Are there lessons to learn from Israel?

By Gregory Mugisha

Uganda is blessed to have hosted the Isreal Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu on July 4, 2016. Netanyahu is one of the most powerful leaders in the world.

Uganda has also hosted several other high profile dignitaries whom we have received in a spell of less than a year including the Pope Francis. Apart from the biblical teaching of Jews as the chosen race by God, the Jews are the most powerful and the richest people worldwide and this is not by coincidence.  They live a life that is very strict; their rules and practices affect every aspect of their lives.

I once picked interest to learn and analyse different cultures, when one morning  while walking on the street of London, I was confronted by two ladies who threw insulting words at me;"Africans you are proud and arrogant people". At first I thought they were talking to someone else but when I looked behind there was nobody.

I shared the scenario with some people at work who confirmed to me why these ladies were abusing me. That those people still feel bitter when they see black people who they suspect to be from Africa, that they were the ones who sold them into slavery. And their difference with Africans is that when the Africans go to Europe say on Kyeyo they work so hard and in short time are driving good cars and buy houses, yet for them much as they are citizens they live in abject poverty.

The observation I made on our brothers in those countries was that during the colonial time, they were trapped into music, the same thing that was done to some neighbouring country. Up to today, the majority are still trapped  in the dancing life with slightly no anything else to live for save for the few who have made it into sports, films and music industry.

There is a new form of colonialism we are embracing in the 21st Century of the Information world. Information Technology has come with a lot of innovations and benefits that it has caught us unaware including the leaders who are looking on helplessly, the parents very confused and the law enforcement agencies looking at the who crime scene in their finger tips with binoculars  and the whole scenario is as though there is nobody in control.

Israel is not more than Kampala Metropolitan city. Their agricultural products in desert are all over the world, their technology and science is the best in the world. All this is owed on the basis of preservation of their cultural identity. For instance it is very hard for a Jew to watch some television channels, or do shopping in none Jew shops.

But as the Bible says; the ways of Satan are the easiest and always attractive. In Africa we have embraced the technology of social media that the western world developed to solve their problem of isolation and individualism due to their harsh very cold environment that affected their social interaction. It has captured the whole world and for instance by Feb, 2014, Face book purchased WhatsAp app for approximately $1.9b that had only started in 2009, mention the Bill gates and others who deal in software and hardware machines being the richest people in the world. The taxes they pay is to look after those who do not earn and develop their nations.

Yet here in Uganda, we now boast of having the highest number of networks that is not equivalent to those in developed world. The technology is not only affecting our pockets, less productive, but made us become spectators who cannot use the knowledge we get on those social medias and suffer the so many mental effects that are associated with them that will have a long time effect on the society, individuals and family breakups.

The appointment of the ministers of gender, culture and technology, I very well know was carefully done by the appointing authority to save mainly the future generation. Much as we have resigned to accept everything foreign as superior we should not always accept all the garbage in and garbage out.

The writer is a university lecturer, researcher and an author