Thousands Head to Kampala Streets as Rajiv Ruparelia Tribute Drive Draws Massive Turnout

By Gad Masereka

Thousands of Ugandans line and join Kampala’s streets on Sunday, May 3, 2026 for the Rajiv Ruparelia Memorial Drive, an event that has generated an extraordinary level of interest and emotional investment from across Uganda’s business, motorsport and general public communities.

What began as a conversation within the motorsport fraternity about how best to mark the one-year anniversary of Rajiv’s death has grown into a full civic moment, one of those rare occasions when a private family’s loss becomes a shared national experience. The response to the Remembering RR campaign has exceeded organisers’ expectations, with registration and expressions of interest coming from across the country and from Ugandans living abroad who have found ways to participate symbolically even from a distance.

Rajiv Ruparelia’s death on May 3, 2025 was mourned widely, in part because of who his family is and the visibility of the Ruparelia name in Uganda’s landscape, but equally because of who Rajiv himself was to those who knew him. He was not simply the son of Uganda’s richest man. He was a motorsport competitor, a philanthropist in his own right, a friend who showed up, and a businessman with ideas and instincts that were beginning to shape the Ruparelia Group’s next chapter before they were cut short.

The tribute has been structured to honour all of those dimensions. The drive through Kampala’s streets celebrates his love of movement and speed. The prosthetic camp at Mulago reflects his commitment to community service. The gathering at Munyonyo honours his hospitality instincts and his capacity to make any space feel like a place where people wanted to be.

Sudhir Ruparelia has said publicly that the scale of the memorial response has given the family something important in a year of grief: evidence that Rajiv’s investment in people had been returned. When you give yourself to people, he said, you do not disappear when you leave. You stay in them. Every person showing up on May 3 is proof of that.

For a city preparing for a Sunday of tribute and remembrance, the expected turnout on May 3 is more than a number. It is a measure of the life Rajiv Ruparelia lived and the space he left behind.