If you have your mobile phone or laptop, reach out to it and simply Google Uganda – interesting images you will land on. Refresh and make another search on Rwanda, and lastly, South Africa.
This then gets me to ask, who handles Uganda’s publicity, and who is shaping the narrative that we would want the rest of the world to know about Uganda?
Deemed as the Pearl of Africa, it can easily be showcased through its rich heritage, diverse culture, flora and fauna, and the achievements it has attained over the years. And when one does a simple Google search, these should be the things they interact with.
As an ardent soccer fan, my club’s kits, both home and away, have a visit Rwanda wording on the sleeves, and this simply means an invitation to the millions of fans worldwide to visit Rwanda. By simply seeing Visit Rwanda on a shirt sleeve, one’s curiosity would be raised about Rwanda.
Now let’s switch to South Africa. In 2024, the Tourism Business Council of South Africa (TBCSA) teamed up with a renowned and celebrated South African-born international comedian, Trevor Noah, for a ‘Visit South Africa’ campaign, and this was mainly aimed at enabling the country to achieve a goal of attracting 21 million visitors by 2030, through tourism.
In such an age where everyone is a citizen journalist because of the digital and technology evolution, if you don’t tell your story, somebody else will tell it for you, and in most cases, they might miss out on some key facts.
But if there was a communications team and website where all this information was archived, maybe then we would tell a better story about our mother land. Public Relations (PR) is beyond crisis management, but how well you shape your narrative and what you want the public to perceive about you.
And with this, I mean the internal public, who in this case we, the citizens. The external public is the neighbour and all other countries that we have relations with on a diplomatic front.
Although I don’t have a great liking for the rival Red Devils, a visit to Uganda wording on a Manchester United jersey would be a nice one, this is simply because Manchester United is one of the biggest football clubs worldwide and leveraging on their large fanbase could, for example, do more than an advert on an international TV.
An article published on My Africa Magazine website on April 15 highlighted that in the very first year of the Rwanda-Arsenal deal, Rwanda recouped its entire £30m (Shs138b) investment, thanks to the exposure it gained.
The article cited that before the partnership, 71 percent of Arsenal’s global fanbase did not even think of Rwanda as a travel destination, whereas by the end of the first year, half of those fans said they would consider visiting Rwanda.
A group of people in London, UK, many of whom had probably never thought about Rwanda much before, are now eagerly discussing gorilla trekking and investment opportunities in Kigali, all because a football club’s sleeve saying ‘Visit Rwanda.’
As we mark the 63rd Independence Day, I would like to see more stories about who we are, what makes us the Pearl of Africa.
Uganda Tourism Board is doing an incredible job to market Uganda to the world, and we salute them, but their efforts need to be complemented, especially by gaining access to more resources to aid them in doing all the incredible things that will boost our tourism numbers.
A team needs to be tasked with shaping the narrative, and the first place would be the online presence. In this case, enhancing the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so that when one Googles Uganda, it’s the amazing things and achievements we have attained over the years that pop up.
Beyond the SEO, publicity related to our motherland needs to be harnessed.
PR continues to be a powerful asset in shaping narratives; hence, let’s not wait for a crisis to erupt and start thinking about what would be done. Let’s start now with telling the Ugandan story, beginning with the 63 years of Independence and beyond.