Uganda’s music scene has never been shy about wading into social debates, but this week things got genuinely philosophical. Ugandan artist Ziza Bafana publicly pushed back against remarks made by Susan Makula regarding men who rent rather than own property, turning what started as a relationship hot take into a wider conversation about mortality, materialism, and what we actually owe each other in this life.
What Susan Makula Actually Said
Susan Makula’s original comment was direct and unapologetic: women should not waste their tears on men who are still renting. The sentiment, while blunt, tapped into a long-running cultural pressure point in Uganda and across much of Africa, where home ownership is frequently treated as a prerequisite for a man’s readiness for serious relationships or marriage. Her words resonated with a section of the public that views property as a measure of ambition and stability.
But not everyone agreed. And Ziza Bafana was not about to stay quiet.
Ziza Bafana’s Counter: Life is Borrowed Time
The artist’s response, as reported this week, reframed the entire debate around something far more existential than square footage or title deeds. His core argument was simple but loaded: nobody arrives in this world carrying property, and nobody gets to take it when they leave. Putting enormous pressure on men to build houses, he suggested, misses the bigger picture of human existence.
He put it in the form of a question that landed hard: how many people have died and left all their houses behind? It is the kind of rhetorical pivot that forces a room to go quiet. Because the answer, of course, is all of them.
Ziza Bafana’s point was not that ambition is worthless or that men should be comfortable with complacency. The argument was more nuanced than that. He was questioning the hierarchy of values that places bricks and mortar above presence, character, or genuine partnership. When life itself has a hard deadline, he reasoned, obsessing over who owns what can become a distraction from actually living.
Is This Just Excuse-Making, or Something Worth Hearing?
Critics will argue, not unfairly, that this line of thinking can be conveniently used to justify stagnation. There is a version of “we all die anyway” that functions purely as an escape hatch from accountability. And Susan Makula’s supporters would likely point out that practical security matters, especially for women who have historically carried the heavier burden of domestic instability.
But there is another reading of Ziza Bafana’s words that deserves honest consideration. The pressure to own a home, particularly in urban Ugandan society, has intensified dramatically over the past decade. Land prices in and around Kampala have surged. Construction costs have climbed. The economic reality facing young men today is not the same one their fathers navigated. Telling a generation already grinding against structural headwinds that they are unworthy of love until they have a title deed is a complicated message to unpack.
When Celebrity Opinion Becomes Cultural Commentary
What makes this exchange interesting is how it illustrates the evolving role of artists in Uganda’s public discourse. Ziza Bafana is not speaking as a politician or an economist. He is speaking as someone embedded in the culture, someone whose audience feels the daily weight of financial pressure. That proximity gives his words a different kind of authority than a policy paper or a think-piece ever could.
Susan Makula, for her part, was also speaking from a place of cultural currency. Her remarks reflect a perspective shared widely among women who have watched relationships fail because a partner lacked either the means or the drive to build something lasting. Both positions carry real weight. Neither is simply wrong.
The Bigger Question About What We Value
Strip away the social media heat, and what Ziza Bafana has actually done is open a door to a conversation Uganda needs to have more honestly. What do we actually expect from men? What do women genuinely need from partners? And how much of what we call “standards” is rooted in genuine wellbeing versus inherited social performance?
The fact that a renting man is still viewed by some as fundamentally less worthy says as much about the structures that make ownership inaccessible as it does about individual effort. Homeownership as a symbol of readiness made more intuitive sense when land was cheaper and economic mobility was more predictable. In 2026, the equation is far messier.
Ziza Bafana’s question about people who die and leave their houses behind is not new, philosophers and theologians have asked versions of it for centuries. But timing matters. Asking it now, in the middle of a viral conversation about renting and relationship worthiness, gives it fresh urgency.
Where the Debate Goes From Here
Online reactions have been predictably split. Some have applauded Ziza Bafana for articulating something many men feel but rarely say out loud. Others have accused him of normalising a lack of drive. A few have noted, with some irony, that the artist himself is hardly living a modest life, which raises its own questions about who gets to philosophise about the irrelevance of material wealth.
What nobody is doing is ignoring the conversation. And that, perhaps, is the most useful outcome. Uganda’s relationship with property, masculinity, and partnership is shifting, slowly but unmistakably. Debates like this one, messy and emotionally charged as they are, are part of how a society works through change in real time.
So here is the question worth sitting with: when we set the bar for a worthy partner, are we measuring character and commitment, or are we measuring access to capital? And if it is the latter, what does that say about what we truly value in the people we choose to love?
