Prime Minister, Amama Mbabazi (@amamambabazi on Twitter) is one of the few government officials in Uganda utilizing Twitter to engage with the people, and has close to 6000 followers, making him the most followed official in the current government. This interview was first published in PC Tech’s print edition on September 2012, downloadable here.
QN: What is your comment about the deteriorating quality of services by telecommunication companies in Uganda today?
AN: Well I am one of the complainers, because I have been a victim and I have discussed it with the minister and the head of UCC as well.We have discussed it with NITA.
So it’s a matter that I expect the relevant government offices to be working on because it has reached unacceptable
levels – as far as am concerned.
There are a few things we have lined up because you see our capacity is the issue. So we have been looking at our capacity even to know what is happening and we are now building capacity to reach a level where
we can really take control.
QN: Is there a deadline you’ve given the various players [in the telecoms sector]?
AN: I don’t have a time frame in mind, but I have made it very clear that this must be sooner than later, as soon as our resources permit. We are all conscious of the problem.
By the way we know what the answers are and together even with the private sector, we are determined to
work on it to find a solution, together with the service providers as well.
QN: Looking at the new budget, and introducing VAT on computers as well apportioning about 0.1% of the budget to the ICT sector,do you feel government is suppressing the sector?
AN: No, I don’t think so because really it’s the problem of resources. I want you all to understand that. Because you see, when we study our budget we look at the things that we have to provide for the activities of government for the next one year and how we have allocated resources you will see that really we had very little alternative.
You see there are some sectors which are cross cutting where we invest and investment benefits the entire economy. The obvious one is security. When we invest in security and we are secure then everything moves on.
So there are certain things we had to do before we put some investments elsewhere and there are others where there is obvious need like the Ministry of Finance and we announce it as the president did in the state of nation address; and in the budget speech that the ministry of tourism is a political sector in terms of priority by this government.
But when we look at the allocations then you think they have not allocated enough, that is true but this is because we need to work on the roads because we cannot have tourism unless we have access to the tourist areas, security because if you don’t have security the people cannot come anyway.
So although in a way we are investing in something else like security we are still investing in tourism. So similarly, many of the areas we know as priority, ICT is obviously priority because this is the direction now. We do not have enough resources to allocate in that
sector other than what we have allocated now. But our expectation is that as we move on, the resource envelope is going to grow and
we will have more and more resources for things like ICT.
QN: You are a very vibrant user of social media, Twitter and YouTube yet your office is not. Don’t you think the office needs to borrow a leaf from you?
AN: [Laughs] We’re working on it. One of the reforms we are going to have is that the office of the Prime Minister must use modern methods to even perform some of the functions I mentioned like monitoring, supervision and things
like that.
We have been talking about a system of computerization, how are we going to deal with it? We are going to have some kind of organic integration.
Using the systems and infrastructures but linking them up with a center somewhere, more like how call centers work so that we have a collection center where the information is gathered and is processed and where information originates from and using the most modern methods of communication.
QN: As the office of the Prime Minister , are you taking the initiative?
AN: Yes, and it will spread out to the rest of the government.
QN: It appears, there is hardly anything about ICT on the office of the Prime Minister’s website.
AN: We are still working on it.
QN: Finally, which one of these many gadgets is your favorite?
And why?
AN: I have to tell you that I find the Samsung S3 very exciting
because it has all the functionalities
