The Internet’s impact on Uganda

Before email, written postal letters and aerograms took weeks to arrive in Kenya, Europe, and North America – that’s if they did not get misplaced in the post office system.

The Internet first arrived in Uganda in early 1995, introduced by a handful of dial-up Internet service providers in Kampala, one at Makerere University, and two commercial ones in the city.

Apart from mostly foreign corporations such as Shell, British Airways, and others, very few companies or institutions in Uganda had any Internet connection at the time. Telex and fax machines were still in active use.

The year 1995 was also the one in which the mobile phone first arrived in Uganda through a company called CelTel, later renamed Zain, and finally bought by the Indian telecom giant Airtel to become the Airtel Uganda we know today.

Monitor first installed Internet in all its newsrooms, editors’ offices, and the library in August 1998, and the first public Internet cafés, CyberWorld and CyberDome, opened in Kampala in 1999.

The American Web-based email service, Hotmail, was created in 1998, soon to be followed by other Web-based email services such as Lycos, Yahoo!, and AltaVista which were mainly search engines and link directories.

In October 1998, the South African telecom firm MTN arrived in Uganda, drastically reducing the very high phone tariffs, and opened the way to mass telephony in Uganda.

Finally, in September 1998, 25 years ago this month, an American technology company called Google was born and this is when the Internet really got onto the global path that we see today.

For these and other reasons, to me, the “fundamental change” that the NRM government claimed in 1986 that it had come to bring, really began in the four-year period between 1995 and 1999, and this change was caused by technology, not political ideology.

Therefore, 1998 is a more accurate date by which to mark the general entry of the Internet into Ugandan society.

When the Internet arrived, it was like a nightmare coming to an end.

For the first time in our lives, we could read the latest editions of international magazines and newspapers.

The geographical and cultural isolation from the outside world that we felt as children in the 1970s and 1980s came to an end.

The intellectual and creative things that made many of us once dream of relocating to America or Europe were now coming to us, available in real-time, 24 hours a day.

Later, starting 20 years ago in 2003 with the creation of the American social media sites Friendster and MySpace and, in 2004, the birth of Facebook, the general Internet of news now became the personal Internet of networks of friends, relatives, neighbours, classmates, and workmates.

Social media was the point when the Internet truly became global, intimate, and user-friendly for the masses of humanity.

Over these many years, the thought has been constantly on my mind, about how much a role the Internet can play in addressing the many economic, infrastructural, and social problems that Uganda and other Third World countries face.

With the old colonial-era public libraries in the various towns now dusty and abandoned, the Internet became their replacement.

With our slow and inefficient district administration offices, hospitals, agricultural and veterinary stations, and extension worker systems, Google with its ocean of information has now become their substitute for basic information.

WhatsApp, SMS text, and email replaced the post office system.

With social media, millions of ordinary people from all walks of life for the first time in their lives have an opportunity to go public with their thoughts, dreams, private achievements, and events.

How about the political and governance areas, though?

On the face of it, we now have direct access to an abundance of political news and information about the government and political leaders than ever imaginable, thanks to the Internet and the 120-plus FM radio stations spread out across the country.

Unfortunately, culture and attitudes tend to change much more slowly and gradually than technology and it shows in Uganda.

While we all are potentially celebrities and influential public figures in our own right, on social media, the people with the largest followings remain established public figures – politicians, socialites, media personalities, religious leaders, senior corporate executives, artistes, and some top business people.

The Internet has created very few stars who are native to the online world.

Most people also remain passive participants.

Studies in Europe and the United States show that only one percent of social media users are active, regularly posting photos, videos, and views.

Ten percent are not as active as the one percent but regularly respond to the content that the one percent posts.

And then, 89 percent of all social media users passively scroll through their news feeds, viewing other people’s content without a comment.

Only one percent of the content on the online encyclopaedia is generated by or comes from Africa.

Most of the entries on Africa are written and edited by Americans and Europeans.

Even after the 2021 General Election campaign during the Covid-19 lockdown was conducted mainly by radio, TV, and on the Internet, Uganda’s political class has never keenly adopted it or realised that it is much more cost-effective and time-efficient to organise and campaign politically online than in person.

As can be seen with President Museveni, Bobi Wine, and Muhoozi Kainerugaba, we are now back to the old-fashioned method of large crowds and public rallies.

This explains why democracy takes a while to take root in a society.

The idea that most people are burning with a strong sense of social justice, and want to have a voice in the running of society, and dictatorial governments or leaders stifle their voices, is not true.

Most people will live under a dictatorship and no matter how much they are urged to stand up for their rights, remain indifferent.

On social media, most Ugandans spend much time complaining about the government or lack of jobs and money or looking to the government for explanations and answers to things that are just a click of a mouse or the touch of a screen away.

They are content to exist passively, indifferent, unfeeling, uninvolved in public affairs, their main preoccupation being to run their little businesses, report to work at the office, and then exhausted by a day of all that, head home to eat supper, watch or listen passively to the evening news, then sleep.

The lesson in this is that the Internet has given Ugandans of almost every background a huge range of possibilities.

About four percent of Uganda’s population owns a smartphone.

That’s about two million sets, a quite large number, given that it would mean practically every elite (university-educated person, business owner, political leader, and so on.)

Our minds, however, have not yet grasped these possibilities and tools.

And so, we trudge on – a disorganised, low-productivity, and unimaginative society surrounded by an ocean of world-class information, most of which is free and affordable to access and use.