What is the National Infrastructure Fund?
We are live with @IEAKwame, @wangarikebuchi, @DavidNdii, and @dianagichengo to break it down. Become part of the conversation by sharing your thoughts and questions in the comments. https://t.co/Gky6h1S8Ep
Uganda’s January 25-26 Paradox: Liberation Day, Bloodshed, and the Long Shadow of Power
In Uganda, January 26 is National Resistance Movement Liberation Day and a public holiday. It marks the date in 1986 when the National Resistance Army and Movement, led by Yoweri Museveni, took control of the capital, Kampala. Forty one years later, Museveni is still firmly in power. He was sworn in on January 29.
While the Liberation is celebrated on January 26, the heaviest urban fighting to seize the capital actually took place on January 25. That day witnessed the final bloody collapse of the Tito Okello government, before the NRA fully secured the city the following morning.
However, the victory almost did not happen even then, due to a serious tactical blunder. On January 26, as the NRA was capturing Radio Uganda, about 1,000 adversary troops from the Uganda National Liberation Army, the sitting government army, broke through from Entebbe, the old capital and the site of Uganda’s main airport, and rushed towards Kampala. To stop them, several accounts say Museveni and his brother Salim Saleh, then the lead NRA field commander, were forced to pull troops from their cordon around the city. This created a massive gap that allowed thousands of government soldiers to flee Kampala entirely, although some NRA veterans insist this was deliberate, to leave the enemy an escape route.
There is, however, a historical curiosity surrounding the January 25 and 26 cluster of dates which, depending on one’s political position, is remembered either as Uganda’s Black Date, the January Curse, or more positively, the January Juncture.
•January 25, 1962 marked the birth of the KY UPC alliance. On that day, the Buganda Cabinet agreed to ally with Milton Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress. While it paved the way to independence, historians often describe it as the genesis of trouble, because it produced an unworkable political marriage that later exploded in the 1966 crisis, entrenched ethnic animosity, and set in motion a political polarisation that still haunts Uganda 64 years later.
•January 25, 1970 saw the murder of Brigadier Pierino Okoya. The Deputy Army Commander and his wife were brutally assassinated at their home. This was a decisive turning point. Okoya was Idi Amin’s main rival within the army, and his killing cleared the path for Amin’s rise while deepening ethnic divisions within the military.
•January 25, 1971 brought the Idi Amin coup. Exactly one year after Okoya’s murder, Amin seized power while President Obote was away in Singapore. The coup ushered in eight years of terror, economic collapse, and the deaths of an estimated 300,000 people.
•January 25 and 26, 1986 marked the Battle for Kampala, with the NRA finally securing the city in the early hours of January 26. It ushered in the longest rule in Uganda’s history, and arguably in East Africa, with Museveni now in power for 41 years. Following his recent re election, he will have accumulated nearly 46 years by the next election, surpassing the 44-year reign of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, andthe longest in East Africa, Central Africa, and the Horn.
It is also remarkable how the NRA, now the Uganda People’s Defence Forces, evolved from a rugged insurgent force (in photo entering Kampala in January 1986) into the steely army it is today, alongside the opulence into which some of the National Resistance Movement’s leaders have since settled.
Jensen Huang: AI is going to make poorly defined work much more valuable.
Because that’s all humans will do. AI will handle everything else.
So what is poorly defined work, and how do you get good at it?
Defined work means given these inputs, produce this output. Write code that does X. Summarize this document. Calculate this metric. The goal is specified. The constraints are known. The evaluation criteria exist before you start.
Poorly defined work means should we even build this feature? What market should we enter next? Is this candidate going to work out? Which of these three strategic directions is least wrong? There’s no right answer you can verify. There’s only judgment.
AI is going to get freakishly good at defined work. Give Claude a spec and it’ll execute. Give GPT a rubric and it’ll score. The skill of translating well-defined problems into solutions is getting automated at 10x speed every 18 months.
But AI can’t tell you what problem to solve in the first place. It can generate 50 options. It can’t tell you which one matters. That requires something AI fundamentally lacks: skin in the game. Stakes. Consequences you actually have to live with.
So how do you get good at poorly defined work?
You make irreversible decisions faster than feels comfortable. The skill is pattern recognition built through reps. You can’t build judgment by thinking about decisions. You build it by making them and eating the outcomes.
You get comfortable with “I don’t know yet” and commit anyway. Defined work has the comfort of eventual correctness. Poorly defined work means moving while uncertain. The people who thrive here tolerate that discomfort instead of seeking premature closure.
You build taste through volume. Taste is internalized judgment from thousands of micro-decisions. The designer who can feel when something is off made 10,000 design choices before. The PM who senses a bad roadmap decision lived through 100 launches.
You seek roles where you own outcomes, not tasks. Task ownership is defined work. Outcome ownership forces you into the undefined space constantly. You can’t own revenue without deciding which features matter.
The uncomfortable truth: most people’s entire careers have been defined work dressed up as judgment. They executed someone else’s strategy. They optimized someone else’s metrics. They never had to decide which metrics mattered.
That’s about to become visible. Fast.
@WheldonOlack@KResearcher You are right about UG. The name Boda Boda actually comes from the various Kenya - UG border points where UG pikipikis were famous for transporting folks and goods across. But the bikes never caught on in KE past the border towns until 2008. Try and find out why….
The double bar Black Mamba was a major goal for african households in yester years. The Rolls Royce that drew attention. Especially if it came with a bell and the dynamo powered headlight. These machines slept in the house.😄
@GacheriNdumba Ey this has given me nostalgia ya village, you should hear these stories from the teenage boys’ perspective. The distances boys would walk just to catch a glimpse Yoh’
Mambo haikuwa rahisi….younger bros were either your “allied forces” or snacks & trinkets was the currency. 😅