The Bank, Competitions & Awards

What have I been up to? Well, a lot apparently.

On Thursday 12^th I was invited on behalf of Speakers Without Borders to attend a stakeholder workshop hosted by the Bank of Uganda on rolling out a National Financial Literacy and Consumer Protection Education Policy to provide insights gained from working among young people on how to approach “these things”. Basically, the “banks are fucking the consumers” and we need to tell people to avoid getting well, screwed. The discussion ranged from simple things like the cooling off period between loan applications and funds disbursement to the glaring gap in the report on how to actively engage and sustain the financial literacy discussion among the young adults in Uganda despite the sheer weight they exert on the demographic tables.  Also there are over 150,000 Ugandans on Face book. Most of those are not my parents’ age. So, why not?  Use everything available as long as they are getting the message. I gave my two cents there.

On Friday the 13^th, I was invited by Mambo Guy, an old buddy who I’ve known for forever, President of the The Lantern Meet, connoisseur of fine things, and architect - to attend the Final presentation of Kitenge Spaces. This cat is really smooth. About a year ago he won a grant from The Youth Action Fund under the auspices of the Open Society Institute (EA) to run a competition for architecture students to design Afro-centric spaces. His belief that architecture is culture and therefore a reflection of our common identity is a debate that’s raged on over the years between him and I. Basically because I think that the spiel that spaces define people is academic hogwash but rather that people define the spaces they live in. Anyway over the course of a year he has had the contestants design and submit objects and space designs to a panel of young and rather erudite architects. This competition is Kitenge Spaces.

Mambo Guy

"Just as a noun is only a noun if it possesses a “verbal companion,” a house is not a house unless it has a proper primary function, from which it will derive its spirit. So the house gives, and the house takes, but the house cannot be unless needs qualify it... like a genie that one summons out of a lamp, to answer to ones needs."

Yesterday, as I sat at the National Theatre and listened to a young man talk about the communality of the African meal and why, that, of all spaces, should be the most well lit space in the house, I knew that Guy had done it. He’d come from where 3 of us sat 5 years ago and talked about being “that man” and taken the road. “That man” is the guy who does not take what he is given, but rather will consistently, infect, affect and effect everything around him with change; constantly saying “NO! This isn’t enough” and asking for more soup, re-defining his own boundaries, pushing the horizon a little further and, without knowing it, making the lives of many, many people mean so much more. Now the world has to watch out. He is coming.

Later in the evening I attended the Public Relations Association of Uganda (PRAU) Excellence Awards Dinner where they were awarding the best PR campaigns, practitioners, companies, agencies and organizations. In what was an almost serendipitous occasion, URA swept three awards all in the corporate communications category, The “ONE LOVE” Campaign by ZK Advertising for UHMG (the “sexual network” campaign for those of you who don’t know it yet) was voted the Overall Best Campaign of 2009/2010. I for one was happy because having personally worked on the submissions for  and designed the communication materials for two of the winning entries –Best Event PR, The Johnnie Walker Launch in Uganda (covered aptly in this post here but also very well taken care of by Google. Hehe!), and the Best Crisis Management Award for President Lager - a Uganda breweries product that was interdicted right before Christmas last year by Nile Breweries from bottling the product in a long neck bottle.

Cheers catch up later!

Thought Leadership: The Game is changing.

Uganda, the land of milk and honey, corruption and money. A beautiful kaleidoscopic picture of zen view sunsets and the gory dod-eat-dog world of modern-day capitalism. To the naked eye, the country is preparing for elections in 2011 but to the trained eye the powers that be are in anarchy.

Over the past few weeks there have been relatively few ads in the newspapers. Well this is what has been going on…

A couple of months ago all the media houses in Uganda got together and decided that agencies who book, sell, and plan media buying for the corporate machine owed them too much money and therefore they were going to stop running all adverts. They called a meeting to talk about this and they were right; agencies and clients together owed the media houses a whopping [Red Pepper style] UGX 5.9 Billion! They gave the agencies, who foolishly agreed, 90 days in which to address the delicate matter with their respective clients and get back to them. 

 90 days later.

A couple of weeks ago Robert “KaBush” (from here on known as Bush), summoned the mother of all meetings, he and his Nation Media Group counterpart Dr. Githinji (did you know he was a gynecologist?) had amassed all their smaller and diverse media cronies and, seated at the head of the table, announced that all advertising was going to stop running. They had done what scholars and industry watchers had thought was unthinkable, let alone undoable. They had blacklisted all media agencies; a blanket ban.
The review meeting following this announcement showed that the agencies had managed to bring down their debt to about UGX 2.9 Billion claiming that some of their clients were adamant to pay or had stricter payment procedures and therefore had not been able to remit the balance in the 90 days pending. So all advertising was going off air.

He shouldn’t have

One, been positioned as the leader of the fight against the corporate machine because that evening nearly all MDs, CEOs, and CFOs of the corporate machine met separately to discuss this new turn of events while simultaneously the agencies also met to digest this new twist to things.

Two, put a blanket ban on the all the agencies because not all agencies had failed to pay. Therefore the whole industry being victimized for one agency’s lack of fiduciary wisdom was not perceived as just or bright.

Three, stood together with his competition to try and “Enforce” a measure that he felt was for the “greater good” because in the end he will still be standing alone to his shareholders to account for what’s happening to their investments.

The results of the meetings.

The Bush meeting ended up with an alliance signed in blood committing all the media houses to a cooperation where if you owe any single media house money e.g. Observer, you will not get be able to run your advertisement in any other newspaper. Of course this would mean increased cooperation amongst the media houses but it also posed the precarious question of commitment and solidarity. In a time when the market is shrinking and print media budgets are quickly being replaced you don’t want to be caught biting the advertisers’ hand. 45 extra days were given and ZK Advertising, the second largest spender of advertising in East Africa 2009 and Ignition were blacklisted. All their advertising was blocked and no work would be coming through them from anyone. Instead, the media houses circumvented the agencies and went directly to the clients and got the adverts directly.
The MDs and CEO meeting resulted in reimbursement bills to their secretaries for coffees and networking time spent discussing “industry re-formation”. They all however agreed that what Bush had done was undesirable and they would have to find a way of punishing the bad boy for his behaviour. “Let’s pull all our advertising from him”, someone whispered, but just like the whisper, he was asked to speak quietly because they all needed Bush.

The agency meeting yielded slightly more than the above because they ended up forming something called the Agencies’ Association of Uganda. (AAU? Kind of funny considering how much weed and alcohol those guys consume no?) They, on the other hand decided to coalesce and give a united position to the Media Owner’s Association, which had triggered all of this. Some radicals said they should get together with their clients and force the media houses to apologize and come to more amenable terms of payment and relationships.
What does this mean for the future?

The Bush and the Gynecologist are definitely not being loved in a lot of client circles and if you are keen there will noticeably be reduced invitations to them to attend corporate functions in the period ahead. 

A certain guerilla caucus has come together to find all the ways in which the Vision conglomerate and the Nation behemoth are replaceable starting with the newspapers. Starting at the top, they are re-doing the research, figures, rationales, and psychographics to justify why all the FMCG companies and the corporatocracy should shift from mainstream media and now invest in more audience-driven forms of media. Perhaps new media even; blogs, Facebook, websites, twitter, You Tube, mobile phone ads, etc. We know that Fireworks has a team dedicated to online/new media; surveying, analyzing, studying, experimenting. Are they about to propose a radical shift to their clientele that will extend the advertising frontier, once again?

The smaller players in this convoluted power play have failed to get their erections up to speak up for their rights and so they are doing what they know to do best; going behind the big boys and saying ”Those guys are doing their own thing, you just give me my thing.” The disconnect this has created is not to be ignored. The agencies have not and will not. What they do next with this crack will probably shake the media industry like we have never seen. Perhaps a total advertising blacklist of New Vision, or the Nation Group?

Let’s wait and see.

The agencies have become galvanized under one umbrella body. Whether this is a good thing or not can only be seen with the passing of time. The Scangroup behemoth (East Africa’s largest spender and biggest marketing services provider) is in search of a Ugandan Telco to bolster its ranks. They already have the East African Breweries and the regional Lafarge business to cater to. When I spoke with CEO to one of the agencies that handle one of the Telcos, she said, “What I think we should do is organize as the big agencies and squeeze these small motherfuckers out of business. Because if we dare try and stand against the media houses, they will go behind our backs and confuse our clients and next thing you know we will be royally shafted here. They can do it.” What she meant was squeeze the agencies without big clients out of business by negotiating better commissions from the media houses through bulk buying. What this would do in essence would be to force the industry to re-align reporting, billing and fiscal control procedures. So one uniform billing document recognizable across the industry, one process. A clear signal of progress in the industry but what does it truly mean for the clients? In a world of organized and unionized advertising, there are no surprises, no game-changers, and definitely no lowered costs. The client looking for clear, distinctive and outstanding advertising and market presence will have to literally go rogue, but which agency will, or can? The argument can be made that a lot of agencies will think out of the box and go rogue. That is until they become isolated by fellow agencies, over charged by the media houses and soon rejected by the corporate machine; killing creativity, and dulling the sharp, incisive edge that it takes to cut through today’s’ advertising clutter. What is dizzyingly clear though is that the industry will never be same after this. 

Bush promised the powers that be a platform on which he would deliver the 2011 election. He gave them Bukedde TV, has opened a radio in every mainstream local dialect and is on a roll to revamp the local language papers. This happens amidst an environment where all media houses are trying to acquire more media houses. KFM, currently the most listened to station in inner and greater Kampala, is shopping for upcountry stations to bolster its arsenal of listenership and footprint, while Dembe FM recently acquired the rural based Rwenzori FM. So as the media landscape’s tectonic plates continue to shift and change one thing is for sure; we are on the cusp of something that has happened in very few other countries: Uganda is preparing to leap frog – Again!

What network are you on?- A Character Exhibition

Two years ago I met up with Jesse "Tuks" as his friends know him and we shared ideas on how the youth and the future were the key to changing Uganda and its direction. he introduced me to the most debate and conversational conundrum i had faced to date. I still use this discussion in my talks with young people and as mind nibbler.

Jesse's passion about a righteous nation did not stem entirely from a religious stand point, but also from a deeply human place. He argued that a society's leaders were elected because they were the best that society had to offer; they were its torch bearers, they were the society's benchmark of morality, goodness, kindness, honesty, generousity, hospitality, diligence and passion! He was riled by the stories that were in the papers everyday where politicians, leaders, teachers, parents and icons just got caught up morally compromising situations. It angered him. Not because it prevented him from progressing but because he felt that with role models like this, the future was not protected - our children were not safe, and hence the nation stood on a precipice.A dangerous place where if we were not careful we would plunge into the abyss!

His friend Moses on the other hand believed that leaders were a reflection of what a society was. They had no moral right, or authority or right to be better than the people they led; they were after-all a selection from among the people. Hence in his argument, leaders were society's moral compass, telling of the society's decadence or its depravities.

However both these gentlemen agreed that something had to be done to heal a broken nation.they believed that today's generation had to do something to heal the divide otherwise it was only;y a matter of time until something catastrophic happened.Until the "Have-nots" rose up against the "Haves"and forced them to "return" what was theirs. It is a scenario that has played out across the world for millenia.

Enter Character.Inc, an organization formed to encourage young people to do the right thing, despite all the competing communication around them; don't litter, be honest, work diligently, never cheat, have integrity, have Character - because its "Worth the Price" 

This is how they express their call to all Ugandans, if you get this forward it on to someone, maybe we can build our community, one choice at a time.

And so when they went to Bududa district to take relief to the landslide victims this is what they had to show: Check out the BUDUDA.PDF REPORT.

Enough said.

Come to the Character Exhibition:

GO UGANDA!!!

PRESIDENT OF BURUNDI VISIT TO CIT.

When the President of the Republic of Burundi, H.E. Pierre Nkurunzinza, visited Uganda a few weeks ago to sign a MoU with the Government of Uganda, he took some time off to tour and talk to the people at Makerere University Faculty of Computing & IT.

Apart from touring the facility [currently Africa's largest computing, teaching, research, and consulting facility], he thanked Uganda for continuing to be the regional educational hub. He talked of the possibility of training Burundi graduates at the National Software Incubation Center, instruction in IT, the newly introduced Software Engineering Bachelor's Degree, and the now looming possibility of Uganda as a Business Processing and Outsourcing center for the region.

Some pictures from that occasion:

President Pierre Nkurunzinza with Makerere University Chancellor, Prof. Mondo Kagonyera; and Faculty of Computing & IT, Head of Corporate Relations, Michael Niyitegeka

In the end, it matters more that he saw it fit to visit than that he signed an MoU with our government. the first counts, the second one, well...story of my life.

The Internet of Things: A Talk with IBM CTO

I caught up with Mr. Clifford Forster at the just concluded Digital Africa Summit at hosted at the beautiful Commonwealth Resort Munyonyo where I spent a few minutes chatting with Mr. Forster about his and IBM's vision for Africa.

Name: Clifford Forster

Position: Chief Technical Officer

Company: IBM Africa

Expertise: Consulting and Engineering.

Q: Where does your career with IBM start?

A: I was born, raised and trained in South Africa after which I worked across Europe in Engineering and Consulting. I joined IBM in 2001 as a partner in the Business and Consulting Division. There, I worked as a consultant for Financial Service Institutions across Europe and China.

Q: What was that like?

A: it was a good time and my time spent consulting and delivering projects led me to be named the "IBM Distinguished Engineer" in 2008.

Q: That sounds cool, what does it mean?

A: It's an internal IBM award that recognizes delivery and distinguished service to customers. It reflects and involves a broad range of deep level engineering and high level consulting.

Q: Returning to IBM, what was going on when IBM decided to switch up and reorganize itself?

A: Well, in 2008 IBM wanted to better focus itself on its markets, and that led to IBM identifying its principal markets. It emerged that there were two major groups: Mature or Developed markets and the Growth or Developing markets. The reorganization meant that markets which previously reported to vendors but were emerging would be given full focus and more attention. And that was how Johannesburg was set up as the sub-Saharan African Center of Operations for IBM.

Q: I understand the need to increase investments in order to stimulate growth [which is IBM's justification for concentrating on the African market] but why would you have given up a career in Europe to come back?

A: I am African, firstly (Laughing and smiling deeply). So there was that. The opportunity to have a positive influence on the growth of Africa is majorly what brought me back. I am very intrigued about the trends in Africa. For example, I have heard a lot from the conferences I have been attending lately that clients no longer want to be serviced remotely. What they want is IBM on the ground delivering services to them. They are buying more than a service; they are buying a brand.

Q: Tell me about the IBM Vision…

A: We realized in reorganizing IBM that in order to achieve our objectives, we were going to have to focus our work. The IBM of the future is looking at a smart planet; boiled down to 3 I's.

Enter Smart Planet:

The smart planet concept was guided by three ideas after realizing that the 21^st century had brought with it a substantial increase in inventions but also a fall in prices of technologies. We believe that the future is:

1. Instrumented: Due to the increase in inventions and innovations, we now see sensors embedded in everything; phones, water networks, water quality, electrical networks, power stations, vehicles, fridges and power meters. Everything is measured. The embedded sensors allow almost all gadgets to take measurements and readings.

2. Interconnected: Everything is being connected i.e. There has been a rollout of interconnected telecoms across the continent. So much that it is "Now no longer the internet of people but the internet of things…" connectivity for cars, appliances, cameras, pipelines, livestock, roadways. This means that more and more you need less gadgets. This is because your iPod talks to your laptop, your car talks to your phone, your phone talks to your banker, etc. Right now Africa has about 300 million mobile phones and projections put it at 400 million by 2010, this means that the continent will get eventually all get connected.

3. Intelligent: The use of this information, to support, enable and guide decisions in real time or near-real time.

Q: And your final word?

A: As technologists, we will be judged by the future by how we used emerging technologies to solve the really big problems facing us.

And so the future will be a safer, more connected place, albeit not without challenges, but Africa is positioning itself to be the fertile ground for the next generation's innovations.

FACEBOOK ON MY KABIRITI!!

Only in Kampala, the city of cool do these things happen.

Blogville Brace Yourselves ! ! !

You can now update your facebook status from your mobile phone. Not your high end programmable phone with a camera and I don't know whatever; I mean a low down and cheap phone that has fallen in the pit a couple of times!

Jon Gosier, a business entrepreneur extraordinaire founded Appfrica.org has been busy! And so today he went live with Status.ug developed by Mr. Felix Kitaka, a young brilliant incubator at Appfrica.

"Appfrica.org facilitates, mentors and incubates entrepreneurs in software in East Africa and Uganda. It offers a physical space with a solid internet connection, servers, software and computers that allows students and recent graduates a place to develop their ideas in a constructive environment…"

Dig this, the place is complete with mentors!!

"… student projects are refined and prepped to help them secure funding and launch sustainable, profitable businesses. This project, loosely modeled after Paul Graham's Y Combinator, is better known as Appfrica Labs."

And I just lifted this off their site because its not so easy to paraphrase what they were saying.

"Appfrica Labs is a for-profit incubator and software development firm currently based out of Kampala, Uganda. The mission is to offer opportunities and work experience for East African software entrepreneurs so that they can then use their talents to bolster the growing local markets by offering products and services. Appfrica picks up where East African colleges leave off by offering hands-on experience in programming languages like Java, C++, C#,…."

You should check them out. And my life will never be the same again. Ever!

Oh I had forgotten you wanna register, right?

Ok you have to sign up at:

apps.facebook.com/status_ugtek

… Till then …

CITY OF ANGELS

I have always wondered about how life goes on in certain parts of the world... you know? Kampala is the kind of city where nothing will move unless you bribe people. The trauma of owning anything and always being insecure about whether someone will steal it. The fear of achieving lest you court envy from even the most kindred of souls. The constant threat of being run down by a speeding cyclist, because in fairness, there is no way to control those blighters.

The argument has been for a long time that they need to earn an income and the elitist Kampala populace which had now become very lazy, encouraged them. now the boda boda takes you right to the doorstep of where you want to go. The ease. The convenience. The sloth.

Then they started hitting people on the head with iron bars, mugging handbags, robbing innocent members of the snobbish elitist populace that would not ask government to put in place a proper transport system. But then maybe its not the population's fault that the leaders they elect don't represent them in government and instead end up aggrandizing themselves.

And so the pressure was on to ban the boda bodas from the city centre, which quite frankly was a measly-hearted move since they were not offered any option. Government said they should not come into town without permits, helmets, carriers, etc. And they hounded them like animals.

But yesterday, in the midst of an otherwise silent night, Owino market was razed to the ground. A market that has seen women and men educate their children by providing a source of income, a market that has given Uganda's poor urban populations a vestige of self-respect by clothing them in western apparel second hand albeit being second hand. Nearly the only where you could get something unique; something without the multiplied feeling of Chinese copycat fabric produced for 1 billion people.

I shopped there growing up [no i didn't stop, i just haven't bought clothes in a long time] and i was told by the guy who sold me shirts that the suits they unwrapped which were good were actually sold to the upmarket stores to go for upwards of UGX 1 million! Now this population is caught without an out. They have taken loans, borrowed, buried their life savings into this. 25,000 lives changed by one action. What of all their dependents, families, their children at campus? This is tantamount to terrorism!

And the politicians have the audacity to howl empty promises while hurling insults at government? To mock our parents, our neighbours, our wives' mothers, our friends our fellow countrymen? can any nation sink any lower in its sh*t and filth? Can we be more callous to people who genuinely want to earn an honest living? We forgave Mabira, we overlooked Temangalo, we turned the other side when the valley dams burst [wait, were they ever built?] and the helicopters that never flew? We were even willing to bail out Makerere, an institution drowning in mismanagement and incompetence! The

It has been said that a country gets the leaders it deserves. A filthy, pilfering country led by kleptomaniacs, so fragmented its tottering on the smoldering precipice of tribal clash outbreak does not deserve good leaders does it?

Or does it? Because Tukacungura Jesse, founder of Charaterdot inc. says no. He says leaders are the torch bearers for the people they lead. despite the fact that they are selected from amongst the rotten populace, they must rise above their larcenous geneology, the impulse to pilfer, and become models, icons if even only for the purpose to inspire.

In the end, these people who work and toil and sweat and eat the sewerage that runs through their workplace are the ones who pay for everything that the politicians enjoy and covet. They are the ones who vote, the ones who take loans, who send their kids to school, who buy all that investor -produced sugar and tea! who bloody buy airtime! They are the reason that most of these banks exist! These are the reason there is a tax base in Kampala! They support this city and almost this country on their shoulders! on nothing but those lean shoulders. They close ranks and hold tight and the politicians dance on the table atop, puckering their lips to the top leadership.

They are our angels. watching and complaining but never failing to pay taxes, never running abroad, never going to war. Our silent economic guardians. The real heartbeat of this city. This city of filth, and drama and fear and oppression.

Kampala is a City of Angels.