It's all about U
| 08:05 UK time, Monday, 21 May 2007
Not my line, but one stolen from one of the thousands of adverts for Ugandan cell-phone providers that appear everywhere here.
We landed just a few metres from Lake Victoria yesterday morning (by design, not mistake) and drove through the lush rolling hills that seperate from the Ugandan capital Kampala. After a week in Abuja, briefly in Lagos, and Accra, the fresh air was a treat.
There's a lot to mention today...
HEALING, PREACHING AND PRAYING
Benny Hinn is in town and you can’t miss him. All over town there are billboards announcing his arrival. who was invited to preach and heal here by Janet Museveni (Uganda’s first lady). This Friday and Saturday he appeared in front of tens of thousands of people and, according to the papers here, performed miracles. These included making deaf children hear and disabled children walk. I’d not heard of him before, but people here certainly have and very very few people seem anything other than delighted that he’s come.
LIVE FROM KAMPALA TODAY
We’re live from in Kampala today. If you’d like to take part, or raise questions or talking points, post below.
SEEING IS BELIEVING
±á±ð°ù±ð’s a video of all of us doing a quick interview for Wednesday’s programme from a busy junction in Accra…and click on the Flickr link on the right to see lots of photos of the trip as well.
WE JUST DON’T HAVE THE ENERGY
This is the one that keeps coming up. Nigerians on Monday and Tuesday complained of the disruption that power cuts cause. On Friday, Kwaku in the audience in Accra put it simply. ‘I have not been to work for three days this week. The electricity is off so we all go home. It's slowing the country up.’ Further west in Senegal supplies for this power stations it’s unclear where large parts of the country will get power from next week.
Hans drove us from the airport yesterday. Electricity was one of the first things he mentioned. ‘People say we don’t pay the bills, but why should we? It’s so expensive and a lot of the time they don’t give us the power we are paying for.’ (If you heard Friday’s show, you’ll know this is an echo of what many Ghanaians told us.)
Michael and Richard are producing this show and we’ve got generators, candles and electric lamps for today’s programme as the power can’t be relied upon. And in the short-term this is going to get harder for Ugandans, especially those who use generators as a back up. The pipe supplying diesel from Kenya was damaged last month andmeant that less diesel is making it here at the moment. So there's an unreliable national grid, and an unreliable source of fuel for your generator. It’s making people very angry.
On the horizon is a potential solution. Lake Victoria already has two power stations, but falling levels on the lake (an separate environmental issue which people are also tuning into) mean they’re not delivering as much as energy as they can. Now , primarily funded by a sizeable World Bank loan. In theory this will make power cuts a thing of the past but as this dam has been planned since the early 90s, I doubt Ugandans will be breaking out the Guinness quite yet.
DO AFRICANS WANT TO WORK TOGETHER?
In Accra, there is an enormous billboard hailing the forefathers of the African Union. As you drive past it, the leaders of many African countries stare down at you. But go to Somalia now and you’ll only see one country representing the AU's peace-keeping force and it's Uganda. It has1700 troops there and in Mogadishu.
In Abuja, Nigerians told us they had their own problems to solve and didn’t want troops going. Ghanaians told us the same. Initial conversations suggest Ugandans aren't too different. Is this because of Somalia’s particularly dangerous circumstances? Or when it comes to it, do Africans simply not have the desire to work together? And if they don’t want, is all the talk of an East African Union for Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda (flag, anthem, single currency and all) simply hot air?
ALL ROUND TO ISSA’S
Issa is a listener to WHYS in Kampala, and thanks to his generosity I’m going to be fulfilling a long-held ambition to take part in a WHYS from a listener’s home. Issa lives about twenty minute drive from the centre, and he and his family and neighbours will be our hosts. We’ve even got a couple of local policemen coming along to check we behave ourselves.
I’ve no end of questions I’d like to ask them , but I’ll happily bite my tongue to see yours answered first. Either email me direct or send your questions to the WHYS email.
Well done if you got to the bottom of this two foot post. I'm off to rest my fingers. Speak to you later.
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