In this edition of the Uganda News Review, find out about the course taking on corruption and the learning centre tackling a more powerful force: lightning. Also below: radio aids development in Northern Uganda, online government meets with uncertain response, and a monster is hauled out of Lake Victoria. Read on…
Uganda News in brief: Christian University makes laptops a requirement (New Vision) ++++ Parliamentary payrise on the cards (Monitor) ++++ Idi Amin to become tourist trail attraction (New Vision) ++++ Museveni speaks in the Rainbow Nation, stresses African strength and togetherness before foreign domination (East Africa Business Week)
02/04/2014
RADIO: letting the people of Northern Uganda connect with each other to share stories and work together on local development is key to addressing the physical and psychological damage done by long years of war. Rural radio is letting them do just that, according to the Open Society Foundation (video).
AWARDS: Gayaza High School, Kampala, has won an international award for eLearning innovation, for its “E-Market Library”, an online resource bolstering youth job prospects, East Africa Business Week reports. read more about Gayaza High school here.
TECHNOLOGY: it’s supposed to make life simpler: but Internet users worldwide know that outages, network failures and the host of technical difficulties can make using modern technology almost as frustrating as old-school paperwork and filing. Here’s the Monitor’s Joyce Tonda’s view on the weaknesses in Uganda’s infrastructure.
eGOVERNMENT: a new web portal has been set up to ease the flow of information from the Ugandan Government to citizens, East African Business Week reports. While Pius Mwinganisa, principal information officer at the Ministry of Information and National Guidance, claims it will allow the public and journalists to monitor the actions of Government departments, journalists themselves have voiced concern that the portal adds another level of regulation on the press, controlling the information released and restricting the people who can access it.
CORRUPTION: “corruption is a vice that is learnt; nobody is born corrupt” says James Nkata, Director General of the Ugandan Management Institute. This learning institution has just set up an anti-corruption course, aimed at ministers, other politicians and civil servants and teaching such skills as safe whistleblowing, to avoid those in power looking on as the public purse is robbed. The Observer continues the story.
LIGHTNING: many people in Africa believe lightning is the work of the Gods, according to Zambian researcher Foster Chileshe Lubasi. It’s a myth she’s anxious to dispel. As global warming causes an increase in lightning strikes worldwide, the African Centre for Lightning and Electromagnetics has been established in Entebbe, Uganda. The Monitor has more.
SPACE: the second African to leave the outer atmosphere could well be a Ugandan. (The first was the appropriately-named SA entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth.) Ashish J Thakkar is also, at 30, Africa’s youngest billionaire – and more impressively, he built his empire, ranging from ICTs to tourism, from scratch. He is interviewed in News Day.
and in other news…
NATURE: it may be a week of records for Uganda: a man-eating, 80-year-old, one-ton crocodile has been caught at Kakira on Lake Victoria and transferred to a National Park. New Vision speculates that this could be one of the largest crocodiles ever caught in the world.
