REPOST: Uganda Bloggers 7 Day Blogging Challenge: Calling All Ugandan Bloggers

This is a call to all Ugandan Bloggers, all protocol observed.

There has been a decline in the blogging habits of many erstwhile Ugandan bloggers. We do not know whether it is because you guys got jobs and went abroad but that is not the point. In a bid to renew the blogging culture of many of us Raymond, Nev, Allan with the input of Olive, Ruth, Dan , Lynn and I, decided to challenge ourselves to write each day for at least 7 days starting today.

You can write about anything and everything as long as it is not less than 250 words.

Please share you blog on Twitter so we can comment and experience your experiences with the hashtag #UgBloggers7Days.

Let others know.

Kissing The Emperor’s Ass; Ugandan Advertising and its Pitfalls

In advertising, it is a common occurrence that you will regularly be asked to kiss someone’s ass. Sometimes with good reason and sometimes for no reason. Now because advertising is what it is, no one ever questions the ass kissing; it’s always been done and will always be done. We just do it. Maybe one day Jesus will come and we’ll stop. Or maybe we wont stop who knows. But I digress.

You now know that advertising people are a subservient, obsequious and disgustingly self-loathing bunch of people. But the truth is that it is not all advertising people who are this way. It the client service people. Those are the real ass kissers. Those who most kiss ass eventually have their oral orifices transform into that oval shaped pout now common with most girls on Instagram; you know the one white girls do because they don’t have thick African lips and the one African girls copy from the white girls because, well they don’t know why the white girls do it and are too stupid to see that their thick Africa lips look like a tilapia in rebellion rather than whatever they imagine they are doing.

 Again I digress.

These client servicing people over the course of a successful (important to note here) lifetime kiss so much ass they get used to and even start to like the smell of it. However there are people who don’t kiss as much ass; the creatives (but this one I’ll leave to another day). But every once in a while you find some ass that smells good. People who know you have to kiss their ass but take the time to make sure it is clean and scented and they wipe it. Clients who like you. Who think you are the shit [no pun there]. Clients who, you too, incidentally, like. They respect you. They listen to you. They let you do your work. They are honest about their budgets. And they appreciate you when you do good work.

“What?! Whaaaaattttt?!! They exist!!” *in maniacal voice*

The real trauma is that this gentleness and humility has come at the end of a lifetime of hard work and interactions. It is lessons from dealing with thousands of people. The kind of wisdom possessed by an “emperor” (for purposes of this post) and not is tempestuous “heir apparent” (also for the purposes of this post). Which brings us to the heart of this post.

Most people who deal with emperors find them civil, full of leadership, great product knowledge and a great amount of insight about their products or services. They know their customers, they know what they (their customers) want, they know when their products are weak. And so they trust their agencies to lead them to the right place. They also know exactly where they don’t want to go but are open to being surprised on what is possible. They are visionaries. These are the ones with the scented bottoms. You could kiss that ass all day long.

However because this breed are so rare one only encounters a handful in a lifetime of work. Quite often you meet one in your whole advertising career.

Just 1.

And you meet them at the end of theirs.  They are either preparing to hand over the empire to the next generation, or to move on to the next great thing. Or if your stars are so badly aligned and you deserve nothing good in this life – they are preparing to hand over to their children.

Why, you ask?

Because anytime a business is successful enough to be handed over, it means there is a lifetime of relationships and lessons to be taught there. A plethora of cautionary tales and an ensemble of adversaries the business has overcome to survive that long. These are things that most emperors try to teach their heirs apparent but most times fail miserably. Why? Because the lessons are time acquired, they are seared in the mind because they are experiences mixed with emotions making them memories. They can’t be forgotten.

In their tutelage, most heirs apparent hear these lessons but brush them off as tales of a time gone by. The prospect of “modernizing” things is so intoxicating that most of them forget why things have remained the same for so long. So they rush into the boardroom and fire everyone. They replace all the casual labour with a capital intensive solution that makes the “casuals” jobless. They are swift to “modernize” the logo and up-end the “brand look and feel”.

“These things are from a long time ago. They all need to change,” they say. “We need to get with the times. Something new and fresh and exciting!”

“Like what were you thinking?” lips firmly placed, you ask.

“ I was checking online and I saw something that I think we should use,” comes the curt retort.

In that process they want their asses kissed so hard and if there is no evidence of sh*t on your face they’ll rub it in for effect. They’ll work you harder. They’ll listen to you less. They’ll disrespect you more. Eventually, when the tally is done they will never let you make as great as they could be. These are the bottoms we all dread. The ones who don’t wipe. They ones who will fart while you are in the middle of your morning ass-kissing ritual and laugh just because they can and there is nothing you can do about it.

But why are they like this? I don’t know so don’t ask me but in my next life I’d like to come back as an heir apparent just to see. But I suspect there are a few reasons why:

As I said above, the emperor is wise and old. He has seen many things and has learnt that he will never really know it all. So he listens. He mulls on things. And appreciates a good idea. He is the emperor. No one can rush him. When he is ready he will act with deftness and blinding speed. The heir apparent doesn’t have that luxury; he has got naysayers, detractors, populists, etc all around him. He must be rushed and decisive. And there is where all the skid marking starts. As they make the wrong decisions and shit their pants in fear, all the ass kisser will find is skid marks when he comes for their ritual ass kissing.

The decided lack of compassion: this lesson is almost as old as itself. Nowhere in the human race is there less compassion than in heirs apparent. They bear an often unmistakable proclivity for mean, spiteful, denigrating behaviour. They’ll end old friendships and relationships, will set fire to the village barn because they haven’t gotten their share of the wheat crop even though the harvest was bad all around. This is perhaps the point where that lesson on absolute power and corruption is derived. I’m reminded that even in the much hailed Holy Bible for all their strength Judges would never become kings. No matter how many Philistine foreskins Samson took, he would never have the grace and empathy of David.

And that leads to my final point; Strength Vs Grace: Ass kissing is all about grace and tact. It’s very difficult for you to kiss ass when you know its ass. The human spirit rebels against that kind of thing. It is revolted by the debasing of the spirit it represents. However if a king passes by and it has been agreed by his subjects that none shall look upon his countenance then it is in unison that they all bow before him and give him respect. That they will let him have the final word. That they will do his bidding even against great personal misgiving. On the other hand, being forced to kiss hard, unscented, unwiped ass on your knees, in chains only makes the ass worse, and the action more vile.

Yet we must and will continue to kiss ass for that is what will light our houses, and warm our loved ones and feed our children. In the end all you can hope for is that you meet an emperor in your lifetime because that experience is truly one worth having had. Just one emperor. Oh such sweet ass.

MY LESSONS FROM AN EVENING OF NETWORKING:

It’s been a while since I have been here and so much has happened since I last was but there’ll be more on that later. Last week I had the pleasure of attending two seemingly similar events and yet they couldn’t have been more dissimilar. The first one was the British Council Young Creative Entrepreneur where young people from Uganda were pitching their nascent ideas on disrupting the fashion business in the hopes of a chance to attend the London Fashion Week and get their business idea bought by the powers that be. “The Young Creative Entrepreneur category will recognize the work of 10 people whose businesses are making the UK creative economy exciting.” Says the official website.

 It was unmemorable not as much for the décor but rather the somberness of the event. The fact that the place was laden with the diplomatic corps was enough to freak anybody out without the restriction on taking pictures. But more on that another time.

The second event was the Local Area Networking event for the ICT Association of Uganda. An inaugural event in its own right but more so because it represented the first step in a journey – definitely in the right direction. Held at Gatto Matto and attended by the who’s who in the tech scene in Uganda, this was the event to be at. From people who adopted technology in their later years to people I knew 5 years ago who more than wrote coded for Facebook startup apps.

Later in the evening as I watched the crowd thin out and the die-hards cluster closer together in smaller groups and huddle round hushed ideas I realized this scene was one like in any minority community. When the well-wishers and the crowd go home is when the purists came to life! The one whose ideas kept them awake at night, the ones whose passion gave them a slightly maniacal glint in their eyes, the ones whose only claim to notability was their sheer ability to never be outworked; the workhorses, the beasts, the ones you call when you want to lift it (anything: from projects, to proposals to mobile apps to grant applications to startups – anything! ) off the ground (I have a theory on these people but that’ll be for another day) and I was reminded of a few things that day:

1.       Meeting New People: You are never as famous as you think with geeks. Milling about I bumped into some serious tech powerhouses, the kinds of guys who you read about winning awards but who were completely oblivious to their surroundings or who was around them; proving the  often over used cliché about geeks’ social awkwardness. So, lesson: be polite, introduce yourself and say what you do. Simply, clearly and deliberately. Geeks hate flakes and they can smell them out quite quickly. Also, whatever you think you have done, it’s not that important because there is a guy in that crowd hoping to cure cancer or to single handedly close the digital divide. So be humble.

2.       Old Ideas Told in New Ways: In the course of the evening I happened to bump into Joseph Kaizzi who I hadn’t seen since my bachelor night sendoff night a few weeks ago but who we really hadn’t sat down and talked with for a while. He told me how his startup was (Tambula is a startup helping boda boda riders track their bikes when they are stolen and a host of other disruptive technologies) For a small fee he will install a tracker and in case your boda ever goes walk about he’ll know here it is. The conversation centered on his first two cases of theft and resultantly tracking; how he’d worked close to 36 hours to track down both bikes – a story only he can narrate with that much verve. As I listened to him tell me how Bing maps actually delivered better ground visibility at 4:00am in Fort Portal and the challenges of trying to orient oneself to seeing the world from above I got the tingling sensation that he had actually stumbled on something new – a problem.  He might learn to see the world from above or he might develop a way to see the world as people on the ground see it while still looking from above. He would just figure out a way to make his startup more efficient and that self-learning was so reminiscent of many years ago sitting in an old coffee booth talking about the Microsoft Imagine Challenge cup team presentations he held court over with tenacity and ferociousness.

3.       Of Gods and Worshippers; At any of these events one is bound to bump into a geek celeb. Someone celebrated for a being a geek. They could be an inventor, a revered mentor, or just simply the poster child for geekdom. In this respect all three categories were represented in the persons of Solomon King, Michael Niyitegeka and the ever iridescent Evelyn Namara.

What one never imagines is how these types interact with each other in the same space; kind of like how handsome guys hate to be in the same space as really hot girls. Both are good – on their own – ALONE. Most people will argue that the interactions are normal and casual until they aren’t. In the course of the evening I talked to a young man who was developing an electro-kinetic charging system; basically a shoe that would generate electricity for charging mobile phones etcetera. As he told me about women in villages who walk long distances and campus kids who walk to everywhere they are going (most likely for lack of money) it somehow slipped into the conversation that Simon Kaheru would need to call him and have a chat with him. I suddenly wished I hadn’t said that. His face paled and he almost choked on some chips. So I probed a little further. It then emerged that phone calls from Simon were as feared and dreaded in his part of the world as in mine – advertising and crisis management. The truth was that Simon had been at the event and had interacted jovially and freely with almost everyone there.

The learning for me was not to take my ability to interact with people for granted because you never know who is scared to death of the person you are talking to so casually. That is not to say I am not scared of Simon, or to even imply that I chat with him casually as that would constitute two large fat falsehoods. As we sipped on our drink and glanced across the courtyard at the table where the ‘powerful’ people were I thought how interesting it would be to appear truly and deeply fearless –the one quality that we both agreed was Simon’s hallmark. But it was a good thought and I really needed to move on to living my life again – with fear. That said, I managed to convince the young man to write Simon an email because only thing worse than him calling you is you calling him

Be There!!