OF THE SOURCE OF THE NILE BRIDGE & KANYE WEST

To much pomp and fanfair last week, the new bridge across the Nile was commissioned.

The bridge with its dual carriage way and increased speed limit, will at the bare minimum, shorten the time it takes to and from eastern Uganda. Of the more than $7b (27trillion) that makes up Uganda’s external trade, easily two-thirds of it rumbles up and down our eastern corridor. While there are other bottlenecks, the 20 kmh speed limit on a single carriageway, enforced across the Nalubale dam should not be underestimated, backing up traffic for miles at the worst of times.

What we need now is for the Kampala-Jinja expressway to be commissioned too, to get the full advantage of the new bridge.

It will also serve as a tourist attraction and may possibly and in lieu of a more distinctive man made structure, serve as the symbol of Jinja – the adventure capital of the region. Not on par with Kenyatta International Conference Center (KICC) in Nairobi or the pyramids of Giza or the Burj el Arab in Dubai, the Source of the Nile Bridge if well leveraged can help Uganda gain top of mind awareness for intending visitors...

Which brings mevaround to the visit of US rapper Kanye West and his wife, reality TV show star Kim Kardashian.

Nothing serves better than third party endorsements in trying to sell anything.

If you went out and told everyone how brilliant you were, they would put it down to bragging and dismiss you out of hand. But if someone else says you are brilliant, depending on how well regarded he is, your credentials will receive an added boost.

Hence the advantage of people like Kanye and Kim coming around to see for themselves. Between them they have more than 200 million followers on social media. And that is to wildly understate the eyeballs on them. If only two million of all these followers relayed the information to their followers and even just ten of each followers’ followers relayed the information and another ten of the followers’ followers …. You get the point.

"Priceless exposure you cannot even put a monetary value to. Because believe it or not, the first hurdle many of us African countries have to vault is to just create awareness. You will be shocked how many potential visitors to this country cannot point it out on a map...

Thankfully the celebrity couple left without incident and hopefully they have fond memories of their stay here. Coming from the concrete jungles they inhabit, it is safe to say they couldn’t fail to notice all the green and naturalness around them.

That being said as a country we need to be more deliberate about these things. While most of these celebrities would prefer that their trips are private events, there has to be a more strategic way to attract them to our shores.

This business of finding on the morning of their arrival that there are in town and people start scrambling to create engagements – which is what it looks like to onlookers, is really a waste of a good opportunity.

But even more importantly we need to really beef up our local tourism. We need to market our own country to Ugandans, who would not think much of traveling to Mombasa, Zanzibar or Dubai. And it is not about familiarity breeding contempt, as many of these gallivanters have never come close to the mountain gorillas of Bwindi or the climbing lions of Queen Elizabeth National Park or the white water rapids of the Nile. Believe it or not, it often times is that they don’t know about these things.

The advantage too of having a strong locally driven tourism industry is that in the event of such freak occurrences as the ongoing Ebola outbreak in neighbouring DRC, which often leads to cancellations by foreign tourists, local travellers can help the industry stay afloat.

These third party endorsements from foreign and local tourists cannot be underestimated. They will often make the difference between negatives perceptions dominating people’s conscience or not.

To illustrate. According to the Neighbourhood Scout website, which serves investors and property managers Miami, Florida has one of the most violent crime rates in the US. Crimes that include murder, rape, armed robbery and aggravated assault all of which are widely reported in the Miami media.
But for us looking in that is not the Miami we know. Our images of Miami are of white beaches, beautiful Latinos and an all-around fun time. Make no mistake, the predominantly positive image has not happened by mistake....

For example hundreds of millions of dollars annually in film projects are attracted to Miami --$150m in 2015 alone. The producers of these projects are incentivised to shoot in Miami and in the process often perpetuate the happy-go-lucky-white-beaches image of Miami we have come to associate with the city never mind that the sunny city’s crime rate may dwarf all of Uganda’s in a year.

Apart from a deliberate and persistent image shaping effort, may it not have something to do with the fact that of the 10 million visitors to the city 55 percent of them come from the US itself?