The Libya Connection

Thank you, Voice of America and BBC World Service, for keeping me abreast on how quickly the world out there is going to hell. I'm all about democracy and freedom, but as seen in Uganda's elections democracy doesn't just happen overnight. Quick change of government can bad (Robespierre comes to mind and he died over 200 years ago).

Now that Libya has descended into civil war, we can more clearly see the power and influence Libya and Qaddafi had on African politics and economics. In the case of Uganda alone, he built the main mosque in Kampala (the road surrounding it aptly named Qaddafi Road). He paid for my king's palace in Fort Portal, as well as the building of the mosque in that city, too. Libya owns a majority share of Uganda Telecom, as well as one of our banks, not to mention supplies a lot of our oil (we even have the oil company OiLibya).

Which brings me to the point of all this: gas prices are going through the roof! Again! A liter of petrol is now 3400 shillings, about $1.44, or $5.60 per gallon. And that's when there is petrol. One station in Fort Portal had gasoline yesterday in a town of six stations and the lines stopped traffic on the main road. The police were called out to keep order. Prices have gone up for goods already, as well as transportation when cars have gas to go anywhere.

It is interesting to see the reverberations of a geopolitical event 1600 kilometers (erm, 1000 miles) away. It will be more interesting to see the effects six months or a year from now. Uganda's 7% inflation rate just might be going up. But then again, I'm a poli-sci nerd.

Sorry Djibouti

My friend Will and I just finished a three-day map project where we painted a giant map on the wall of his site, St. Mary's Seminary in Fort Portal. There were some minor mishaps, notably Uganda was somehow absorbed by Sudan (we later worked that out), Namibia and Botswana were the same country until a UN delegate painted a border, Djibouti was left out completely, the Central African Republic was painted light blue so it looks like a giant inland sea, and a few former Soviet republics became Soviet republics once more.

Other than that it was a great three days that generated a lot of interest in geography. One of the main comments was that Uganda was so small compared to the rest of the world.