{UAH} DAN BWANIKA NOW YOU HAVE MAIL

Mwami Dan Bwanika

 

I have read many of these writings that you have spent time posting in the forum, and I need to take a moment and question if there is no other way you can help Ugandans than posting what they simply can't use.  And I am making these comments from a very wide experience and after losing so many years dealing with Ugandans. You see when I arrived in this country I  loved Uganda with all my heart and I spent my first five years copying every good thing I saw in this society,  and trying to plant it into Uganda. I was travelling into Uganda at least three or four times a year just to make sure that we do things right. I was wrong for I failed to realize that making a project good does not mean it works in every country. Do you know what made me stop? I remembered the nightmare we had in Uganda  Posts and telecommunication after the fall of Iddi Amin.

 

When Iddi Amin introduced the services nearer to the people policy, society opened up and everyone in the country wanted to get a telephone line. I was based in Kampala thus my worst experience in this writing is going to be Kampala. To match the numbers of people that were applying for telephone services in Kampala larger region, we had to transform our services from the kettle structure we had under The UPC government of phones belong to Indians and whites, to all Ugandans have a right accessing a phone line, thus the quickest way to supply those lines was to introduce  telephone exchange containers. We rushed into Japan got trained and came back ready to send out that signal to every Ugandan that was cut off by the UPC government. Funds were available and the containers were imported and installed, one at Nakawa to serve Kireka Bweyogerere Seeta and surrounding areas, we had one in Mbuya, we had another one in Kawempe and then the telephone house in Mengo. All these exchanges started a new numbering structure in Uganda for Mengo was 68 numbers, Kireka was 251 numbers Mbuya I think was 268 and on and on they so went.

 

Jobs were created and I had a telephone sales manager that one time stood on Uganda telephone house to announce that if you live in Kampala and you want a phone in your house we will deliver it. We had the funding, we had all the vehicles we needed, we had all the hard ware we needed and we had the technological training to send out that dial tone. But as the process was building up, we also needed a way to send that dial tone from the trailer exchange to the distribution point where it gets spliced to reach the customer's house. You see wiring a telephone line is not like a power line, a telephone line uses two pairs of wired from the exchange to the house yet the power line uses a single line and every one taps on. The cheapest and fastest way to send that dial tone was to use aerial cable. Aerial cables are those huge cables you see on poles that run from pole to pole, they have the ability to take 100 or 200 pairs to wherever you need them then you split them as you want.

 

Do you know why aerial cables failed to work in Uganda posts? Because when Amin fell Acholi and Langi took over Kampala, and they became lunatic drunkards. They were going to the barracks drink and at night walk Kampala streets shooting those weapons with no care at who they were shooting for they were drunk. As many Ugandans condemn Acholi and Langi violence in Uganda, as many condemn them of raping women left and center, as many condemn them of making all Uganda urban centers unsafe, you have no idea how they made our job very impossible. You see when the Acholi goof fires that shot in the air for it is drunk, it fails to understand where that bullet will end, and many times it ended up running through my aerial cable and making a hole into it. When you make a hole into an aerial cable water goes into it, and ends up earthed and those 200 customers are off line. Aerial cables are very delicate you do not want to cut them up to patch up the hole and you are better off just replacing the whole 5 miles stretch. We were importing these cables from Japan, it is very expensive, and the speed at which Acholi and Langi were destroying them we simply failed to catch up and in as much as everyone out here is using aerial cables they simply failed to work in Uganda.

 

Mwami Bwanika we fought this war very hard, we talked to the ministry of defense, we talked to Paul Muwanga, we drove Oyite Ojoke to these city suburbs, Major Agwa among many were informed that we cannot function when Acholi and Langi soldiers turn nights into gunning spree for our cables are getting destroyed. And phone system is a very good thing for these big wigs were losing communication as well, and we were telling them the dial tone is gone for a punk out of Dakolo put a hole into it last night. All of them failed to put this situation to a control. And no one is blaming them for why would you expect a kid from Dakolo to understand the value of an aerial cable in a city? Yet he has a gun and a useless command? How would you expect a kid out of Akokoro to respecting aerial cable in a city? Yet he has a gun and a useless command?

 

Read carefully what men like Ocen Nekyon post in this forum, follow how abusive they are, turn around and read what men like George Okello write in this forum and how abusive they are, everyone in the forum to them is an idiot, an individual on mind benders and a fool. And I entitle them to that conclusion only that in as much as they are that educated, Akokoro and Dakolo remain the most primitive regions in Uganda. So the "education" they claim to own can never be transformed into let us change the place where we live in, My God I walked into The Uganda Ottawa embassy at a time when an Acholi family was put in the embassy as a home, I regretted being identified as a Ugandan. Mwami Bwanika we need to reach a point and accept that some of our the people we are forced to live with are simply too uncivilized and completely backwards, for the moment we reach that point we will know at what speed to drive Uganda  but what is of a more value to them that we can start with.

 

Some of these friends are simply too backwards to deal with sir, that it is simply too delusional thinking we can walk the path of development together. The language they use in UAH refers.

 

EM

On the 49^th Parallel          

                 Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja and Dr. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda is in anarchy"
                    Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja na Dk. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda ni katika machafuko"

From: ugandans-at-heart@googlegroups.com [mailto:ugandans-at-heart@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Dan Bwanika
Sent: Monday, March 28, 2016 12:08 AM
To: ugandans-at-heart@googlegroups.com
Subject: {UAH} World's Best Street Designs

 

A Before-and-After Photo Archive of the World's Best Street Designs

It's a walkable feast.

• Feargus O'Sullivan
• @FeargusOSull
• Sep 15, 2015

As a remarkable new photo archive of urban transformations shows, making city streets more user-friendly doesn't have to be that complicated. The archive put together by Brazilian urban design collective Urb-i houses a collection of more than 350 before-and-after shots showing city blocks across the world that have been transformed by pro-pedestrian makeovers.

CityFixer

Solutions for an Urbanizing World

Go

Browsing through the crowd-sourced images (culled mostly from Google Street View), the redesigns often seem pretty straightforward. Cities narrow or eliminate car lanes, put in cycle tracks, maybe lay down a light rail line if money permits. Then they expand sidewalk space and put in some extra greenery to make the place more welcoming, enticing strollers back into a formerly arid, polluted space.

So far, so standard. So why then is the archive so striking? Mainly because of its sheer volume of images, and because of its vast geographical range across six continents. This scope shows that, when it comes to policies for weaning cities off cars, we may soon reach a watershed after which such policies will no longer be an exception, but a rule.

Cities in Northern Europe tend to get billed as default poster children for car-free transformation, but the archive shows how global the trend for the pedestrian-friendly refashioning of streets has become. Look at how hugely improved this street in Suwon, South Korea, is now that its cars have been slowed and its sidewalks swollen and lined with trees. No longer a route from one place to another, it now looks like a place to linger.

Urb-i / Daum Maps

The gallery's before-and-after time lag shows not just the planning transformations themselves, but how much better they look when they've had time to settle. Look at this corner of Antwerp, where what was a bleak corner in 2009 has not just gained a bike path and lost its car lanes by 2014, but has been transformed into a lush, café-filled micro-park.

Urb-i / Google Street View

Other photos in the archive reveal a transformation that's part psychological as well as practical. Take this major revamp of an avenue in Toulouse, France. There have been big changes here—a light rail line, the replacement of two car lanes with a pedestrian precinct, tree planting—but thanks to repaving, there also looks to be a change in the way the place feels. By uniting the whole intersection with the same cobbling, the makeover visually expands the pedestrian's sense of entitlement to the wider space. Even though cars can still enter, this now looks and feels like a space owned by people on foot.

Urb-i / Google Street View

In some instances, the transformation is phenomenal—such as with this update to Budapest's Square of the Franciscans. After a deep-cut entrance to a road tunnel is filled in, cafés and shops have space to gobble some of the road space, humanizing and reviving the street without impinging on sidewalk space for people who just need to pass through. Thanks to tree planting, what was once an incongruous ramp will mature into a thickly shaded mini-avenue within a decade or so.

Urb-i / Google Street View

While there's no city block here that doesn't seem to be improved by its makeover, it's important to recognize that these transformations are often works in progress. Take the changes shown to the Oxford Circus intersection in London—a city that has contributed many good examples to the archive. Following the overhaul, it has become far easier for pedestrians to cross, while motor traffic in the street has been reined in and restricted by a new central reservation.

The change is encouraging, but the street in question still has the worst recorded nitrogen dioxide pollution in the world. Calming traffic and encouraging pedestrians is great, but to go for gold we still need stricter curbs on certain types of heavily polluting vehicle. Now that the pedestrian-friendly street has thankfully gone global, that may well be the next major battle to come.

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Bwanika Nakyesawa Luwero

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