Speaking Swahili to Bill Gates: How Uganda lost out to ‘computer games’

Young, playful and carefree. That is what we were during the bad old days of gun-rule in Uganda. So we invented some silly games with my brother to “alarm” our parents.

Standing within earshot of the adults but pretending not to be aware of their presence, we would hold a conversation in rapid Swahili.
Of course, we did not know any Swahili. Nobody in Uganda, except members of the armed forces and women with the reputation of frequenting Mombasa for “work” spoke Swahili in those days.

But a number of Swahili hymns were being sung in school chapels and secular music by the likes of Simba wa Nyika was also popular.

Combining phrases and verses from hymns like the popular offertory Toa Ndugu, and the pop song Sina Makosa, our conversation, translated, would go thus:

ME: Take out whatever you have

HIM: You want to kill me for nothing

ME: The Lord sees whatever you have right unto your heart

HIM: But you have yours at home and I have mine at home, so why the beef?

ME: The time to sacrifice has come, think hard about it
HIM: I swear I am innocent, I have done nothing wrong

Our shocked parents were left wondering if we had been hanging out with bad elements. But the lie could not last; soon, uniformed men came kicking in the door on their routine searches. They asked questions and issued orders in Swahili, which nobody understood, roughed us up a bit and moved on to the next house.

Our parents then asked us why we had not translated what the soldiers had been saying, and we confessed we did not actually know any Swahili.

These days, Swahili is no longer a mystery in Uganda. The new mystery tongue is Information Technology. And we have some playful adults around to confuse the masses with what they do not know.

For a decade or so, they have been convincing the public that they are experts and a whole ministry of ICT has been created. One past ICT minister was even alleged to be a personal friend of Bill Gates, so the voters were told.

Like our non-existent Swahili, which could not save the family from the soldiers’ boots and gun butts, the avowed credentials of our IT gurus have failed to get Uganda out of the computer backwaters. Billions upon billions of shillings have been spent on highly touted IT projects with dismal results.

The national Internet backbone, the identification of persons project, voter registration systems, the migration to digital of national broadcasting systems, all have landed on the long list of failed projects. All that is left is for the media to count how many billions are lost in these “computer games.”

Joachim Buwembo is a Knight International fellow for development journalism. E-mail: buwembo@gmail.com