Budget hunting is quite possible when you are experienced like me but still, you have to be very smart in this materialistic era.

Birds these days are born and grow up with the doctrine that hunters are a walking ATM card that you only have to press and voila! Cash drops in their open palms. That is why practicing budget hunting is like convincing Theoneste Bagosora that all Rwandans are the same. You have to carry out a brain transplant to achieve this feat. But of course, if you are good, you can go through a minefield.

The tactics of budget hunting involve being a master of deceit. In other words, you have to portray yourself as someone who only dreams about being broke, rather than the other way round.
You could even withdraw all your salary and carry it around in a big bag (of course if your pay can fit in your pockets, you can change it into smaller notes, let’s say, of 500) and carry it on every date as proof of how ‘loaded’ you are. After making sure the bird has seen the load, buy a few drinks and make sure she is in no hurry to have a piece of the load.

Assure her that all that ‘petty’ cash is meant for her to have fun. This will make her appetite subside and she will be ‘easy.’ Once you hit-and-run, the bird will be wondering what hit her (pun intended of course) as you prepare your next mission.
‘Multi-party’ hunting, what in Kenya they would call Mipango ya kando, is quite different from the budget hunting.

This kind of hunting can put you in debt and put you in a perpetual financial deficit. Before I embraced budget hunting, I had to learn the hard way after I failed to raise bus fare to work a few days after pay-day. ‘Multi-party’ hunting refers to being involved with a line-up of birds at the same period of time. You maintain permanent contact with them and call them when it is convenient for you.

The other problem is that the birds may decide to contact you when it is not in your convenience. To be successful with this, you need to be a good chess player.
Where it gets expensive is when you have to keep them all in the loop. In order to keep them in your network, you are forced to promise or be seen to do things that show you are serious. Competition is tight out here and birds of substance know this quite well. If you can’t maintain ‘total territorial occupation’ then another ‘developer’ will be found to take care of her needs. I once tried this and I can assure you, it’s not a good thing to venture into. I was overstretched to the extent that I wanted to give up on bird hunting completely and also.

At one time, as if the birds had had a meeting (they did not know each other, to the best of my knowledge), asked for money to go to the saloon for natural dreadlocks. I had four birds in my network and each of them wanted at least Rwf 50,000. For this, never mind that natural dreadlocks are done for only Rwf15,000 at any saloon. I was in a serious fix because I was quite keen on keeping the network.

Now I was in a dilemma.
I was torn between the choice of raising the 200k and letting the network go. There was no way I could only remain with one because if you have to stick around, you have to do so with a sizeable number of birds because one is not a viable reason to stay ‘faithful.’  What I did was to keep promising until I quit.

After many texts of "baby, how far?” they decided that I was a fraud and stopped sending the texts altogether. That is how I resorted to budget hunting and I have never looked back.

Ends