Week of Death simply refers to the last conurbation, the final relay in the race to the end of the month for salaried workers, and by salaried workers I mean people who get paid for their labour at the end of the Calendar month.

Taking you back a little, just come to think about it; Is it not just weird that for most salaried hustlers, life simply revolves around some kind of heedless race to the end of the month?

Visit any average corporate organisation and you will be shocked to discover that for majority of employees, speculation about the next payday dominates the office small talk during tea breaks or when co-workers bump into each other in the corridors or in the loos or when they hook up for tobacco breaks. 

As the month draws ever closer to the end, speculation now shifts to when is the earliest possibility of getting paid?

Corporate organisations mostly pay their employees by wiring salaries and wages to the said employees’ bank accounts, having submitted their bank details on acquisition of the job.

For most modern and rich corporate employers like The New Times, which bank with equally modern banks like BK, employees usually get to know that they’ve been paid via SMS alert. 

But sometimes the wait for the magical bank message turns out to be a tedious and drawn-out affair, depending on the mood of the paymaster. 

Just like not every day is a Sunday, pay days are not a guaranteed and clean-cut affair in that the dates on which we get paid keep changing. Some months are good, such as when people get paid on the 25th day of such a month, although this usually happens once in a red moon. 

Other months it’s the reverse in that you will get paid 5-10 days from end of month. 

The week of death is also the time when people that used to buy Intore and Dunhill Switch by the pack now resort to that humiliating ordeal of having to buy your Intore or Switch by the stick.

Also, people that used to claim that only Heineken works for them among beers now stealthily resort to the cheaper and bigger and slightly more portent petite Skol. 

But enough of the week of death because apparently we’re way out of its grim clutch and onto a new month –the month of the African Union Summit 2016 in the brand new Kigali Convention Center. 

Which now reminds me; what’s the essence of going to Ninzi Hill Hotel when you don’t intend to eat your giant breakfast omelet from the hotel’s open terrace that also housed the bar but that is now no more? 

The question is, will the hotel still retain its appeal to walk-in guests like me, who only visited for the omelet and who preferred to dig into said omelet from the outside terrace? 

Not that this will affect them much anyway. Judging from the type of cars that are a permanent feature of the hotel’s off-road parking lot, their main thrust is the rooms. 

Those monster Four-Wheel drive tour rides that never seem to leave the Ninzi parking can only be at the service of gorilla-tracking bands of rich tourists in need of a functional hotel in a central location en route to the Volcanoes National Park for the gorillas, then as the last stop for a warm shower and a spot of Souvenir shopping and sight-seeing in Kigali on their way back home.