Tag Archives: land

Uganda and emerging technology

Matsiko Kahunga’s Sept. 26, 2016 piece from The Monitor (Uganda: Are We Hunter-Gatherers or a Nanotechnology Economy?) on allafrica.com provides some intriguing insight,

Our teacher of Agriculture in lower secondary school, (I can only remember his moniker: we called him Boxer) had a very intriguing definition of land, which we may today find instructive as the land question in Uganda rears its ugly head again. From his various definitions of land, what emerges is that land will mean different things to different people. Thus, to an aeropilot, land is a hard, flat surface onto which airports can be built to enable safe take off and landing; while to an equatorial forest hunter-gatherer, land is that lush green environment where fruits, berries and roots are ever in abundance and game animals plentiful. To the sedentary arable farmer, land is that medium in which crops can grow…it is useful if it can support crop life, and it is useless if it cannot support crop life.

The land question is up again. And already tempers are high and rising, building on the earlier intermittent squabbles across the country. Perhaps a simple reflection may send us rethinking our perception of land: does land mean the same thing to all Ugandans? If we are on the path to industrialisation as we ought to, does land in an industrial country carry the same meaning and importance it carries in a subsistence economy?

Kahunga then recounts this story,

A friend who recently returned from a tour of duty with a UN agency in an Asian Tiger, tells me that he lived on the 17th floor of an 81-storey skyscraper, which is basically a self-contained town: besides residential flats, the entire height of the building is punctuated by public arenas, kindergartens, shopping malls, clinics, temples, office blocks, police stations, municipal council and related services.

He then contrasts it with Seoul,

Another instructive case is Seoul, the South Korean capital. The Seoul National Capital Area houses 25 million people (as of 2012).

This is over half the population of South Korea, living on 0.6 per cent of the country’s land area, and generating 21 per cent of the country’s GDP (Leahy, 2012). Twenty five million is 73 per cent of Uganda’s population (2012 figures) or Burundi and Rwanda combined.

I am struck by the similarities between the current heated discussions about land use and density in Vancouver (Canada) and our national climate change issues and Kahunga’s depiction of Uganda’s issues,

The tokenism of ‘carbon-fund’, ‘green development’ ‘mainstreaming’…, typical of conferences will not save us. Uganda is best placed to pioneer green industrial development with not only minimal impact on the climate, but also a reversal of the current catastrophe: plastic-choked soils, drying marshlands and river beds, changing season patterns and melting Rwenzori glaciers.

And no one is safe from this pending catastrophe: rich or poor, investor or squatter, powerful or powerless . …

Thought-provoking, eh?