17/05/2025
Untimely death.💔
Death will come to us all, but no matter how old we are we hope to do as much living as possible before death comes calling. This was not to be the case for Rajiv Ruparelia who met his untimely death in the early hours of Saturday morning. Rajiv was thirty-five years old, with his whole life ahead of him, and it was a promising life since his family have assets of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Rajiv had indeed lived life to the full and was known for his generous spirit and love of fast cars. He had married Naiya in London 2017, and they had a daughter, so was moving between Uganda and London where his wife and daughter were living. On this occasion he had come to visit his parents and attend a wedding for his friend Jonathan Butera. He had dinner with Sudhir and Jyostna but then decided to stay the night at Munyonyo, hence he was driving along the expressway at around 2.00 am in his tuned-up Nissan GTI. As a rally car driver, he was used to fast cars, and it is likely that he was travelling at speed since he was on a motorway at 2.00 in the morning, but he did not realise what was up ahead.
Over the past year there has been work taking place on the construction of bridges over the Munyonyo spur of the Entebbe Kampala expressway, but at the beginning of this year the construction was largely wound up and the expressway opened straight through for the conference of Non-aligned Countries. One major change was the Busabala flyover where a temporary roundabout had been introduced during construction but was then removed. After that conference it was reinstated but removed again for a more recent conference. I used the highway while going to the airport on Tuesday last week, and it was open, but during the week the roundabout was being reinstated again.
Rajiv obviously thought the road was open, came over the hill and drove straight into the concrete bollards. The impact sent the car into the air; it overturned and burst into flames. On so many
