Every now and then a prominent rich man dies in Uganda. And as sure as night follows day, his children start ripping his estate apart. On average, there is nothing left a year after the founder dies. Except for a couple of Indian families, there is no old money spanning three generations in Uganda.

Estate plunder will follow a rich Ugandan’s death regardless of the source of the wealth, be it hard work, crime or politics (the latter two being closely related). In the 1980s, a powerful military officer died, leaving a fortune rumoured to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars in inaccessible Swiss accounts. Today, his surviving offspring have mastered amphibian tactics, living rough in the wettest of Kampala’s swamp slums.

In the 1990s, a wealthy politicians died, leaving behind a large fleet of passenger vehicles. A year later, you couldn’t trace even a teaspoon that once belonged to him. Today, some dead Ugandan politicians’ daughters are practising the world’s oldest profession in Kampala and Dubai.

A few years ago, a powerful Ugandan building contractor died. Today, whatever he had amassed is gone, including the private houses and ancestral land that is considered priceless in our culture. Talking of ancestral land, which hosts burial grounds, several prominent politicians have become squatters in their graves after the family vault is kindly spared by the new owners of the land.

The record holder could be a wealthy property mogul who was also widely praised as being a good, honest man. He only died this year and his estate is dwindling so fast that even the city authorities have joined the fray, trying to collect some dues before it is all gone.

When you go upcountry for a social or funeral event and hang around the trading centres long enough, you may run into some local drunkard of indeterminable age who introduces himself loudly as “honourable's son.”

He only has his dead dad of an MP’s name to hang on. Such wasted fellows are usually male, as the once-rich families’ girls were either lucky enough to be married off in time or they have died, since women are more vulnerable to health hazards when the going gets tough.

I think the lesson for Africa’s rich is simple and clear – you have to teach your children the family trade. But if you shelter them from the realities of how you make the money that enables them to live a five-star life, they will have no clue how to maintain it when you depart.

And they will start by selling off the very things you thought would secure their future. Don’t protect them from hard work, they will sell the land and houses a few months after you die.

If you are honest, teach them the family business and involve them early enough. But if you are not straight, it is delusionary to think that your offspring will make a clean living when you raised them on dirty money.

So if you are a politician, teach your kids how to steal public funds. If you are a shady businessman, teach them how to bribe politicians and senior civil servants. Introduce them to the bad guys in government. They will need them when you are gone.