Rebecca Nkore
3 December 2008
opinion
Kampala — The National Book Trust of Uganda (NABOTU) was formed in 1997 to promote a reading culture in Uganda.
To this cause, they have an annual Book Week Fest and this year's was held under the theme: "Publishing for Lifelong learning."
Apart from being poorly organised and publicised, the event could hardly promote the reading culture. The trust challenges are not as soluble as it might seem, although for a country which does not care about books much, even a reminder that they exist, would be like chasing a black dog in the night.
A big percentage of our learned middle class families, have television racks rather than book shelves in their living rooms. So the reading culture is not easily groomed from our homes either.
For a country whose priority is literacy and prosperity for all, the attitude Ugandans have towards acquiring knowledge, should be more aggressive than what we have in place.
Though the Government policies and budget allocations toward education are appreciated, it is not followed up to streamlined reading as a culture.
Some licensed government and private schools still lack libraries and the declining academic standards are blamed on poor access to supplementary reading materials.
Yet for schools which have books, the children have limited access. Most schools have very prohibitive rules and keep no records of books and borrowers.
There should be efforts to equip teachers with library management skills so as to improve the management and supply of books.
Th education ministry should have devised an alternative, before scrapping the decentralisation instruction materials procurement programme.
According to NABOTU, the future of 300 bookshops which were established under that programme now hangs in balance. Children from the lowest levels of education should be mentored towards the values of reading. The current trend, however, is that when children get interest in reading there is no one to encourage them read.
Extra-curricular activities in schools should not only include syllabus related clubs like science, geography and Interact clubs, but reading and book clubs as well.
Recitals and presentations can be sowed into the norm of inter house or interschool competitions where drama productions written by students are encouraged. This will shape students toward reading and improve their grades. Students who read extensively excel academically.
Unfortunately, the norm is for our university and college students to photocopy pages and chapters of a given topic of study thus limiting them to knowledge so parochial.
The results are evident in our graduates who still struggle with grammar, punctuation and word usage. As NABOTU had crafted this year's book festival theme, learning should be a lifelong process because knowledge is power.
We can learn a lot from other forms of edutainment but reading is the best source of acquiring knowledge. Television, sports, local entertainment fetes and theatrics have a lot to teach us but it has been too commercialised that it reduces our creativity.
Those who have achieved should share their knowledge. Just as they grace album launches and gala nights, our celebrities, politicians and opinion leaders should root for book festivals and reading.
The private sector and corporate organisations should come aboard and sponsor reading events. In a market where our locally published books go from sh5,000 to sh15,000 a copy, we should not give excuses for not buying books.
Arguments that compromise the reading culture have been given, such as we are innately word-of-mouth, folklore people as Africans.
For a nation that wants to develop by alleviating poverty, ignorance and disease, knowledge acquisition through reading is a worthy, price to pay.
The writer works with Info Consultancy
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