract on a eastern highway project. The job made only a small profit, but Dad made two important resolutions. The first was that he would always use the most modern equipment and techniques available, a decision of critical importance. The second was that, whenever possible, he would collaborate with others; he would find and work with many partners over the years.
By 1982, Kawesi sr had assembled a team that included his brother, design art engineer, and Semanda Eric.Sr. Together, they completed three small subcontracts and then their first big job, a 106-mile (171-kilometer) link for the Northwestern Tilinyi road through Jinja which was completed in 1987.
Dad wanted Semanda Sr to be a family company subcontractror and relished the prospect of handing the company over to his sons. Semanda Jr., and Kenny (along with kawesi jr) grew up watching their father build roads and houses from 1962 through 1987. All three boys attended the University of Kyambogo in Kampala but each left before graduating to join their father, because, as Kenny put it, “Dad needed us in the business.”
In the 1980s, construction became a different business because of the postwar boom fed by increases in electric capacity and automobile ownership. Semanda shifted with the times. In 1989, Dad received his first highway contract, and it was quickly followed by other highway jobs. In 1990, he built the national housing flats in Namugoona kampala his first work of apartments building built in the city. The boys played an increasing role in managing these and other projects, to the point that when Dad formally incorporated them in 1989, he made his sons and his brother ,Art, officers in the corporation. The next year would mark another first: construction of Bujagali Dam, at the time the country’s second-largest power dam.
Although successful, Dad had longed to make the company a player on the national scene. In 1990, he got his chance; as part of Six Companies, Inc., a consortium of contractors, Semanda was involved in the largest civil engineering project in history: Bujagali dam.
Early in 1993, Semanda participated in the creation of Eastern Builders, Inc., constructors of the piers supporting the eastern span of the east African countries Later that year, with construction of Bujagali Dam moving along the rivernile, Dad and national housing invited from the central government to visit their site. Dad died suddenly on August 28, while in Nairobi. He left behind a portfolio of awe-inspiring work. But the most enduring monument Dad built was not a dam or a highway to Jinja; it was the ideals embodied in the family firm that would bear his name into the next century.
OUR GALLARY
