Here below is my response to a comment made on a friend’s Facebook note regarding the now widely viewed and discussed KONY2012 video by Invisible Children. Here is the link to the note by my friend Robert (hopefully it is a public note). If it’s not, then I hope to post the content plus the comment I was responding to after getting permission from the respective writers. But I hope my response is clear and the context understandable:

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@Jeff – excellent post! I get the feeling that you’re the kind of person I’d like to have a chat with over a nice cup of coffee. However, there are bits of your post that I respectfully disagree with:

• Reconciliation & negotiated peace: These may be the best way to resolve conflicts the world over, not just Africa, but it has not been effective in our society as you say. And the more complex the circumstances of the conflict, the harder it is for such peaceful approaches to work. A simple example is the issue of tribalism – a real and living problem in Uganda. It is extremely complicated to solve but trust me, it will take a lot more than re-conciliatory discussions for say the Northerners to trust the Westerners. Or the Banyoro to accept and integrate the Bakiga on their home soil. I come from a part of the country that is highly polarised along religious and ethnic lines and these divisions scare me. Note that I am not saying other means would necessarily be the best – no. It’s just saying that your assertion also makes the mistake of assuming these things are simple. They are not.
•  Africans should be left alone to solve their own problems: Unfortunately, the era of communities being islands are over. Moreover, I’m not sure our own solutions would preclude the use of force – were there no wars on the continent before the white man appeared on the scene? Look at the Rwanda genocide – are you sure that if were left to our own devices, massacres would not become a routine matter? But again, these are political problems we’re talking about. What about others such as health? Look at the dreaded and much talked about nodding disease that so many are accusing Russell/IC of ignoring. Our only hope of combating it lies on CDC identifying the cause and solution? And what is CDC (Centers for Disease Control)? Yes – you guessed it – an American institution. What about economic problems? We need the rest of world not just as markets but to ‘copy’ from. China has grown simply by being the world’s factory – a lot of the manufacturing there is done for western firms and its now gotten to the point where it no longer needs these firms but it can stand on its own. India too and many others are riding on the shoulders of western giants but they’re getting to a point where they can walk on their oiwn. We too should do the same and abandon isolationist thoughts – they won’t get us anywhere. And the yuppies – they may be irritating but I am fully aware of the quality work some of them have done and continue to do. Even the much maligned IC has actually done some great work on the ground (schools and healthcare). If they had kept to the poverty stricken people of their home countries, then the beneficiaries here would still  be wallowing in desperation waiting for a government and community (rest of the country) that doesn’t give a hoot about them.
• Campaigns that are bad for the image of Africa: Here I disagree – Africa is what it is and there’s nothing like ‘bad image’. For every success story, there are tens of heart-breaking failures and we’re talking about the present, not the past. These campaigns and bad press may reinforce bad stereotypes but these stereotypes are unfortunately mostly true. Look at this country for instance and tell me how we can do a whitewashing campaign that ignores all the facts such as our poor infrastructure, healthcare and political systems? But all this is beside the point. The point is we Africans are solely responsible for the image the world has of us. There are many societies that have had negative images but have outgrown them. A few years ago, all the middle eastern countries were associated with poverty and terrorism. Nowadays, the UAE, Bahrain and Qatar no longer carry this image. Why? Because they’ve proved to the world they do not deserve the historical tags. Qatar is especially impressive – while we moan that the western press/media (BBC, CNN etc) is biased and so on, they quietly launched al Jazzera which is currently one of the shapers of public opinion. Where is the African equivalent of the BBC? Why isn’t it there? Another thing – there is no such thing as our image being bad for our prosperity and business. No – it’s solely down to the enabling environment. How can we be a good business destination if we don’t have the infrastructure? How do we attract manufacturing investment if we can’t even generate enough electricity to run a couple of factories (10 serious factories would consume the whole of Jinja’s power output). How do I start a Google/Facebook competitor if the maximum bandwidth I can get is 256kbps and it still costs me an arm each month? How do I get a business running if the cheapest credit carries an interest of 25%? Most worryingly of all, how does one do business and prosper if the most basic raw material (personnel) are not only a product of a lousy education system and extremely lazy preferring to spend their evenings ‘hanging out’ instead of acquiring knowledge and working hard but is also exceedingly corrupt? Make no mistake – once you put the right conditions for business, the business will flood in. That is why western companies rushed to China even though it was and still is a communist country (and being a communist carried the capital penalty in the US just a few decades ago) with a poor image. And many people/countries are still seeking ways of doing business with Iran despite the sanctions and all.
• More on the negative image of Africa: While growing up I personally made the effort to read up about the history of modern civilizations and I still try to read widely. As such, I know very well the brutalities meted out by the Spaniards in Latin America, the Belgians in Congo and the genesis of the world wars. More recently, there are things like the Northern Ireland conflict, the war in the Balkan states, the ongoing Basque separatist movement and the income inequalities in the developed world. I’m trying to get to two points: first, if one wants negative stories about the western world, there are so many and readily available. Look at the global economic crisis – it was reported and re-reported ad nauseam and it was all very negative. We therefore should stop thinking the western media and history books only talk of terrible things when it comes to Africa – they do an excellent job of talking about themselves as well. It’s just that we tend to either ignore those stories or we don’t look for them. Secondly and more importantly, all these stories have their place in history and the western ones are mostly a thing of the past e.g. Germany’s aggression in the 1920s/30s/40s. If we can therefore sort out our problems, then the current negative stories will become part of a historical narrative – interesting but no longer valid. Look at Wandegeya for instance. There was a time there was a roundabout there and the jam was intolerable. Once the modern junction was put in place (a donation from Japan by the way), the jam disappeared. What happened then? People started to say ‘there USED TO be terrible jam’! The same way people say ‘the UAE used to be a collection of sand dunes’. Unfortunately, the Wandegeya jam has since returned. However, it stands to reason that if the pace of development had continued along a logical path from 1999 (or if the Japanese had continued doing our work for us), then there’d be multi-lane roads and over/sub-passes at all the traffic bottleneck junctions in the city and we’d be reminiscing on how bad things used to be. That hasn’t been the case however and so we have to face the bitter truth. Hopefully, we can get to the point where we can gleefully lecture the west (like the former Malaysian PM was doing the other day – telling the Europeans they were now poor and needed to stop living beyond their means). That day hasn’t come yet.
• We Africans should make videos about the Iraqi chaos etc: I concur. That is exactly what I told people during the Libyan crisis – they were complaining they were only getting one side of the story (fron CNN/BBC etc). I asked them why they didn’t send their own journalists there to get the other side of the story if any. I mean, if Russell can do a 30 minute video so can you and I. If we’re interested that is. But the Hague bit – you know the Americans refused to sign up? And we blindly (along with the Kenyans) signed up. When shall we start thinking before acting?
• Timing of the hullabaloo: I’ll disagree with you here – foreign powers only take advantage of another country’s natural resources if that country ‘fails’ to manage the resources themselves. By failing, I mean situations like Libya – a guy rules forever and gives NATO an excuse to support insurgents. If Gaddafi had put in place an acceptable political system (acceptable to the people of Libya), then there’d not have gone through what they went through. And an acceptable political system doesn’t mean a democracy…

Lastly – no matter what our feelings about the KONY2012 video are, there’s one good thing that I think we can all agree it has done: without it, we’d not be having this debate… Ultimately, this global discourse will be good for Uganda/Africa.

Dear Jennifer (KCCA ED),

Having wasted another 2 hours of my life in the city’s traffic jam (effectively covering a distance of 17km), I find myself thinking hard about certain things:

Why exactly doesn’t our city make a serious effort at improving it’s infrastructure? Apart from the N. Bypass, there’s not been any major new infrastructure built within the entire past decade. That means the same traffic jams that were there in 2000, say along the Banda-Kireka road are still there 12 years later. Clearly this has very little to do with the number of vehicles and everything to do with the lack of investment in infrastructure. Surely, we should be having traffic lights at every junction within the city centre and the major junctions in the suburbs. As it stands, the only functional lights (Wandegeya, Nsambya, Jinja Road, Wakaliga) were donations from Japan if I’m not mistaken.

Of course there’s an answer – no money… But why? We all know that for the past few years, more than UGX. 1TN has been allocated to national roads during each budget cycle. Yet, this sector is also heavily supported by donors aka development partners. And  it is very good to note that this is slowly paying off – the quality of the major national roads being constructed, even to a laymans eye, is extremely high (e.g. the N. Bypass, Jinja-Bugiri, Masaka-Mbarara, Kabale-Kisoro etc). On the other hand, KCCA is forced to use contractors that do such shoddy work and take so long doing it that it would be highly comical if it were not so sad. But even more embarrassingly, some of the things that can be done to make Kampala a better place to stay would actually not cost that much. Honestly, how much do traffic lights cost? Or, the simple but effective junction modification such as was done to the Kololo-Lugogo Bypass road at Kati-Kati? A small ‘lay-by’ that enables traffic to join the bypass seamlessly and hey presto – it’s saving thousands of motorists a lot time that would otherwise be wasted.

Anyway, with the money issue in mind, I’m forced to wonder what Kampala’s contribution to the country’s GDP and tax base is? I suspect it is close to 80%. If so, why doesn’t the city get a lot more budgetary support from the central government than it does currently? We all know that the best contractors are the likes of SBI/RCC & Roko. Why is KCCA given so little money that they cannot afford them? Is it really a wise idea to neglect the city dwellers whose taxes form the bulk of locally generated government revenue? Or, to put it another way – if hundreds of thousands of city dwellers/workers waste three hours daily while commuting  short distances, how will they compete (in the new global knowledge-based economy) with their counterparts in other cities?

Then, the whole hullabaloo surrounding the new bus service – I just don’t get it. This is a private company that has imported 100 new buses. If we assume a cost of UGX. 100M per bus, that is an investment of UGX. 10BN. Why would anyone in their right minds halt this service when there’s absolutely no taxpayer money being used in running it? Do they want you to start a new procurement process all over again which will last another 3 years? Call me naïve – but why would a private transport firm even need a contract with KCCA? Unless there’s a plan to maintain a monopoly, I’d imagine that there’d be a licensing framework instead and all capable investors would throw their hats in the ring. Then KCCA would limit itself to regulating the sector and ensuring standards are maintained. That would be the best deal for long-suffering commuters with all the advantages of competition. Imagine a situation where the government decided to contract a particular bus service to provide all public transport e.g. Gateway or Gagaa? Where would that have ended up? In my opinion, it is imperative that the buses start operating straight away. And so you need to do all within your power to make it happen – stand up to those MPs on our behalf.

Anyway – this is enough! To summarize the rant, a lot of us were extremely happy when you assumed office and we were energized by the way you embarked on your duties. We still support you and wish you the best. However, if you are to be judged as having succeeded at the end of your term of office, you’ll need to have done a lot more: secured proper/adequate funding for running the city, started/completed some serious infrastructure projects (junctions/drainage/flyovers) and put in place a sustainable, affordable mass public transport system (better than the current 14 seater vans). I hope you and your team manage to achieve most if not all of them. And I believe that you can do all this with or without the support of the Lord Mayor and/or other negative forces…

News started filtering in earlier today of a ferry that capsized between Zanzibar and another island. The scale of the tragedy soon became clear: close to 200 fatalities. It could have been so much worse though since initial reports were pessimistic about the survival chances of all 800+ passengers.

In the midst of all this however, one of the survivor’s stories made me pause a bit an think. According to her, the passengers begged the crew not to set off because the ship was visibly overloaded. Note that it was carrying 200+ more passengers than it had been licensed to carry. Now – I’m sorry to say this and I know I may get some stick for saying it but this is a clear example of how we Africans simply do not know how to say ‘no – enough is enough’. A typical Westerner (Briton, German or American) would not have stopped at pleading with the crew – he/she would have proceeded to disembark. Why is it so hard for us to do the same? Why do we suffer in silence while risking our lives?

How many of you (Ugandan readers) have ever been in a taxi whose driver simply puts the fear of the Almighty in your hearts with his driving? I know – the majority of you. But did you do anything apart from sitting back and hoping/praying for the best? Why? How many of you have sat back silently while being packed in a taxi or bus like sardines in a tin? What about those of that have sailed on one of our ferries without a life-jacket?

How I pray we get to the point where we’re brave enough to say no to those practices that put our lives and livelihoods at risk. And not only as victims but as willing participants/accomplices. In the meantime, condolences to those affected by the Zanzibar tragedy.

Travelled to Kabale over the weekend for my friend Harriet’s giveaway ceremony. Congratulations Harriet and may God bless you and Andrew with a happy, happy future.

A couple of observations from my trip – first, it is great seeing how the upgraded road is turning out. Obviously, I’d have loved to see a 4 or 6 lane highway from Kampala all the way to Kabale but that remains a dream for now. So, I’ll settle for what is being done which is actually quite good. The quality of the tarmac seems to be really, really good with multiple thick layers. They are even laying some sort of waterproof canvas underneath the tar layers to prevent water from being drawn up and causing damage – this is the first time I’m seeing this being done in this country! Then, although generally the overall width of the road is disappointing, they’re putting in place climbing lanes for many of the slopes which should make overtaking slow-moving traffic a breeze. All in all, it looks like quality work even to my untrained eye. Something else – the sheer quantity and quality of equipment deployed tells me RCC is a serious contractor (remember how they saved the government from the embarrassment called the Bugiri road?).

Second – this global warming thing; is it for real? I mean, Kabale was so, so, so cold that we simply couldn’t spread margarine on our bread at breakfast – it seemed to be frozen rock solid! Even for a ‘person-of-the-soil’ like me, it felt colder than usual. And this is July, a traditionally hot and dry time of the year. Spare a thought for my co-travellers, especially the two of them that were born and bred in central Uganda.

Third and last – my friends know that the car fanatic in me hates the Mitsubishi brand with a passion. Interestingly, the vehicle we used was a Mitsubishi Lancer borrowed from a friend and yours truly was the ‘pilot’. Imagine the shock (in a totally positive sense) when, despite my heavy right foot, we used just over 27 litres of petrol to cover the 410km to Kabale. This translates into approximately 15km per litre. Never in my life have I experienced such fuel economy (certainly not in my beloved BMW 528i – RIP ) and to say I was impressed is a massive understatement. This is a car tailor made for these hard economic times. Certainly, the smooth stretches of new road helped but even then, coaxing more than 11 or 12km per litre in any car on that road is very hard. My loathing for Mitsubishis is officially over and after hitting ‘Post’, I’ll be logging onto the Mitsubishi section of the tradercarview.com website…

Reading this Monitor story, I couldn’t help but smile. Especially since, of all things, the President decided to use food as a reference. If only he’d glanced at his garage(s), hangar and even his wardrobe beforehand, I’m sure he’d not have said what he said. Let’s check out the afore-mentioned locations, shall we?

Garages: A couple of luxury Toyota Cygnuses, a fleet of Mitsubishi and Toyota pick up trucks and a couple more SUVs (mainly Mitsubishi Pajeros and Toyota Landcruisers). Plus a handful of support vehicles and outrider motorbikes. Does our beautiful country manufacture any of these vehicles’ spare parts? Or the lubricants needed when they’re being serviced? Are they running on fuel from the Lake Albert region already?

Hangar: Gulfstream G550. Are the Katwe boys actually manufacturing spare parts for this sleek jet. Heck – I’m sure even the servicing is done far away from our borders.

Wardrobe: I’m willing to bet a reasonable amount of cash that most of His Excellency’s suits are not of the locally tailored kind.

And so on and so forth (used to hear this a lot in class back in the day ). I would love to know whether his wife’s book was actually printed in Uganda.

The funny thing is what he said is absolutely true – if we were not importing stuff, we wouldn’t be so worked up about our struggling shilling. But not importing stuff means we’d basically have to live stone-age lifestyles. No modern technology like current telecom & ICT, entertainment would exclusively be village wrestling, buildings would be mud & wattle and there’d be no cars! NO cars!?!? I for one wouldn’t like to live that kind of life.

So what would the non-import alternative be? Making everything ourselves of course. Brilliant. Until you realise that to make stuff, you need to have certain essential factors of production. The most important of these, imho, are electricity and transport. The government that His Excellency leads (and has been leading for almost half the time since independence) has utterly failed in regard to putting the two in place. I recall the frustration of trying to complete a certain urgent project just after completing university (self-employed then) and yet I only had power on average three days out of seven. Its better not to even talk about the transport systems here. Another important factor is abundant skilled labour. That too is asking too much of our broken education system where cramming for good grades and cheating is the order of the day.

Ultimately, even with everything in place, there are things that we’d not be able to make and we’d still have to import them. A strong dollar will therefore always inflict pain on mere mortals like me and you even if our President is not affected. But, being the President, I’d imagine even if he doesn’t feel the pain personally, he should feel the pain of his people. That’s what leadership is all about.

Hello everyone!

Having turned 31 two days ago, I purposed that come rain or shine, I’d post at least a single blogpost once a week for my entire 32nd year…

So help me God!

So someone points out that all my blog posts start with a ‘so’. Thats not strictly true but anyway, so?

So, I’ve been sitting at my laptop for a while now doing a couple of things. A few geeky things plus checking out whats happening at the Paris Auto Show (officially known as the Salon de l’Automobile). That Lamborghini (Sixth Element) is too ballistic! Of course, this is pretty unremarkable except for one thing – I decided to switch to Linux for my personal computing a few days ago. So I’ve been doing all the stuff mentioned above using Ubuntu 10.04. And after some hours of use, I now totally agree with the many people that see nothing but trouble ahead for Microsoft. Let me explain.

I have never really had a problem with Windows or indeed with any Microsoft software. Sure, Internet Explorer is at the bottom of my list of preferred browsers (mainly because the damn browser simply cant save a web page in the background, an annoying quirk that they’ve carried over to IE9) but that is it. I’ve always loved the ease of use of Windows and the ease with which one can throw together applications for the platform. Somehow, up to this point, Linux for me was strictly for server side purposes. And I somehow had never managed to disassociate it with the dreaded command line interface. Actually, as a techie, I don’t have much of a problem with the command line. Its just that I don’t believe I should be subjected to it while doing the simplest of tasks. Like editing a text file for instance. Or accessing the contents of a CD. Given that I was introduced to computing on Microsoft OSes (Windows 3.1, 95 and then NT), I really didn’t see the need to switch. Especially when I started serious coding and discovered Delphi (Windows only unless you had Kylix) and decided it would be my tool of choice. That decision was quite easy given that my target market was all addicted to Windows.

Mind you, I did keep an eye on the progress of Linux and the other consumer OSes out there (MacOS) and would periodically try out different distros. However, I was just too comfortable with Windows and the comfort was enhanced by the fact that I practically never experienced the problems everyone else suffers (viruses, blue screens etc) apart from a few isolated incidents at my work place. Home – nop. But my trial sessions always ended with me concluding Windows was just too nice to abandon. Remember, this was the time Windows started shipping with all manner of drivers pre-installed and yet we still had to mount drives on Linux.

Fast forward a few years and what do I see now? First of all, the Ubuntu installer is small enough to fit on a normal CD (700MB). Which means you can comfortably download it over a lousy link. Then the installation process is such a breeze – wow! And the PC I’m using (a humble HP Compaq) is noticeably faster than when it was running Win 7. Actually, make that MUCH faster! And guess what? No mounting anything! I plugged my USB pen drive into the machine, grabbed a pdf and sent it as an attachment using a wifi link that I simply connected to without having to ‘man’ anything. But the biggest reason why I think the Windows ecosystem is in serious trouble is what I realised after using the laptop for a few hours. Most of the stuff I was doing was web based using the excellent Firefox that ships with the OS. And I rarely found myself doing things that I’d be doing differently on Windows. So, the average computer user out there would find very little different to what they are accustomed to on Windows.  Interestingly for a developer like myself, it appears it is now officially easier to install the tools I need on Linux (Ubuntu) than it would be on Windows. Of course, I can’t do my Delphi development. But installing stuff like IDEs (NetBeans, Eclipse etc), databases (MySQL, Postgres), application and webservers (Tomcat, Apache) is so much easier! And all this is free. How much longer can Microsoft go on charging for their OS when Linux distros have reached this level of sophistication and ease-of-use? Note that I haven’t even mentioned the security angle.

As far as I can see, people are going to start waking up and smelling the coffee. For people like me who are tied to Windows by virtue of the fact that our target market dictates thus, what happens when they start demanding that their apps be availed on the Linux platform? Guess that will be the end of our Microsoft love affair then. Of course, I don’t think Microsoft will collapse – the company is too rich and has too many smart people in its employment. However, I’m sure they know the future will be very different to the past 30 years. In the meantime, let me enjoy Ubuntu even more (when I can).

So, Microsoft unleashes what is supposed to be the second coming of the browser – Internet Explorer 9. Of course, the curious geek in me demands that I immediately check it out and take it for a spin. ACID, js execution speed, aesthetics and ease of use etc. So, off I went to the Microsoft site and navigated all the way to the IE9 page. Just before clicking ‘Download’ though, what helpful tooltip do you think popped up? See it for yourself.

Very helpful tooltip...

Classic case of copy/paste from the Website team at Microsoft. Good to see it doesn’t happen to only small guys like me!

For real! Ok, it turns out he is a woman this time. Don’t believe it? Then check this out. I’d recommend you run to the nearest cinema thereafter (please note that cinema != torrent site)