Ronald Leonard Egesa

As we draw closer to the 2011 elections, Dr. Kizza Besigye and his IPC colleagues continue to charge that there will not be any elections until the Electoral Commission is reconstituted. In order to achieve this objective, they are preparing and staging demonstrations.
While Besigye and his IPC leadership will mobilise and rally poor market vendors and unemployed youth to go for the demonstrations, after the day’s demonstrations and run-ins with the Police and Kiboko squad, Besigye and the IPC top brass will receive their share of NGO funds. The poor market vendors and unemployed youth will go home on empty stomachs, as their hatred for the ruling regime multiplies.
Critically looking at this situation, it tilts the playing field in Besigye’s favour as his initial game plan is to create hatred for the regime and prepare the local population for war.
I think Besigye and his IPC top brass need to respect these low income earners and their families and stop using them as cannon fodder!
Also, Dr. Besigye, Dr. Olara Otunnu and the IPC have taken it upon themselves to speak for Ugandans by demanding a changed Electoral Commission. This too is unfair to Ugandans, since the voice of democratic Ugandans is through Parliament which vetted and approved the Electoral Commissioners. For Besigye and his group to purport to be speaking for Ugandans is to undermine the principles of democracy that they claim to be fighting for!
Ronald Leonard Egesa,
Kampala.

Published in The Weekly Observer of 01/07/2010

A lot has been said since the Easter Sunday remarks by Archbishop Cyprian Kizito Lwanga about the central government-Buganda question. The archbishop must have been busy so as not to notice that the Mengo establishment held talks with the central government in 2005 and reached an agreement which preferred devolution (regional tier) to the old feudalism that some of the conservatives were pushing for, only to turn around and reject something that was unanimously endorsed by the Lukiiko.

The learned bishop relates the Buganda-Uganda question to the Vatican-Italy question. He should note that the Vatican controlled the Italian economy through and through whereas in Uganda, the capital can be shifted and the economy is not controlled by the Mengo establishment through and through, therefore they cannot boast the same bargaining power as the Vatican boasted.

While the archbishop has a right as a citizen to express his view on the political climate in the country, he ought to remember that he has a duty of not dividing his flock on political grounds. It is therefore my humble prayer that the aArchbishop steers clear of political talk.

Ronald Leonard Egesa,
Kampala
Email: leo@ronaldegesa.com

Published in the Daily Monitor of April 20, 2010

Ndorwa West MP David Bahati is the news man of the moment. What I find interesting though is the fact that those opposed to his private members’ bill are failing to give good reasons to convince the liberals to join their side. The media has been awash with headlines pointing at the powerful people of the west (President Obama, Top US Diplomat Hillary Clinton, British Premier Gordon Brown and the Canadian Premier among others) being against this bill. One of these was quoted as saying that passing this bill into law would be a major setback in the protection of human rights!

Interestingly, top Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda and Scientist and leader of opposition in Uganda, Prof Morris Ogenga Latigo argue that homosexuality is a trait exhibited by a small proportion of the human race just as is the case in other animal species. This is the reason they are suggesting that the bill is uncalled for and it is diversionary. I would like to remind these two learned men that every human being is born with a trait of theft and deceit among other common sins! For this very reason Jesus asked the fellows who brought a prostitute before him to front only one who had sinned not to be the first to cast a stone unto her! We all know that at one time in our lives, we have stolen something from a friend, brother, sister or even told a lie to achieve wealth, but we never oppose legislation that is geared towards addressing acts of Theft and telling lies and uttering false documents. Why then are we so much determined to fight the Bahati bill? Something is fishy here! There must be more than meets the eye that we must look out for in whoever is coming out to call sodomy a “HUMAN RIGHT”! It is also on record that Hon. Margaret Muhanga (sister to Andrew Mwenda) once said that God did not create Adam and Steven, but created Adam and Eve. She ought to tell this to her baby brother.

On the other hand, making the legislation is laudable and promising to make Uganda one of the most dangerous destinations for sodomists, but the question is will this law be implemented? What happens when the fellow implicated in sodomy is your brother, sister, father, mother, friend? These people who are close to you would be implicated in having had knowledge of homosexual activity in the vicinity. It is very hard to prove beyond reasonable doubt that someone had prior knowledge of sodomy between a pair of two other consenting adults since this does not amount into a conspiracy. Why then don’t we have such clauses in the penal code when dealing with theft or robbery or trespass?

In conclusion, the Bahati bill is a step in the right direction to let the sodomists not set foot in our motherland Uganda, but it needs to be panel-beaten to remove some clauses that are not directly dealing with the sodomists themselves. There is no point in the law being harsh to third parties who have other pressing issues to deal with.

FOR GOD AND MY COUNTRY

Ronald Leonard Egesa
Email: leo@ronaldegesa.com
Tel: +256-752-442375
Kampala

Since its introduction, the Land (Amendment) Bill 2007 has met stiff resistance from the Mengo establishment. The government, as proponents of the Bill, has always made their case that it seeks to fight illegal evictions and when one reads the Bill, this seems to make sense.

On the other hand, Mengo and a number of MPs from Buganda have only been telling us that the Bill is “targeting” Buganda Kingdom where the Kabaka is the main landlord.

The interesting bit here is that the Bill’s opponents have not for once told us how the Bill is targeting Buganda. I have listened to many opponents of the Bill and none is answering the ‘how’ question.

Since the Bill is only hostile to landlords who seek to forcefully evict tenants, save for failure to pay ground rent, is Mengo then trying to tell us that the ‘Ssabattaka’ has plans of evicting some tenants in future for reasons other than failure to pay rent?

Are Mengo and its supporters telling us that the major landlord may in the future want to sell off his land without giving tenants the first option of buying? Or is Mengo merely playing the political hate card against President Museveni and his regime?

It is also on record that the same Mengo establishment once passionately opposed the 1998 Land Act whereas it is now turning around to say that the 1998 Land Act is sufficient and only needs rigorous implementation!

Ronald Leonard Egesa,
Kampala.

Published in the The Daily Monitor of Monday 30/Nov/2009 and the Weekly Observer of 03/Nov/2009

I needed to backup a mysql database on a computer different from the one on which it was running and I set a cron task executing the commands below:


mysqldump -ce --user=username --password=password dbname | gzip | uuencode dbbackup_e.gz | mail email@address.com


The backup file in compressed .gz format will be mailed to the email that you specify and will always have a small size as a result of the enconding and compression.

Enjoy as you backup your data!

Why western democracy cannot work in Africa?

I have said this over and over and I still continue to get mixed responses –as if I have killed a person. The western world knows it very well that there are stages of social and infrastructural development that a country must undergo prior to achieving democracy, but they will not stop to demand mature democratic practices from the third world countries of Africa. It is the only way the western world will maintain its superiority!
Whoever claims to love Africa cannot fail to see this. Africans as opposed to Europeans have strong ethnic ties that are yet to be broken and the accountability is not one of the high values in many of the traditional African tribes. On the other hand, the western model of democracy places accountability at the top of the values that must be upheld. In simple terms, it is not possible to claim a working democracy without accountability to the stakeholders. Accountability is expected of the President, the Electoral Commission, the Parliament, the local leaders and all other people in the positions of responsibility. In traditional Africa, there was a king/chief who was keenly advised by a council of elders/wise men in society and he did whatever he felt was good for his subjects! The aspect of Patriotism in African societies was inherent. People were born patriots and there was no need to preach it outside the fireplace or mealtimes.

Times have changed. Communication channels have gone global, Africans have travelled around the world, the pressure to be like the ‘developed world’ is more than ever before! This has resulted in Africans themselves demanding more from the leaders than the ground can hold. The leaders are in charge of leading and being accountable to groups of people of diverse ethnic and cultural heritage who were forced to live and work together as nations by the white man! The diversity in cultural identity puts the individual above society – the bad one –corruption is then born naturally out of selfishness. The largest group that people can be patriotic about is the extended family and beyond that, it fades away just like that. It is now very common to see African leaders heaping riches for their Children and their grand children.
As if demanding mature democracy from us is not harmful enough, the western world goes an extra mile and extends donor aid with rosy reasons like reducing mortality rates, supply of clean water among others while in the darkness they sit and connive with the selfish leaders of our countries to rob our natural resources such as oil and other minerals, not forgetting the ‘English tea’ that was grown in Kenya and Zimbabwe! I strongly maintain that the only way Africa will ever get to catch up with the western world is by first prospering in beneficial trade from its natural resource without western exploitation, and then democracy shall set in naturally. One only needs to study the political history of Japan in the last 100 years to appreciate the natural evolution of working democracy when the necessary social and infrastructural development has taken place.
There is simply no way someone will govern or rig elections with impunity and go unpunished when the levels of literacy in a country are over 90%. The same cannot happen when more than 90% of the population is in gainful employment. Until the social and physical infrastructural transformation takes place, western democracy will never be perfected in the land of our ancestors!

1 Information System and Computer Technologies

1.1 Introduction:

The term Information system refers to a system of people, data records and activities that process the data and information in an organization, and it includes the organization’s manual and automated processes. Information systems are widely used in the form of computer based information systems and spatial based information systems such as Geographical/Land/Disaster information systems. For the purpose of this presentation, we shall restrict ourselves to computer based information systems and computer technologies for improved service delivery in secondary schools in Uganda.

1.2 Scope:

Information systems and computer technologies can be used to deliver services in secondary schools to both the student and teacher populations. The teachers definitely need more efficient, computer based ways to managing records, assessing students and carry out evaluation and communicate its results to the stakeholders. The student population on the other hand needs more efficient, exciting, and interactive computer based ways of accessing educational content and interacting with teachers. We are going to explore the two requirements, see what is in place and the way forward.

2 MANAGEMENT

2.1 ADMINISTRATION:

The administration of secondary education in Uganda has in the past been faced with a number of challenges and this continues to cause a number of challenges as evidenced by the cases of students striking and citing poor administration. In many of such cases; there is always a communication barrier between the school headteacher and/or Board of Governors and the other stakeholders who are the parents.

One way of avoiding such communication breakdowns is by adopting information systems in the form of Management information systems that will assist in faster access of information by the head teacher whenever he/she needs it and also help him/her in getting that information to the other stakeholders.
There are a number of software companies that have developed finance management systems for schools. These include Magezi Finpro – a web based finance management and accounting system.

The adoption of such a system make it possible for the school head to access key financial statements any time and be in the know of the financial status of the school, thus plan effectively.
Some of these web based system have the ability to allow the school capture the email and mobile telephone details of the parents. With the email of the parents on the system database, it becomes possible to always communicate aspects relating to student financial status, student conduct and health at school by way of email message or sms. This leads us to another computer technology that schools will need to embrace –the internet. The internet is a powerful communication tool that the school can use to effectively communicate to the stakeholders and improve on service delivery.

With the recent developments in the ICT sector in this country including but not limited to the coming of the optic fibre infrastructure and faster and cheaper internet, more parents will harness the power of the internet as a communication tool, it will therefore imply that schools that have deployed web based Management information systems will have an edge in service delivery and client satisfaction over the others.

2.2 EVALUATION

According to the curriculum in Uganda and world over, one of a teacher’s core activities is evaluation. Teachers often spend valuable time carrying out computations in order to derive meaningful evaluation of the students. The computations and summarizing of vital performance related data of students can be done using computer technologies –this calls for the adoption of Academic Records Management systems such as ARMS from Makerere University Faculty of Technology, Magezi Harvest developed by Magezi Solutions, School Management Information System (SMIS) developed by Kampala Computer center among others. For instance the Magezi Harvest system performs all the computations, provides flexibility on grading systems, can be integrated with finance systems, provides statistics and graphs for performance analysis, generates the transcripts/reports, marksheets among others that help teachers in making better evaluation and improve on service delivered to students.

2.3 INNOVATIVE LEARNING METHODS

With the number of computer in Ugandan secondary schools increasing and the student to computer ration drooping, there is always going to be an opportunity to come up with more innovative computer based learning methods. Learning material can be available to students by way of:
• Multimedia CDs
• Browser based resources browsed off local content servers at school
• Downloadable Material from the internet.
• Internet portals operating like social networking sites for students and teachers alike.

Born in late 1984, I can easily pass for a ‘Museveni kid’. I have admired Mr Museveni all my life and he has inspired me in setting out to achieve my dreams. I am however confused now, since after 23 years in power, I’m seeing things that I would expect to find in a Failed State- like what we have been taught about the Amin regime. We are seeing unwarranted detentions, reports of torture in ‘safe houses’, poor condition of roads even in the capital, corruption and embezzlement, claims of nepotism in national institutions, reports of land grabbing by army men, people dying of famine, rampant riots, claims of vote rigging, use of force to suppress frequent demonstrations, rise of ritual and contract murders and rampant school fires. The question still lingering in my mind is: when will the ‘fundamental change’ dream be realised? Any honourable leader or freedom fighter ought to accept failure and pave way for fresh blood to come in with new ideas.

Ronald Leonard Egesa,
256-752442375

This was published in the letters section of The Daily Monitor newspaper of August 21 2009

I am greatly disappointed in the city council engineering team in Kawempe Division. There seems to be a general lack of vigilance in the leadership of Kawempe Division and Kampala as a whole. Since the start of the year, I have observed that the state of Sir Apollo Kaggwa Road at the junction with Makerere Hill Road between Makerere College School and Chez Johnson has been terrible and nothing is being done.

In the past five years, I have witnessed three accidents involving deaths at that point and two of them resulted from someone trying to dodge a pothole. The problems in this area stem from the failure to properly drain water and take it off the road surface. I do not think working on this joint would produce a budget deficit for Kawempe Division or Kampala City Council and even if it did, such a deficit would justify the need for more financial support!

Another dangerous point is the pothole just before the roundabout at Kubbiri on Bombo Road. All vehicles and bikes try to squeeze on the narrow section of the road where the tarmac is still intact. This started like a small pothole, but it has eaten up the three quarter width of the road and it will not be long before we see lives lost at this spot.

KCC, it is my humble request that you take it upon yourselves to always fix these small potholes before lives are lost!

Ronald Leonard Egesa,
Kampala
leo@ronaldegesa.com

Published in the Daily Monitor on Monday August 3, 2009