The Too-wit To-woo of Busoga and the need for a regional data centre

My father, Nathan W Mugabira, peace be upon him, served, in his retirement, as Namulesa Village LC 1 secretary throughout my teenage years.

Our home usually doubled as the village court; and there I witnessed grassroots based management, leadership, community engagement and the art of problem solving at play almost daily.

One thing that stood out was a practice that whenever a new person joined a village, they would first report to the LC Secretary with a letter of recommendation or introduction from the LC of their previous host village. That letter spelled out key facts about the individual joining the village: The age, their profession, or source of income, details of their family, if they were married.

That letter, in short, gave the LC leadership a fair understanding of the new village citizen, and by extension a fairer understanding of the village they were superintending over.

It was oblivious to me that the practice was long dead when I, in 2010, attempted to take one such letter to my would-be LC 1 Chair in Namungoona, a Kampala suburb I was relocating to after my university.

“Do not bother, it is not necessary. We don’t even know who it is and where he or she stays,” my neighbor who had stayed in the area longer than I told me.

How then will they know they have a new addition to their village? I wondered. How will they know they have a journalism graduate among their citizens; one working with Daily Monitor at that! How will they speak for me and my interests if they do not even know I live among them? What do they base on to guide and lead the village, gut feeling?

So, when the minister for presidency, the Honorable Milly Babalanda, said, during this year’s Liberation Day Anniversary in Wakitaka, that she had been sent by Basoga to apologize for not voting overwhelmingly for the NRM, I couldn’t stop but wonder which Basoga she was referring to.

Does she even know the population of Busoga and what pains them? I wondered. How many of those can’t access clean and safe water, how many of those die every day because they can’t access emergency medical help? How many of those are graduates but have never had formal employment in their lives? How many of those eat food mixed with dust or can’t ferry their agriculture produce on time to markets because roads are too dusty during the hot season and impassable during the rainy season?

I couldn’t stop wondering; when these our leaders say they are speaking on our behalf, do they know us, not by name, but what we are made of, what we can do, what our inadequacies are and what our aspirations are?

A section of leaders sat and developed the Busoga Development Agenda. After careful deliberation and consideration, they came up with 10 Development Pillars the region should focus on to develop. None touches Sports and Entertainment (the Arts), not even by inference. Busoga, however, is the region that gave the country and the world the talented Rachel Magoola of Afrigo Band, the Late Mowzey Radio, Maata the Blind Guitarist, the multitalented actor, the late Paul Waible Sr, of the Ebonies late 90’s sitcom That’s Life Mwattu; sportsmen like the former Cranes central defender, Isaac Isinde, the former Cranes Captain Andrew Mwesigwa, and a host of track and field athletes and cricketers.

It is a region ripe with talent, but talent development and the arts are, according to the framers of the region’s development agenda, not among the top ten pillars to be focused on in the push for development and shared prosperity (Buntongi).

What are we trying to tell the ten-year-old boy in Buwagi- Budondo who reports to the village football grounds every evening to practice his dribbling skills? What are we trying to tell St Fred, an upand- coming afro pop musician in Kaitabawala, Jinja who believes that he is just one good studio away from success for both himself and his family? Or to a young girl in the Jinja Senior Secondary School drama club trying to memorize her lines for the next performance at the national secondary schools MDD competition?

Too-wit To-woo is the cry of an owl. Owls cry to, among other things, protect their territory. Busoga needs to cry through data-based solutions and interventions to its problems. Not through gut feeling or through national figures that are too general.

If you asked five leaders from the region what the population of Busoga is, you will get five different answers.

How many from the region are teachers, doctors, or complete primary school or join university/tertiary institutions every year?

You can’t really plan for what you do not know. Even in a home, you cannot buy food for your household based on the average estimation of the number of people in a typical household of your clan. Therefore, whereas the national figures are very important, we need to have a heartbeat, in numbers, about how we are doing. How I wish we had a regional data center, something like Busoga Data Center!

What could be our regional diamond? How many metric tons of grain does Busoga produce every year and on what amount of arable land? Can that sustain the demand in China without depleting home consumption demand? How do we stand in the tonnage production of jackfruit, potatoes? How has the production of vegetables in Budondo been over the last five years; has it increased, or has it been decreasingly? What expert knowledge do we have in excess, and which one do we lack?

As the UNDP notes on its website, data is a powerful tool that can change the way we do development work. By providing more points of information, data can help development professionals get a nuanced, more complete picture of a problem or scenario– and hence, the opportunity to make better decisions for impact.

But, stuck in a state of lack of facts about his or her region, a leader will simply claim to apologize on behalf of their people when asked to speak before the president. “Forgive us your excellence for I don’t know the trouble with my region,” they will say, leaving those on whose behalf they speak to wonder, “Oh dear, really?”

I could be accused of regionalism by the nationalists, but a country is as developed as its regions. Regional development is as national a discussion as it can get. The problem has been the Kampalanization of issues.

For example, to have a good education[sector] whose off springs can then lead to positive change in whichever fields they choose to study, the seed school on the fringes of Buyende and or Namayinyo needs to be built and equipped with textbooks and teachers the same way schools in the city are.

Also, there should be interventions geared at giving all children an equal opportunity at education as a tool to contribute to turning around the region. It is that resolve to contribute to educating the future of the region that three high school friends have joined hands, working with the East Enders Cricket Foundation, Gabula Royal Foundation and Busoga Today newspaper have established the Dreams Restored Scholarship Fund. Proud to be associated.

The Scholarship Fund aims at educating at least 1000 financially challenged but brilliant and or talented (in sports) Basoga from Senior One to Senior 6 through a giving out full scholarships to kids joining senior one.

When they are educated, our people will understand the issues of their region and their country and what role they must each play to contribute to its development. They will also contribute to discussions about the development of their regions with confidence and verve. Feel free to join the Dreams Restored bus.