14 November 2009
analysis
Kampala — ONCE, Uganda was closed off from the rest of the world. With one radio and TV station, mainstream religions, one university and no Internet, people had no choice. Timothy Bukumunhe looks back at how far Uganda has come and where we are at.
The information superhighway is firmly in Uganda. Back in the 1970s and for the best part of the 1980s, there was no information superhighway. Uganda, under Idi Amin, was basically closed off to the outside world.
We had no e-banking. Religion then was mainstream, and for education, we were limited to one university and no international schools. We also had to contend with UTV (now UBC) and UTV then, was a hotbed for showing anything that emanated from the former Eastern bloc nations.
We used to watch documentaries of soldiers marching in East Germany, Russia, China and North Korea. If UTV were not showing those documentaries, then they we showing us documentaries of Marshall Tito or Chairman Mao.
Even the National Theatre, which is supposed to be an institution that enriches the mind, did not fare any better. 90% of the literature came from - you guessed it - East Germany, Poland, North Korea, China or Yugoslavia.
And though there were telephones, it was not a simple case of making a quick foreign call to find out what is happening on the other side of the world as it is today. There were of course no cell phones which meant, you could not simply pick up your landline (that is if you had one) and make a call.
You had to book a call through a company called Uganda Posts and Telecommunications (now called utl) who would then give you a reference number. After a 30 minute or so wait, the call would come through.
And when it came to radio, we had to make do with Radio Uganda, a drab station that only seemed to air ebirango (death announcements) and news. If they played music, they played ancient stuff that in our frustrations and depending on where you lived, if you were lucky enough you would get a signal from Voice of Kenya which at least played some decent music. And with that, that was the information superhighway of the 1970s.
In the early 1980s, there was some movement on the superhighway but the only people who benefitted where those who lived in the Diamond Trust apartments. On Blacklines House, one of the first satellite dishes sprung up and those fortunate enough to live in Diamond Trust were able to pick up a signal albeit a weak one. But who cared about the weak signal. As long as they could watch anything apart from the dreaded communist documentaries, it was good enough.
Shortly after, the revolution in the form of the VHS video recorder hit town. It was the machine to have for suddenly we had access to foreign movies and television series. We were so starved of anything decent to watch that we watched anything. As long as you borrowed a video tape, we just knew it was worth watching even if it was not.
As time moved on, and President Museveni came to power, the superhighway gathered speed. We suddenly had Sanyu TV, then DStv and followed by a whole host of FM radio stations. While Sanyu Television did not last, it nevertheless gave the populous a chance to see what the free world was like.
But we wanted more than just FM stations and DStv and Sanyu Television. We wanted to know more and that came in the form of the Internet cafes. It was like a boom. Round every corner there was an internet café and people rather than go out for a beer, used to spend their evenings surfing the net.
Then, we had no idea what we were surfing for but we just surfed. People spent more time surfing than sending e-mails because not many people had an e-mail addresses. Now just about everybody has an e-mail address though the once popular yahoo.com or hotmail.com address has been replaced by the users name followed by the place where they work - say joeblogs@newvision.co.ug.
E-mail was the grim reaper for the fax machine and the post office to an extent. People no longer saw any value in using the post office where letters were supposedly stolen. With e-mail, the message was instant and as more and more people got access to e-mail accounts, the more people stopped surfing for 'valuable and enriching information'.
The Internet had only two purposes - e-mail and looking for the latest gossip on Michael Jackson or some movie star.
Today the information superhighway has leap froged. Getting access to information is but a mere click away, but sadly with the birth of Facebook and Twitter, has the information superhighway gone to waste? Probably because, dare we say, that of all the computers in Kampala, when they get switched on, one of the first applications to be opened is Facebook followed by e-mail.
The information superhighway was not limited to television, radio or e-mail. There was the banking industry too. Pre-1986, we used to have just a handful of banks - the likes of Uganda Commercial Bank, Uganda Co-operative Bank, Bank of Baroda, Barclays and Libyan Arab Bank. Banking then was a tedious affair that often involved queuing up in the banking hall for hours on end. Today we have over 15 banks and if our transactions were limited to deposits and withdrawals, there is no need to us to ever step foot into a banking hall because we have access to the ATM.
The banks went a step further, in that you no longer had to give them a car log book or a land title to acquire a loan. As long as you are in full-time employment, you qualified for a salary loan and because of that, just about everybody who works for a white collar company is driving as well as adding on to the traffic problem within the city.
When it came to religious affiliations, we either went to the mosque or one of the Roman Catholic or Anglican churches. Churches like Rubaga, All Saints, Namirembe and Christ the King were unrivaled. But today, the alternative brands of religion are giving the main stream churches a run for their congregations.
Watoto Church and Rubaga Miracle Centre are almost as big as some of the main stream churches.
Further down the road, there were no International schools while the higher education sector was limited to just Makerere University. But as things progressed there are well over 18 international schools in Kampala now and when it comes to universities, Makerere has some rivals.
Today people go to Makerere just for the prestige but getting a degree from Gulu University, or Ndejje University is equally as good.
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