A COVID Love Letter

Dearest,

The pandemic of your love has placed me under total lockdown.

Let me in as an essential worker so I can travel to every corner of your heart.

Kiss me and sanitize me from all my pain.

Socially distance from all the others and hold tightly onto me like a face mask.

Please... be careful with my heart, it is one of my soft parts.

Vaccinate me with daily doses of your touch and hugs and cure my loneliness.

Ask mother and father to lift this curfew over our love, I promise to observe all their SOPs. 

Yours,

Love

Sex, Family, Church and Community… The Better Way

 SEX: Like all of us, our adolescents and young adults will battle fierce waves of sexual desires within their bodies. Giving them condoms and contraceptives so they can have “safe sex” is more detrimental than beneficial to their growth and future. We should instead teach them the better free-of-charge way of managing and dealing with sexual desires and all desires at that i.e. having self-control while ridding our media of all the sexual innuendo that has filled it today.

FAMILY: If husbands are not fulfilling their leadership duties in their families, wives, the church and wider community should sternly rebuke the husbands while encouraging them to man up to their God-given responsibilities in the family. We should stop investing in turning women into better men otherwise we’ll end up with the unattended famine roles and fumblers at the masculine roles.

CHURCH: If the Church (the followers of Jesus Christ) are not giving enough to support the work of the churches, the church leaders should labour to teach Christians about giving towards the work of the Church as one of their cardinal duties as followers of Jesus Christ. The church was not established for income generation. The Church is incapable of pursuing both God and money.

COMMUNITY: If our neighbourhoods are insecure, we should find ways to restore and promote the spirit of community and oneness wherever we stay so that each one looks out for the safety of the other. Building high walled perimeter walls and putting our trust in weapons will only, in the long term, lead to more insecurity.

Let’s choose the better way of living.

10 Tips for Effective Digital Marketing

With more people now aware and appreciative of the benefits of digital marketing (mainly due to the new normal created by COVID-19), many are asking themselves: How can I market my products/services online effectively? If you are one of those asking this question, I have 10 tips to help you achieve effective digital marketing.

But before I can share the tips, I have a quick and simple assignment for you.

Assignment 

Imagine you have to create an advert for a car on sale for each of the target market groups below. List three features about that car that you would highlight in your advert for each advert.

1. Middle income salary earners
2. Couples with children
3. Rich celebrities

Now, the 10 tips for effective digital marketing.

Tip 1: Point out only the key/strong facts about your product (not everything) 

When creating an advert, there is a temptation to tell your potential buyers everything you know about the product you are selling. But telling your potential customers everything about your product will only leave then with more questions about it than interest in the product (that is if they have the time to listen to everything you have to say).

Too much information about a product will lead to more analysis of the product by your audience and as they start to analyse your product more, they will begin getting more logical (than emotional) about your product hence emptying your advert of the “feel” effect a good advert should have on those who see it.

Consider the advert above of the TECNO phone. A smartphone like one of those shown in the advert surely has many features and functionalities and yet, all that the advert tells us about the phone are the megapixels of the phone’s camera.

Don’t lie to your potential customers and don’t withhold critical information about your product from them, but, when marketing your product, don’t tell your audience everything you know about the product.

 Tip 2: Use visuals 

Whenever you visit a social media platform like Twitter, which posts get you to pause your scrolling the most? Is it posts with only text or those with visuals?

Unlike text/words, images and videos easily grab our attention and excite us because we do not have to strain our minds to imagine anything. Therefore, when making a digital marketing plan for your products, be sure to use visuals.

The visuals you use do not necessarily have to be showing the product you are selling because some products like voice bundles cannot be photographed but never put out a post about your product without a visual.

For products that can actually be photographed like a book, a phone, land, etc., including a visual of what you are selling adds to the credibility for your advert.

Tip 3: Make the information in Tip 1 most pronounced 

After you have identified the key things you want your prospective customers to know about your product, make sure you make those easily seen and appreciated.

There is so much information online and on social media most people do not have the luxury of time to zoom in on your advert to read information about your product that you made almost invisible to the naked eye.

If your product’s competitive advantage is its lower price, make sure the price is conspicuous. Your target audience should be able to clearly see the price of your product as indicated on your advert at first glance.

Resist the temptation to make other information on the advert like your logo most prominent in your advert because your logo, for example, adds little (if anything) to any person’s appreciation of what you are selling. Focus on the product

Tip 4: Speak to the needs of the market (not how you feel about the product) 

This tip is directly connected to tip 1. Quite often, people who create adverts render them powerless in as far as getting people to like the products being advertised because the designers focus more on showcasing their artistic/design skills. For example, advert creators can use fonts that are hard to read just because they consider those fonts very artistic and trendy. Sometimes, adverts are designed to massage the egos of those who own or made the product by focusing on what the product owner likes most about the product.

Consider the assignment I gave you above. You cannot market a car the same way to all of three groups (I hope you didn’t). For each group, you must, guided by your awareness of that group’s needs, choose a few features about the car that you are confident will get the prospective buyers excited about buying the car.

For example, availability of plenty of sitting space may not be exciting for you as an unmarried sales executive, but it is most likely a deal maker/breaker for a young couple with children because most couples with children want a car with enough space for them and their children.

They say the customer is king so let your advert speak in the king’s language and the king will buy from you.

Tip 5: Include a call to action 

An advert for any product without a call to action with like a beautiful romantic relationship between a man and a woman where the man never proposes because he believes [in his heart] the girl knows his intention is to marry her. Another man will likely marry that girl.

After you have included all you must and need to include on that advert for your product, tell your prospective customer what they need to do after falling in love with your product. This is the “DO” part of effective digital marketing.

It is not enough to get your audience excited about your product and not tell them what they need to do to get that product otherwise that advert will be a waste.

An example of a call to action is telling your audience to call a certain number to place their orders.

Tip 6: Be sure your advert reaches your target audience 

When selecting a digital platform to advertise your products/services, you must be sure that platform is able to deliver your advert to your target market.

Social media platforms like Facebook have very robust marketing algorithms that can ensure your advert is seen by particular groups of Facebook users classified according to their age, geographical location, sex, relationship status, etc. Make use of this.

SIDENOTE: Do not assume your target market is online because you are online. Always find out where your potential customers are and market your products to them there, even if that means you marketing offline.

I always enjoyed putting my creative juices to use designing banners advertising MD chapattis and sharing them on the MD Enterprises Facebook page. But after posting those adverts for some time and not getting any orders I ditched marketing on Facebook and went downtown Kampala to find market for my chapattis and I was overwhelmed by the market I found there for my chapattis.

Tip 7: Track advert reach and impact 

When it comes to digital marketing, be sure that the platform you use for airing your advert can offer you analytics for how your advert is fairing just like WhatsApp does for status updates.

Most digital platforms today will tell you how many people have viewed your advert, where those people viewed it from (the physical address of the devices they used to view the advert), what time they viewed the advert, whether they simply viewed or actually clicked on the advert, etc.

All the above information is critical for you as an online marketer because it helps you appreciate how your advert is doing so your anticipation for sales is not wishful but rather informed by an awareness of how many people have actually expressed interest in your advert.

With digital marketing you must know your advert's reach and the impact it's having otherwise you will be marketing blindly.

Tip 8: Optimise your adverts for viewing on mobile devices 

Today it is impossible to think about digital without thinking about mobile devices. Most people who access the Internet and visit different digital platforms do so using mobile devices because most of them are now smart and always on us. 

It is therefore paramount that as you design your advert, you optimize it for viewing on mobile devices. Do not put out adverts that require people to first activate screen rotation mode for them to be able to see your advert well. Do not design adverts that requires people to first zoom in before that can see the details on the advert. As much as possible, ensure that viewing your advert does not require your audience to put in any extra effort. They should be able to view you advert as they go about their routine actions without feeling inconvenienced.

There may be some people who will view your advert using for example desktop computers and laptops and it is good practice to always optimize any adverts for viewing on different devices. But if you must error, error on the side of giving it the best view on a mobile device.

Tip 9: Make your advert memorable 

Consider the advert above by MTN Uganda. MTN Uganda is licensed to offer telecommunications and banking services. What on earth is a photo of a man fighting to get his plate of food back from a waiter doing on their advert for Freedom Bundles? And why would they go further and offer such a photo almost 50% of the advert space? Is MTN about to start selling food also?

All that MTN was trying to do and, to a great extent achieved, was to make their advert memorable. The irony makes it memorable. By remembering that scene of the man fighting for his plate of food, many people will also remember the information shared on the right side about the Freedom Bundles.

To make adverts memorable, some companies use famous people on their adverts, others use tunes/beats of popular songs, some use very daring and captivating stunts for their adverts (like Mountain Dew soda often does), etc. You too should strive to make your advert memorable because the more people think about your advert, the more they will think about the product you were marketing through that advert and the higher the likelihood of them buying that product.

If you are not as creative, it is okay. You do not have to do everything all by yourself. You can team up with someone more creative than you are so you can come up with the most memorable advert.

Tip 10: Be ready to stay in people’s faces for a while before you enjoy returns on your marketing 

Think about this: How many Coca Cola adverts do you see in a day? But who does not know [about] Coca Cola? Coca Cola is an internationally recognised strong brand that has been around for years. And yet, in just one day, I can see and listen to over 15 adverts marketing Coca Cola products. 

If a brand as strong as Coca Cola is very deliberate about constantly adverting its products, why do you think that just one advert of your products on Facebook is enough to get you customers? 

I share this tip not to discourage you but more to encourage you and prepare you for the long haul. As a business, have advertising as one of your daily operational engagements with the public because for most people, decision making is a gradual process not instant.

It is also unlikely that you are marketing a product that has never existed. Most likely, what you are marketing is an alternative product (hopefully a better one at that) to the already existing options. Therefore, be patient with the market as you convince them to abandon what they have been using for yours.

The other reason why you should be ready and plan to advertise for some time before you can enjoy returns on your marketing efforts is that most people are not out there looking for adverts. Using advertising giant Facebook as an example, most people (including you) visit the social media site to connect with friends. If you, therefore, want them to take notice of your advert in an ocean of posts by their friends, you must be ready to keep trying to get them “distracted” until you succeed and have their undivided attention. And achieving this will take time.

Effective advertising is a marathon not a sprint.

BONUS TIP 

Always follow the rules of grammar that govern the language of choice for your advert. If your advert is in Rukiga, write love as “Rukundo” not “Lukundo”; if it is in Luganda, write mother as “Maama” not “Mama”; if it is in English, write “You’re” not “Your”.

Any questioning of what you really want to communicate through your advert takes away from that advert’s ability to raise interest in the product being advertised.

The common sense in not allowing homosexuals to raise children

A poisoning of our values as a human race is sweeping across our planet funded by people whose wealth has blinded them to the value of human life and the critical need to preserve it. We must rise up against this wave!

Being unable to provide for a child’s material needs is one of the reasons (classified as child neglect) that can lead to a parent losing custody of their child. Of course, such a legal separation of the child from the parent(s) is necessary sometimes because children have material needs that must be met for them to grow and mature into healthy and productive adults.

Material needs, however, are not the only needs children have. In fact, children’s material needs, although very important, are not paramount. Like me, many children have been born and raised in poverty with hardly enough provisions to meet their material needs. By “international standards”, many parents, especially in the financially poor countries are guilty of child neglect and would have lost custody of their children had the international standards on child well being been applied without fear or favour.

Ironically, being raised in poverty notwithstanding, millions of children raised in poverty (sometimes with support from charity organisations like Compassion International which sponsored my education) grow up to become the most productive and influential members of society.

It is obvious, as countless life stories will prove, that as a child grows up, they can, through hard work, overcome the poverty in their lives and become financially prosperous. This later-in-life self-renewal is however very hard to achieve (often impossible) when it comes to the values a child is raised with.

Values do not necessarily have to be taught because children pick up the values lived out in whichever environment they are raised.

This catching of values is the reason why many, even among born again Christians, unaware of the fact that children pick up values, have come to believe in generational curses. A promiscuous parent or a drunkard ashamed of their ways and wishing a better way of life for their child(ren) labours to raise them under proper instruction (often including the teachings from the Bible) and yet the children end up with the same vices and addictions as the parent(s). “Values are caught not taught,” a father of two children (now young adults) once told me.

A proverb in the Bible reminds us that children will not depart from the way in which they raised. Therefore, anyone participating in the upbringing of a child or children should train them (which has more to do with role modelling for them) how they should live. (Proverbs 22:6)

An article by the BBC published today (17/03/2021) reported that there are over 50,000 children currently being raised by homosexual partners (who refer to themselves as parents) in Poland. What should we expect from these children later in life? Will/can those 50,000 children grow up and somehow value the union between a man and a woman? And if those children (who will be adults then) cannot value the source of life (a union between a man and a woman), how will they value life?

The hypocrisy of the human race has never been so obvious and saddening. With one hand we hold out placards preaching environmental conservation (climate change) because we recorgnise that without a natural environment, our God-given habitat to live in, humanity will not have a home to live in and flourish and yet with the other hand we raise placards claiming the rights and freedoms of men who want to have fellow men as sexual partners and women who want to have fellow women as sexual partners, an complete deviation from the God-given guidelines on sexuality for the human race. Who bewitched us?

If we allow men to have sexual relations with fellow men and women to have sexual relations with fellow women, where will the people for whom we are gravely concerned and are labouring and investing heavily to conserve the environment for come from? Will children grow in rectums of men? Or will women fertilise fellow women? It is time we allowed common sense to take its rightful place in the story of humanity.

Children have a right to be raised in an environment that allows them appreciate and cherish the source of human life and the un-substitutable contribution that each of the sexes brings to the creation of life. A person or persons not willing to role model the unit of the family as a union between a man and a woman should have no business raising up a child.

If only Rwanda had horses for her wishes

Every person has a wish, but many times those wishes are only empty shells that amount to nothing. Nations too can have these empty shells. I wish I could predict otherwise for Rwanda. I wish things had turned out different in my own country, Uganda. If our wishes had become horses, maybe then I would say that Rwanda is now headed for a better tomorrow. But thirty one years later and all we still have with us are our wishes.

Leadership, any leadership, anchors itself on integrity. A big part of what makes up one’s integrity is their ability to stand by what [they said] they believe in, no matter what. Integrity is what anchors a leader firmly so they can serve effectively, delivering on their mandate while fighting back any of the never ending pressures that always come any leader’s way. Take away integrity and you have no leader. Even a leader of a gang of thieves must demonstrate integrity by remaining true to the gang’s mission. If his integrity (as the gang leader) is compromised by good morals, that leader will no longer be fit to lead that gang and if the gang wants to remain true to its cause and mission, it must find a new leader. Or better, the now compromised leader steps down and allows another person who will advance the gang’s mission to take over.

Integrity is about being truthful. A leader must be truthful first to himself, and then to those he leads or wants to lead. Truthfulness to self and to the led cannot be separated. Any separation is hypocrisy.

It is not leadership that gives one a vision. One first gets a vision and then leads himself and others to that vision. Therefore, if a leader’s vision changes as he leads, then that leader lacks integrity. That leader has been compromised by leadership.

One of the signs that a leader’s vision has changed is a change in vision achievement timelines. If a president is appointed/elected to office because he said he has something to offer a nation in two presidential terms, he should govern for those two terms and step down. Of course in his term of office he will not accomplish all or he may accomplish more than he promised and that’s alright. It is alright because we are human and many times we do make miscalculations. It is alright because it reveals something about the leader—how clearly he had perceived his vision for leadership. It is okay because someone else, someone the leader has groomed, can always take up the vision and bring it to fruition.

When a leader has failed to deliver on his promises or there’s a feeling—in him or among the population—that he can still continue delivering more of what he’s already delivered, and then nation’s constitution is altered to accommodate the leader for more time, that’s a recipe for disaster for any nation.

Of course the constitution and the way governments in Rwanda and Uganda are structured is largely foreign. This wasn’t our ancestral way of governance and currently neither is it for a number of other nations—some of which are prospering. But if a nation, if a people, agree to a certain form of governance, then they must be true to it. Else they must quickly adopt a new acceptable form of governance that they’ll be true to.

Good or bad leadership, especially under the democratic system of governance, is not dependant on longevity of reign but on integrity—being truthful. If a president sees no problem with a constitution before they become president, sees no problem with the constitution while they are president, but then suddenly sees a big problem with the clauses that limit their terms of office or the age they can be president when their term of office is about to expire or age has caught up with them, then that’s being untruthful. It is lack of integrity. The lapse in integrity in the leader’s character is greater if the leader pushing for the constitution amendment actively participated in having it set up the way it is in the first place.

So what if a president has a constitution amended to selfishly favour him? How does that affect a nation?

Last year I enrolled for a 40 weeks’ godly character building course called Build Up at my church.  During the 40 weeks we studied 40 principles on self-government, management, productivity and leadership. From that course I learnt that we all can make choices, but none of us—great or small, rich or poor, sick or healthy, righteous or wicked—can determine the consequences of those choices. Our power, all of us, ends at making a choice.

Consequence One: The Team Factor

“No man is an island,” so the saying goes, and leaders are no exception. Leaders need people to work with. People who will believe in their [first] vision and commit to working alongside the leader to bring the vision to life.

When a president amends a nation’s constitution to accommodate his selfish interests, three things happen within his team.

First, the people who are not ready to be comprised by and with the leader will break camp with the leader. These are people who were totally committed to the leader’s vision as he sold it to them in the beginning. These are usually very courageous people. 

Secondly, some people—usually the majority—will stay with the leader. Among those that stay are people with no convictions but lots of needs of their own. People with no convictions of their own may seem like a great addition to a team because they bring minimal opposition to what’s happening (and every team surely needs such). But these people always require a lot more pushing through micro-management just to keep them on the same pace with the rest of the team. With the people who strongly believed in the leader’s vision gone, the leader, if he wants to keep delivering on his mandate, must extend his micro-management to cover more people beyond his core leadership team. This of course is straining on the leader and only the birth pains of the leader’s problems. Problems will stem from both the dynamics of micro-management and how different people respond to it and also the fact that the leader is only able to effectively manage a limited number of people because he is only human.

Thirdly, of course the leader must get (and usually does, easily) new people to replace those that broke camp with him. This is the ferocious group. These are people who have been only watching from a distance for years praying and hoping that they too can get the positions those who formed the president’s core group held. Now is their chance. These people come supercharged and determined to impress the president at all costs. Whatever he says, they’ll do. 

So, after a constitution amendment a nation will have the following to lead it to the future: A president without integrity and a team of individuals working with the president only to impress him—a president who has chosen a new path and a new philosophy for his nation: the president and his interests come before the nation.

The president, to his delight, will meet minimal resistance to his post constitution amendment rule because of three reasons:

1. Those with the ability to question his motives in line with what is best for the nation—his original vision—are gone.
2. The president will be working with a team that’s out to impress him. Anything he suggests will most likely pass.
3. What was above him, that which defined his limitations—the constitution, is now below him.

Consequence Two: Disorder and Evil

In the Bible, the writer of James tells us in verse 16 of chapter 3 that, “For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you will find disorder and every evil practice.” A nation that has a president who not only harbours but also fronts his selfish ambitions cannot escape disorder and every evil practice. Such a leader will bring a nation, any nation, to ruin. 

We attract what we are. A leader who promotes his selfish interests using public resources will end up surrounded by a team whose individual’s hard work is motivated by a desire to fulfil selfish interests using government resources. Sadly this many times is unknown to the leader because everyone around him acts like they are serving only his interests. 

I once watched a documentary about the life of a certain African president. At the height of his self-serving resign, he would simply instruct the prime minister by word of mouth to get him money from the bank. If the president instructed the prime minister to get him say one million, the prime minister would instruct the bank governor to get him 2 million for the president. In turn, the governor would withdraw 3 million. Nonetheless, the president got only the one million he had requested for. 

All human beings are selfish by nature. But under good leadership and with God’s help and wisdom, people can be brought to a point where they look beyond their needs and see those of others. This, even though only achievable with God’s help and wisdom, always requires a lot from the leader: uncompromising integrity.

People’s selfishness is like a river and leaders the dams that hold this selfishness back keeping it from destroying society. A lapse in integrity of a leader is like a crack on the dam. A president who develops cracks in his integrity leaks. Slowly but surely, evil and disorder will find their way through him and in no time characterise whichever nation he leads. This, like all consequences, is inevitable.

Rwanda, here’s to consequences!

Homework should be about work at home

I wonder how schools would react if pupils starting reporting to school with unwashed utensils given to them by their parents so they can wash them from school as part of their “schoolwork”. It would be bizarre, wouldn’t it? And yet somehow schools today have been allowed to send children back home with class work as “homework”.

What happened to doing the right thing, at the right time, in the right place? Yes, schools have an obligation to train children academically, but academic work is only a small part of what makes person’s life resourceful. In fact, any society is better off with an illiterate but well-groomed person than with an educated but not groomed person.

Schools should revert to doing things the way they were when people like me were still in school. I do not recall ever going back home with schoolwork (called “homework”). All school related engagements—including ample play time—were done and completed at school giving us room to also be groomed in the other ways of this life while at home. From primary through university, schools take up an individual’s most productive time of the day; schools should make the most of that time and not have school activities spill overs.

I, however, also know that many parents today are too lazy to groom their [own] children. They literally dump them at school and run off to chase after money or whatever they consider more important. Schools may therefore still have a big role to play in ensuring holistic training of children for the future.

Schools can retain their “homework” concept but make it about work at home as a way to ensure that their pupils are getting all round training. Homework can cover things like leading prayers at home, cleaning utensils, washing clothes, community service (bulungi bwansi), saying kind words, making the bed, helping mummy/daddy, etc. Parents can then be tasked with monitoring how the pupils engage in these activities and then send a report back to school on the same for the child’s development evaluation. Schools shouldn’t be supervising parents’ grooming of their children but what can we do? It’s lemons we have, let’s make lemonade.

Schools should be monitored so they keep within their time boundaries while the schools monitor the parents to ensure that they are making the most of the time they have with their children. It is very important that parents groom their children in non-academic matters because scenarios in real-life where one has to apply caught knowledge (common sense) out number, by far, those where one’s class knowledge is needed.