patungire

Telecom Engineer, Passionate about all things Tech and...yes, Good things take time!

[patungire @patungire]

Easter Inspiration - Indeed Africa needs us to have faith in what WE can build if we just start.
https://t.co/JILwElk87X

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

- The worst way to have money, is to be famous.
- The best way to have money, is for as few people to know you as possible.

I've worked with a lot of people on both sides of this, and you could not pay me enough to be famous....

[The Observer @observerug]

The now-deceased Tooro kingdom leader visited some high-end hospitals in Kampala after feeling persistent backpain. X-rays, MRI scans later, they told him they saw nothing.

Being a person of means, he flew to a hospital in Nairobi where he was diagnosed with cancer. A year later he was dead. What did the doctors in Nairobi see that the Kampala ones couldn’t?

Well, Nairobi has a Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scan or a few. Kampala and the whole of Uganda don’t. A PET scan costs about $3m (Shs 11.7bn) or approximately 17 Land Cruisers.

If there was a meeting of government officials, you would run out of space to park them. That is how many we have in Uganda but a PET Scan is not something we have been able to buy and install yet.

https://t.co/kZ4PB2kkpO

[Jim Spire Ssentongo @SpireJim]

Reality we must check in our academia

[Jim Spire Ssentongo @SpireJim]

One of the overdue conversations in Ugandan academia that hasn’t gotten serious attention is how many academics continue to speak to themselves in their scholarly publications without regard to local relevance - whether their communities access what they publish, especially in journal articles (the most encouraged/incentivised medium of dissemination). Does it make sense to simply publish and thump our chests without caring who reads our stuff? Why aren’t our universities incentivising and innovating forms of dissemination relevant to our people and contexts? We cannot just imitate the Western academy/university even where it makes little or no local sense. More than anyone else, scholars shouldn’t need someone to convince them that the ‘publish or perish’ convention makes little local sense.

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

New York City is banning the use of artificial intelligence in public school classrooms through middle school for one year while officials study the impact of the technology.

Read more: https://t.co/J4X23xiXvO

[BUGANDA YIYO BUGANDA YANGE 🫆 @BugandYiyoYange]

Report: Did you want to become a King?

Kabaka Ronald Muwenda Mutebi II: I had no Choice ...📌

[Adam Shuaib @adamshuaib]

One of the worst predictors of founder success we've tracked is how well someone pitches; the correlation between pitch quality and outcome was often negative.

Zuckerberg was so awkward in early investor meetings that VCs wondered if he could ever manage anyone, and Larry Page refused interviews and earnings calls for years. Bezos had to pitch 60 different investors to raise his initial $1 million.

Highly articulate people are great with the 30min process of telling a story to strangers, but this is a pretty different skill to building a company. Founders who spend years optimising to be persuasive have often optimised away from the building skills that compound over the 10yrs of execution that come afterwards; it’s incredibly hard to do both well.

The articulate founder will impress your partners but the awkward one will return your fund.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The way to win at capitalism is to focus on what it actually does (make customers' lives better) rather than the socialist caricature of it (squeeze every penny out of them). The latter gets you 2x returns at best, whereas making new things for people can get you 10x.

[Tim Ferriss @tferriss]

"What’s the worst that could happen?"

I encourage you to remember this often-neglected question as you begin to see the infinite possibilities outside of your current comfort zone.

Whether a yearlong sabbatical, a new business idea, reengineering your life within the corporate beast, or dreams you’ve postponed for “some day,” there has never been a better time for testing the uncommon.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

It's a bad sign when someone denying you something uses the phrase "at this time." That phrase means they've gone full bureaucrat.

[VT @VusiThembekwayo]

We will pay 100 times the manufacturing cost for a product made in China with a European name on it.

But the moment someone who looks like us tries to charge what their work is worth we question their audacity.

Until we fix how we see each other we will keep funding everyone else's dream while starving our own.

[VT @VusiThembekwayo]

You get the deal you negotiate.

Not a cent more.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

“The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge.”

— Aristotle

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

"The world is not designed to give you a good life. It's designed to distract you from building one."

Real banger by @MattyFusaro

Put on blinders and build.

[Triplets Ghetto Kids @ghettokidstfug]

From Where We Come From 🇺🇬....To the Biggest Stage in Football ⚽️🌎
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@Nilesafarilodge @ExploreUganda @TourismBoardUg
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#inspireghettokids #ghettokids #ExploreUganda #makinglifebetterthroughdance

[Afropolitan 🅰️🌶 @afropolitan]

“You get rich, in one of 3 ways—
one, by producing the cheapest product
two, by selling the most expensive product
three, by the government forcing everybody to buy from you.

every billionaire fits one of the three..”

Iyin speaks on the three ways to get (really) rich on the Afropolitan podcast

[Useful Idiot @ZeeroBrain]

I hope Muwanga Kivumbi knows that the Ugandans he thinks he is fighting for are now in bars drinking till morning... others will be doing road trips tomorrow and on Sunday others will be on brunch.

He would have come and first chilled with his family...I am for self preservation

[patungire @patungire]

Heroes ACT...talk is cheap...go easy on blaming Ugandans..you aren't even here to face the consequences of the people you call oppressors!!

[Solomon Kampala @kampala_solomon]

I long for the day Ugandans are mentally free enough to stand up to this bullying.

Once we are mentally liberated, our physical liberation will follow. We are already on our way there.

A people who refuse to accept oppression in their minds cannot be ruled by force for long.
We deserve better, and this moment will not wait for us. We cannot let it pass us by!

Look at what they are building! A family dynasty run by the most unqualified people. They have stopped even pretending to serve the people. They take everything for themselves and dare us to object.

You think staying silent keeps you safe? You think fighting us keeps you safe? It does not.

You are weak.

The day is coming when the gun is pressed to your head, when it is your body being dragged into a dirty white van, when it is your children asking where you went!

The van comes for the quiet ones too. Your fear, your weakness, is not protection from it. It is an invitation.

The strong eat the weak.

It is time for Ugandans to realize that they hold the true strength.

[Poonam Soni @CodeByPoonam]

Satya Nadella just gave the clearest explanation yet of why "just use ChatGPT" is a losing strategy for any serious company.

his argument: every company now runs on two kinds of capital. and leaking one of them is a one-way door.'

[Mohammed Hersi : Mr Optimist @mohammedhersi]

South Africa Is Playing With Fire

Boardrooms are now battlegrounds. Activists are marching into corporate offices across South Africa demanding that "foreigners" pack up and leave.

President Cyril Ramaphosa @CyrilRamaphosa this cannot stand and here's why it's not just wrong, it's dangerously short-sighted. Please ask yourself does South Africa know how deeply it is embedded in the rest of this continent?

✅️1. MTN carries hundreds of millions of subscribers across Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, Côte d'Ivoire, and beyond a South African company thriving on African soil that isn't its own. @MTNza

✅️2. Absa now earns nearly a third of its group profit from outside South Africa — Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Uganda, Zambia, Tanzania and is still acquiring more African banks as we speak. @Absa

✅️3.Standard Bank remains the continent's largest bank by assets, moving trillions of rand through African economies every single year. @StandardBankZA

✅️4. MultiChoice/DStv has for decades been the dominant gatekeeper of entertainment and information across dozens of African households.

✅️5. Sanlam and Old Mutual manage insurance and pension savings for millions of East and West Africans.

✅️6. Nandos, Steers, and Debonairs feed households across Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, and Uganda.

✅️7. Bidvest and Imperial Logistics run supply chains that keep goods moving through multiple African economies.

✅8. ️Then there's tourism an industry South Africa depends on heavily, and where the hypocrisy cuts sharpest. Hospitality groups like Tsogo Sun, City Lodge, and Sun International have expanded into Zambia, Nigeria, and beyond. South African Airways, Airlink, and a web of SA-based travel companies have spent decades marketing Cape Town, Kruger, and the Garden Route to the rest of the continent and Africans have answered in huge numbers. Kenyans, Nigerians, Ghanaians, and others fill Sandton hotels, Table Mountain cable cars, and Kruger safari lodges every year, injecting real foreign currency into the South African economy.

So which is it? Do you want African wallets in your tills and African bodies in your hotel beds, but not African faces in your boardrooms?

Now imagine just for a moment Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, or Ghana adopting the same logic. Boardrooms in Lagos or Nairobi staging walk-ins demanding MTN executives leave, Absa hand back its banking licenses, or Kenyan immigration quietly discouraging South African tourists from checking into Mombasa or Diani hotels. The fallout for South Africa would be instant and brutal and tourism, banking, and telecoms would be the first casualties, not the last.

This is the essence of glass houses and stones. You cannot build a continental empire in banking, telecoms, insurance, and tourism, and then slam the door on that same continent's citizens the moment it's convenient at home. It's worth remembering South Africa's most celebrated exports thrive precisely because other nations didn't gatekeep opportunity by passport.

Trevor Noah built a global career from a studio in New York. Elon Musk, born in Pretoria, built his fortune in Silicon Valley and Texas. Both benefited from economies that judged them on merit, not nationality. @Trevornoah @elonmusk

If Africa responds to South Africa's boardroom nativism with mirrored nativism, no one wins least of all South Africans working, investing, and building across this continent.

Mr. President, this is a fire worth putting out before it spreads.

As always, I choose to remain an optimist.

Mohammed Hersi
A true African patriot at heart