In what was supposed to be a tweet promoting social distancing, turned out to be a mega embarrassment for the ICT and National guidance Ministry, as tweeps flooded them with messaging expressing their disappointment in the ministry for not harnessing the power of technology.
Yes, we are happy that government civil servants are practicing safe social distancing but one cannot fail to ask why the meeting that was held this morning was not conducted online via teleconference? The meeting that was attended by the ICT Minister Judith Nabakooba and state minister Mr Ogwang with their department heads at the ministry’s office quadrangle. The aim was for top management team discuss a way forward on how they can curb the coronavirus pandemic by implementing yesterday’s presidential directives to all Ministries.
The intentions were good– but this is a perfect example of a scenario where they could have used video conference tools like Zoom, Google Hangouts or Skype to have this meeting. We think a video call would have been a great demonstration for the Ministry of ICT given the years of investment the government has pumped in this sector and to show that our National fiber backbone actually works.
Case in point, lets check out UK’s Prime Minister’s tweet below, where he held a cabinet meeting via video conferencing two days ago. It id clear that other countries are taking the coronavirus threat very seriously.
Investments made in the ICT sector
In 2015, President Yoweri Museveni signed a $9 million (UGX 26 billion) loan deal from Exim Bank for implementing the 3rd phase of the National fiber project. The project had been put on halt following a 2012 investigation by the Auditor General that accused both the government and Huawei Technologies for procurement recklessness and little value for money respectively.
In July 2019, President Yoweri Museveni also officiated the launch of Uganda’s first Tier 3 National Cloud Data center in Jinja. The National Data Centre was primarily set up to house all Government ICT applications, with an expectation of saving costs involved in hosting these applications independently, while collectively avoiding any further duplication and wastage of resources.
It also host the Government Cloud, MyUG Cloud. MyUG Cloud enables Ministries, Departments, and Agencies to focus their resources on service-based delivery rather than asset-based delivery. NITA Uganda started working on a Cloud Project, which was launched in September 2017 and finalized in June 2019, with support and funding from the World Bank under the Regional Communication Infrastructure Program (RCIP). This project upgraded the existing data center to a cloud-based tier 3 design certification.
With all investments that have been made in the ICT sector, one wonders why govt civil servants can still resort to old fashioned meetings especially at a time like this? Let us know your comments below.
